An academic study by Harvard University.

1. How Chinese Government
Fabricates Social Media Posts for
Strategic Distraction, not
Engaged Argument
Gary King, Jennifer Pan, Margaret E. Roberts
Harvard University

2. Introduction: Social media in China
• 1,300 social media companies
• Millions of post every day
• Great Firewall of China apply censorship on all criticism (i.e posts)
towards governments or filter out individual posts even before they
appear on the web.
• There are also evidence of ‘reverse censorship’ (flooding of fabricated
comments), carried out by 50c Party.

3. What is 50c Party?
• First existence confirmed in 2008, consist
of journalists, academics and social media
participants.
• Worked with Propaganda Office in each
province in China (China has 34 provincial-
level units).
• 99.3% of the staff are confirmed to be
government staff in various agencies.

4. How it was carried out?
• Patrolling chatrooms and online forums (Deibert and Rohozinski,
2010)
• Fighting (Debate) and defend (strongly argue) those who criticize the
government (Zhang, DiFranzo and Hendler, 2014, p. 1889)
• Cheerleading (inspiring quotes, expression of patriotism etc)
• Making favorable comments and positive discussions (Greitens, 2013)
• Provides factual reporting of government programs, initiatives, events
& plans.
• Activities includes inside China & abroad.

5. Study findings
• It was found out from the study, that post that falls into “taunting
foreign countries” and “argumentative praise and crititism” are
exactly zero.
• Views and posts by journalists, academics and social media
participants are mainly directed towards “praise” & “cheerleading”.
• Members of 50c Party are taught and guided on how to perform their
task.
• Estimated, the Party are capable of 448 million post per year in China.

6. Why this is important?
• We must remember the two objectives of the initiatives:
1. Do not engage on controversial issues.
2. Stop discussions with collective action potential
• The most important war is war at home (lessons from Vietnam War).
• Staying in power is more important than eradicating opponents.
• Keep in check the collective action outside the government.

7. • Humans are very easily distracted. Therefore, distraction highly
effective in terms of information control put an end to opposing
argument.
• The best way to put out the fire?
• Change the subject.
• Let the argument die.
• Get someone to back up.
• Plus, censorship only results in anger.
• It is may even a case, that people argue solely for the reason of
winning arguments; not for seeking the truth (Mercier & Sperber,
2011; Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative
Theory)

8. Role of Information in Authoritarian Politics
• Let’s first understand the common ingredients for a revolution:
• Critical information of the regime
• Spread of the information
• Shared grievances of the people
• Coordination
• Chinese government specifically; differentiates ‘grievances’:
1. Specific grievances (feeling sad, bring treated unfairly) is allowed.
2. Grievances with collective action potential is the one to avoid.
• Grievances are always present, given another one carries little potential
towards a protest. Therefore, there little reasons to apply censorship,
argue or flood the net with opposing viewpoints.
• However, given a creative political actor to carry it out, a post on social
media can be turn towards a collective action, which needs to be rooted
out.