Chinese government-backed social media users flood Web

[boomslang]

Chinese government-backed social media users flood Web

Associated Press
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4 days ago

© (AP Photo/Andy Wong, File) In this Thursday, April 14, 2016 photo, a Chinese national flag flutters against the office buildings at the Shanghai Bund in Shanghai, China.

BEIJING (AP) — China's government fabricates and posts several hundred million social media posts a year to influence public opinion about the country, according to a new paper by U.S. researchers examining one of the most opaque aspects of the Communist Party's rule.

The academic study led by Harvard political scientist Gary King claims to be one of the first in-depth looks into the inner workings of China's push to influence public opinion by flooding social media with posts portrayed as if they were coming from ordinary people.

Aside from possessing highly sophisticated censorship controls to find and delete content outright, China's government has long been known to employ a huge group of internet workers, known colloquially as the "Fifty Cent Party," to influence discourse in subtler ways. The name originates from a popular rumor — never substantiated — that such people are paid 50 cents per pro-government post.

The research project, which took advantage of a trove of government emails, spreadsheets and work reports from a propaganda office in central China leaked online in 2014, concludes that an estimated 488 million fake posts a year "enables the government to actively control opinion without having to censor as much as they might otherwise."


The researchers also reached a slightly surprising conclusion about the goal of the massive operation: to "distract the public" during politically sensitive news events. That counters the widespread perception that Beijing employs internet workers to shout down its critics on online forums.

"They do not step up to defend the government, its leaders, and their policies from criticism, no matter how vitriolic; indeed, they seem to avoid controversial issues entirely," the paper's authors write. "Letting an argument die, or changing the subject, usually works much better than picking an argument and getting someone's back up."

The paper detailed an elaborate methodology used by the research team, which employed its own army of research assistants. After gaining a glimpse into how China's "Fifty Cent" operation organizes itself from leaked documents, the research group created numerous fake accounts of their own to ask large samples of suspected government workers an elaborate set of questions to confirm that the posters were indeed getting guidance from authorities.

One of the three co-authors, Margaret Roberts from the University of California, San Diego, said in an email that examining leaked documents or interviewing former participants could offer a biased view of the operation, but "large-scale statistical analyses of online data allow us to directly observe and summarize what people within the system are doing."

The trio of political scientists, which also included Stanford University's Jennifer Pan, has been using statistical methods for years to study China's methods of information control, sometimes reaching somewhat unexpected conclusions.

In a 2014 study sifting through social media posts, they found that Chinese censors allowed citizens a significant amount of freedom to vent their frustrations with the government — until any calls for organized action that could lead to street protests appeared. Those were swiftly taken down.

Makes you wonder how many Chinese government henchmen are on PDF, dishing out their brand of censorship and fact bending propaganda. And look at the 'air' in the picture. You could chew it.

 

[BoQ77]

So who can get the internal publishing which limit to high ranking officials in CCP ?
I guess, even state-funded reporters can't get above mentioned publishing

 

[TaiShang]

Hopefully, China's government will be able to utilize social media manipulation as effectively as the US government.

More investment and R&D must be dedicated on this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sockpuppet_(Internet)

 

[Jai Bharat]

China’s government fabricates about 488 million social media comments a year -- nearly the same as one day of Twitter’s total global volume -- in a massive effort to distract its citizens from bad news and sensitive political debates, according to a study.

Three scholars led by Gary King, a political scientist at Harvard University who specializes in using quantitative data to analyze public policy, ran the first systematic study of China’s online propaganda workers, known as the Fifty Cent Party because they are popularly believed to be paid by the government 50 Chinese cents for every social media post.

Contrary to popular perception inside China, the Fifty Cent Party avoids engaging in debates with critics and doesn’t make fun of foreign governments. Instead, it mostly works to distract public attention away from hot topics by highlighting the positive, cheering the state, symbols of the regime, or the Communist Party’s revolutionary past.


"In retrospect, this makes a lot of sense -- stopping an argument is best done by distraction and changing the subject rather than more argument -- but this had previously been unknown,” King said in an e-mail.

