Buying influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

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Flood global social media with fake accounts used to advance an authoritarian docket. Make them look real and grow their figures of followers. Seek out online critics of the state — and find out who they’re and where they live.
China’s government has unleashed a global online crusade to furbish its image and undercut allegations of mortal rights abuses. Important of the trouble takes place in the murk, behind the guise of bot networks that induce automatic posts and hard-to- trace online personas.
Now, a new set of documents reviewed by The New York Times reveals in stark detail how Chinese officers tap private businesses to induce content on demand, draw followers, track critics and give other services for information juggernauts. That operation decreasingly plays out on transnational platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which the Chinese government blocks at home.
The documents, which were part of a request for flings from contractors, offer a rare regard into how China’s vast bureaucracy works to spread propaganda and to carve opinion on global social media. They were taken offline after The Times communicated the Chinese government about them.
On May 21, a branch of the Shanghai police posted a notice online seeking flings from private contractors for what’s known among Chinese officialdom as public opinion operation. Officers have reckoned on tech contractors to help them keep up with domestic social media and laboriously shape public opinion via suppression and the dispersion of fake posts at home. Only lately have officers and the opinion operation assiduity turned their attention beyond China.
Shanghai police were looking to produce hundreds of fake accounts on Twitter, Facebook and other major social media platforms. The police department emphasized that the task is time sensitive, suggesting that it wants to be ready to unleash the accounts snappily to steer discussion.
Botlike networks of accounts similar as those that the Shanghai police wants to buy have driven an online swell inpro-China business over the once two times. Occasionally the social media posts from those networks bolster sanctioned government accounts with likes or reposts. Other times they attack social media druggies who are critical of government programs.
Lately, Facebook took down 500 accounts after they were used to spread commentary from a Swiss biologist by the name of Wilson Edwards, who had purportedly written that the United States was snooping with the World Health Organization’s sweats to track the origins of the coronavirus epidemic. The Swiss delegacy in Beijing said Wilson Edwards didn’t live, but the fake scientist’s allegations had formerly been quoted by Chinese state media.
The Shanghai police’s social media trouble isn’t just a figures game, and this portion of the document underscores sweats to shift from brute- force tactics like using bot armies to commodity more subversive
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Disguise and maintain overseas social media accounts. Suppliers should package a portion of the overseas accounts into a group of decoration accounts, that is, accounts that survive for a long period of time, have a certain number of suckers, and can be used to promote information. Each month on each platform three accounts must be maintained, and an increase in suckers must be guaranteed each month. Note this design has intermediate time perceptivity. Each week, the number of posts and survival rate of accounts will becalculated.However, it needs to be fixed in a timely fashion, If an account is suspended.
The police department was seeking an upgrade in complication and power a series of accounts with organic followers that can be turned to government aims whenever necessary.
The request suggested that police officers understood the need for strong engagement with the public through these biographies-for- hire. The deeper engagement lends the fake personas credibility at a time when social media companies are decreasingly taking down accounts that feel fake or coordinated.
Bot networks that have been linked to China’s government stand out for their lack of engagement with other accounts, intimation experts say. Though they can be used to comb others and boost the number of likes on sanctioned government posts, utmost of those automated accounts have little influence collectively since they’ve many followers.
In their advertisement, authorities used a expression common among China’s internet police that refers to tracking down the factual person behind a social media regard “ touching the ground.”
With growing frequence, the country’s internet police has hunted down and hovered internet druggies who state their opinions. At first, its agents concentrated on original social media platforms. In 2018, they began a new crusade to detain druggies of Twitter inside China — account possessors who had plant ways around the government’s blocks — and force them to cancel their accounts.
Now, the crusade has extended to Chinese citizens who live outside of China. The document spelled out how Shanghai police wanted to discover the individualities of people behind certain accounts and to trace their druggies’ connections to the landmass. Its officers can also hang family members in China or detain the account holders when they return to the country in order to impel online critics to cancel posts or indeed entire accounts.
In former Chinese information juggernauts, botlike accounts have been used to add an unrealistic number of likes and retweets to government and state media posts. The simulated flurry of business can make the posts more likely to be shown by recommendation algorithms on numerous social media spots and search machines.
In recent weeks, a analogous pattern surfaced from a network of botlike accounts amplifying substantiation that was issued by state- media intelligencers, purporting to show that tennis player Peng Shuai was safe, freely eating regale in Beijing and attending a youth tennis event.
Shanghai police explained veritably easily the functionality that the department solicitations, demonstrating a familiarity with recommendation algorithms on social media. Its approach underscores commodity that propaganda officers know well A cluster of junk accounts can compactly make one post from an sanctioned account appear to go viral, giving it lesser exposure and advancing it credibility.
As overseas Chinese propaganda juggernauts have developed, they’ve come to calculate more on visual media. Officers were looking for a company to not only maintain and emplace fake accounts, but to also induce original content. The demand for vids is high.
A separate document reviewed by The Times shows that the same original branch of Shanghai police bought videotape- making services from a different company in November. Police asked the supplier to give at least 20 vids a month and to distribute those on domestic and overseas social media. The document appertained to the task as original videotape product that would be used to fight the “ battle of public opinion.”
Before this time, a New York Times and ProPublica analysis showed how thousands of vids portraying members of the Uyghur ethnical nonage living happy and free lives were a crucial part of an information crusade that Twitter eventually attributed to the Chinese Communist Party. When Twitter took down the network behind those posts, it took down accounts linked to a contractor that it said helped shoot propaganda vids. A Twitter prophet declined to note.
Three weeks after the Shanghai police department’s request came public, a company called Shanghai Cloud Link won the shot, the documents show. In its pitch, the company listed itself as having just 20 workers. According to the LinkedIn runner of its author, Wei Guolin, the company works with transnational enterprises and provides services in “ digital government” and “ smart metropolises.”
Wei didn’t respond to a request for comment. The Shanghai Pudong Public Security Bureau didn’t respond to a faxed request for comment.
Work like what Shanghai Cloud Link pitched is likely just the tip of the icicle. Original governments and police across China have put out analogous requests for services to impact overseas social media but frequently in vague terms. Sometimes, specifics are revealed. In 2017, for case, police in Inner Mongolia bought software that allowed government pixies to post directly to multiple social media spots, outside and outdoors of China, according to documents reviewed by The Times.