China’s ruling Communist Party has opened up a new front in its long and ambitious war to shape global public opinion: social media in the West.
Liu Xiaoming, who recently stepped down as the Communist Party’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, was one of the Chinese Communist Party’s most successful front men in this evolving online battlefield. He joined Twitter in October 2019, when dozens of CCP diplomats flocked to Twitter and Facebook, which are banned in mainland China.
Since then, Liu has skillfully elevated his public profile, earning himself more than 119,000 followers as he transforms himself into a new generation of China’s saber-rattling “battle wolf” diplomacy paragon. “War Wolf diplomacy borrows the title of one of China’s best-selling action films.
“In my opinion, the reason there are so-called ‘war wolves’ is because there are ‘wolves’ in the world and you need warriors to deal with them,” Liu Xiaoming, now China’s special representative for the Korean Peninsula, tweeted in February. Liu wrote on Twitter in February.
His series of tweets were retweeted more than 43,000 times from June last year to February this year alone.
However, the massive amount of support Yoo and many of his colleagues appear to have received on Twitter was actually manufactured.
A seven-month investigation by the Associated Press and the Oxford Internet Institute, an affiliate of the University of Oxford, found that China’s rise on Twitter was fueled by a large number of fake accounts that retweeted Chinese diplomats and official media tens of thousands of times, secretly amplifying propaganda that could reach hundreds of millions of people, and often not disclosing that the retweets the fact that the content was funded by the government.
From June of last year to January of this year, more than half of Liu’s retweeted tweets came from accounts that had been suspended for violating the platform’s rules regarding the prohibition of manipulation. All told, more than one-tenth of the 189 retweets of Communist Party diplomats in this time period came from accounts that Twitter suspended before March 1.
But Twitter’s suspension didn’t stop the pro-CCP amplification machine. Another cluster of fake accounts, – many of them posing as British citizens – continued to send content from the Chinese Communist authorities. These accounts garnered more than 16,000 retweets and replies before Twitter permanently halted accounts that engaged in platform manipulation late last month and during the beginning of this month in response to investigations by the Associated Press and the Oxford Internet Institute.
This fictitious popularity can elevate the status of Chinese messengers and create an illusion of widespread support. It could also distort the platform’s algorithms, which are designed to facilitate the distribution of popular posts, potentially exposing more genuine users to propaganda from the CCP authorities. While individual fake accounts by themselves may not seem to have an impact, over time and on a larger scale, such a network of fake accounts could distort the information environment and deepen the breadth and credibility of China’s messaging.
“There is a seismic, slow but massive plate shift in the narrative,” Timothy Graham, a senior lecturer at Queensland University of Technology who studies social networks, told the Associated Press. “Over time, with a little bit of control, it can have a huge impact.”
Twitter and other platforms have found inauthentic pro-China networks before. But for the first time, an investigation by the Associated Press and the Oxford Internet Institute showed that massive false amplification was widely driven by the involvement of various government officials and official media accounts, further evidence that Beijing’s appetite for steering public opinion, including in a covert manner, transcends national borders and extends beyond core strategic interests like Taiwan, Hong Kong and Xinjiang.
Twitter typically removes content weeks or months after such activity has taken place. The Associated Press and the Oxford Internet Institute identified 26,879 accounts that were suspended only after nearly 200,000 successful retweets by Communist diplomats or official media. They accounted for a significant share, sometimes more than half, of the tweet retweets from many diplomatic accounts.
It is not possible to determine whether these accounts were sponsored by the Chinese Communist authorities.
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