Although those who post comments are often rumored to be ordinary citizens, the researchers were surprised to find that nearly all the posts were written by workers at government agencies including tax and human resource departments, and at courts. The researchers said they found no evidence that people were paid for the posts, adding the work was probably part of the employees’ job responsibilities. Fifty Cent Party is a derogatory term since it implies people are bought off cheaply.

About half of the positive messages appear on government websites, and the rest are injected into the 80 billion social media posts that enter China’s Internet. That means one of every 178 social media posts on China’s micro blogs is made up by the government, the researchers said. The sites affected include those run by Tencent Holdings Ltd., Sina Corp. and Baidu Inc.

The team based their findings on leaked archives of 2013 and 2014 e-mails from the Internet Propaganda Office of Zhanggong, a county-level district of nearly half a million people in Ganzhou City, in Jiangxi, a province in southeast China. The archive included a mix of multiple e-mail formats, programs and attachments that required King and his team to build customized computer code to crack the archive and deploy automated text analysis and extraction.


They pulled out 2,341 e-mails of which more than half contained a Fifty Cent post, totaling 43,797 posts that formed a benchmark for identifying other propaganda posts. They were able to identify Fifty Centers by cross referencing names from leaked e-mails with online social media profiles.

They found the name, contact information, and even photographs of many of the authors but chose not to disclose them because it didn’t serve an academic purpose, they said.

The timing of the posts showed coordinated control. Typically, the Fifty Cent Party workers would go into action right after some kind of social unrest or protest and try to distract public opinion with a wave of social media that researchers said was “interesting, but innocuous and unrelated topic.”

For example, they found 1,100 posts touting the China Dream, local economic development following the July 2013 riots in Xinjiang, or pegged to senior politicians’ gatherings in Beijing.

“Many revolutionary martyrs fought bravely to create the blessed life we have today! Respect to these heroes,”read one post cited in the study.

People also criticized the West and drew favorable comparisons to China.

“On one hand, the US publicly asserts that if China does not perish the West will wither; on the other it tells the Chinese people: your government is problematic, you have to overthrow it so you can live better lives than you do today. I can ask, is there a more ridiculous and contradictory logic than this?” another poster wrote.

After analyzing the database they created from the leaked accounts, researchers used machine learning to find other Fifty Cent posts in other parts of China. Volunteers in China set up Weibo micro blog accounts to try to contact Fifty Centers to verify if they worked for the government.

“Of course, the difficulties of interpreting these answers is complicated by the fact that our survey respondents are conducting surreptitious operations on behalf of the Chinese government designed to fool users of social media into thinking that they are ordinary citizens,” the researchers said in their paper, “and we are asking them about this very activity.”

They researchers said they deduced the rules for the messages: First, don’t engage in controversial issues. Second, stop discussion about potential collective or street protests by active distraction. Allowing some dissent serves the purpose of letting the regime gauge public opinion on local leaders, they concluded, while complete censorship only serves to stir up anger.

“The main threat perceived by the Chinese regime in the modern era is not military attacks from foreign enemies but rather uprisings from their own people,” they said.

Revealing a paternalistic approach, the guiding policy of China’s Fifty Cent Party appears to be that distraction is better than conflict. “Letting an argument die, or changing the subject, usually works much better than picking an argument and getting someone’s back up (as new parents recognize fast),” they wrote.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...88-million-internet-posts-to-divert-criticism

http://gking.harvard.edu/50c

 

[William Hung]

Makes you wonder how many Chinese government henchmen are on PDF, dishing out their brand of censorship and fact bending propaganda. And look at the 'air' in the picture. You could chew it.

According to the analysis, this is main strategy that the PRC government have instructed them to do:

“However, the most interesting finding is that the phoney posters avoid arguing with sceptics and critics, and indeed avoid discussing controversial topics altogether. So what are they up to, then? Mostly, it seems, “cheerleading for the state, symbols of the regime, or the revolutionary history of the Communist party”. In other words, trying to swamp social media with happy-clappy stuff and thereby dilute conversations about grievances, state shortcomings and other tricky topics. Professor King calls it “strategic distraction”, but really it’s the political equivalent of the LOLcats that keep western youth anaesthetised and off the streets.

Reading that and then looking at the front page of the China & Far East section, I can’t help but to think...

 

[William Hung]

Although those who post comments are often rumored to be ordinary citizens, the researchers were surprised to find that nearly all the posts were written by workers at government agencies including tax and human resource departments, and at courts. The researchers said they found no evidence that people were paid for the posts, adding the work was probably part of the employees’ job responsibilities.

If all they are doing is swamping social media with cheerleading and positive posts about their country, then I think that is fairly harmless to other people.

I think that is indeed being resourceful and making the most out of their regular government office employees. For example, if a receptionist working for a Consulate-General office in a quiet city somewhere in the US, Australia, Thailand (with false flag if necessary) or a lonely government employee residing in Taiwan, it’s better to instruct them to create online social media accounts to swamp the place with daily cheer-leading and positive threads, than to waste time sitting in a office doing nothing or playing on mobile phone.

Personally, I think that is a smart way of getting the most from your employees. Two thumps up from me.

 

[cnleio]

How many they should pay for me and my posts on PDF ?

LOL ... !

 

[xunzi]

Although those who post comments are often rumored to be ordinary citizens, the researchers were surprised to find that nearly all the posts were written by workers at government agencies including tax and human resource departments, and at courts. The researchers said they found no evidence that people were paid for the posts, adding the work was probably part of the employees’ job responsibilities. Fifty Cent Party is a derogatory term since it implies people are bought off cheaply.

Basically these researchers are wasting everyone time with their nonsense.

 

[Jlaw]

Do I counter as Government backed 50 cent soldier? could someone here tell me how to contact the organization？

I've been asking some of these people since 2013 but no one will give me the contact. I always wanted to be part of the elite 50cent army.

 

[Jlaw]

China’s government fabricates about 488 million social media comments a year -- nearly the same as one day of Twitter’s total global volume -- in a massive effort to distract its citizens from bad news and sensitive political debates, according to a study.

Three scholars led by Gary King, a political scientist at Harvard University who specializes in using quantitative data to analyze public policy, ran the first systematic study of China’s online propaganda workers, known as the Fifty Cent Party because they are popularly believed to be paid by the government 50 Chinese cents for every social media post.

Contrary to popular perception inside China, the Fifty Cent Party avoids engaging in debates with critics and doesn’t make fun of foreign governments. Instead, it mostly works to distract public attention away from hot topics by highlighting the positive, cheering the state, symbols of the regime, or the Communist Party’s revolutionary past.


"In retrospect, this makes a lot of sense -- stopping an argument is best done by distraction and changing the subject rather than more argument -- but this had previously been unknown,” King said in an e-mail.

Although those who post comments are often rumored to be ordinary citizens, the researchers were surprised to find that nearly all the posts were written by workers at government agencies including tax and human resource departments, and at courts. The researchers said they found no evidence that people were paid for the posts, adding the work was probably part of the employees’ job responsibilities. Fifty Cent Party is a derogatory term since it implies people are bought off cheaply.

About half of the positive messages appear on government websites, and the rest are injected into the 80 billion social media posts that enter China’s Internet. That means one of every 178 social media posts on China’s micro blogs is made up by the government, the researchers said. The sites affected include those run by Tencent Holdings Ltd., Sina Corp. and Baidu Inc.

The team based their findings on leaked archives of 2013 and 2014 e-mails from the Internet Propaganda Office of Zhanggong, a county-level district of nearly half a million people in Ganzhou City, in Jiangxi, a province in southeast China. The archive included a mix of multiple e-mail formats, programs and attachments that required King and his team to build customized computer code to crack the archive and deploy automated text analysis and extraction.


They pulled out 2,341 e-mails of which more than half contained a Fifty Cent post, totaling 43,797 posts that formed a benchmark for identifying other propaganda posts. They were able to identify Fifty Centers by cross referencing names from leaked e-mails with online social media profiles.

They found the name, contact information, and even photographs of many of the authors but chose not to disclose them because it didn’t serve an academic purpose, they said.

The timing of the posts showed coordinated control. Typically, the Fifty Cent Party workers would go into action right after some kind of social unrest or protest and try to distract public opinion with a wave of social media that researchers said was “interesting, but innocuous and unrelated topic.”

For example, they found 1,100 posts touting the China Dream, local economic development following the July 2013 riots in Xinjiang, or pegged to senior politicians’ gatherings in Beijing.

“Many revolutionary martyrs fought bravely to create the blessed life we have today! Respect to these heroes,”read one post cited in the study.

People also criticized the West and drew favorable comparisons to China.

“On one hand, the US publicly asserts that if China does not perish the West will wither; on the other it tells the Chinese people: your government is problematic, you have to overthrow it so you can live better lives than you do today. I can ask, is there a more ridiculous and contradictory logic than this?” another poster wrote.

After analyzing the database they created from the leaked accounts, researchers used machine learning to find other Fifty Cent posts in other parts of China. Volunteers in China set up Weibo micro blog accounts to try to contact Fifty Centers to verify if they worked for the government.

“Of course, the difficulties of interpreting these answers is complicated by the fact that our survey respondents are conducting surreptitious operations on behalf of the Chinese government designed to fool users of social media into thinking that they are ordinary citizens,” the researchers said in their paper, “and we are asking them about this very activity.”

They researchers said they deduced the rules for the messages: First, don’t engage in controversial issues. Second, stop discussion about potential collective or street protests by active distraction. Allowing some dissent serves the purpose of letting the regime gauge public opinion on local leaders, they concluded, while complete censorship only serves to stir up anger.

“The main threat perceived by the Chinese regime in the modern era is not military attacks from foreign enemies but rather uprisings from their own people,” they said.

Revealing a paternalistic approach, the guiding policy of China’s Fifty Cent Party appears to be that distraction is better than conflict. “Letting an argument die, or changing the subject, usually works much better than picking an argument and getting someone’s back up (as new parents recognize fast),” they wrote.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...88-million-internet-posts-to-divert-criticism

http://gking.harvard.edu/50c

Where can I sign up? Can you please provide me with the recruiting agency? I'm serious.

 

[Emperor_of_Mankind]

I should get paid for the pro China posts i make on youtube and facebook.

 

[TaiShang]

Dear China,

50 cent is financially unfeasible in the long run.

My advice to you, instead hiring an army of paid social media workers, why don't you do just as the US does and write a nice sockpuppet program to generate comments automatically to convince the naïve world people that China is the third best thing after sliced bread and Trump's shiny hair?

Heaven's forbid, China, you employ hundreds and thousands of people on 50cent welfare checks , what if one of those tens of thousands of people decided to talk to some fair-minded, truth-slave, wet-eyed Western journalists and reveal all of your dirty Communist tricks?

Just hire a group of software engineers and coders, allow them write a nice program and then flood the internet with sockpuppet software generated comments. NSA style. That will cost you, China, only a fraction of what you have been paying for thousands of 50 cent welfarists.

When will you communists learn?

Taishang.
Your Taiwan co-patriot.

 

[Tiqiu]

Can you re-direct the overdue bill for my payment from the Chinese government for me?

 

[gambit]

Pay me 51cent and I write all pro-US post, all day, everyday.

The biggest issue with these type of study is the non-evidence of direct proof. It is more of in tune behavior bound by bias analysis. It is sort of like they expect a Google employee to talk negative about Google to be acceptable behavior. For the US, they just don't understand how we defend the Chinese government and it doesn't fit their perception. When it doesn't fit their perception, it becomes a 50cent. LOL

Please...

For the past six months, I hosted/trained about a dozen Intel-China Chinese engineers, mostly men. Over beers and steaks at my house, several of them never had American style steaks before, they loosened up and admitted that there are paid Internet agents in the employ of the Chinese government doing EXACTLY what this article says. It is an open secret in tech China. To a man/woman, all of them are embarrassed about it.

If you and your friends on PDF do not know about it, maybe you guys are just not good enough.

 

[xunzi]

Please...

For the past six months, I hosted/trained about a dozen Intel-China Chinese engineers, mostly men. Over beers and steaks at my house, several of them never had American style steaks before, they loosened up and admitted that there are paid Internet agents in the employ of the Chinese government doing EXACTLY what this article says. It is an open secret in tech China. To a man/woman, all of them are embarrassed about it.

If you and your friends on PDF do not know about it, maybe you guys are just not good enough.

You claim too many titles. At this point, you are the biggest candidate working for the CIA agent in the internet for all we know. LOL I have suspect you for a long time now to be honest.