That countries have been using social media to spread propaganda and misinformation has been widely documented in recent years. Nonetheless, a new report from the Oxford Internet Institute is interesting as it implicates Chinese diplomats in the online antics of the government.
The report is the conclusion of a seven-month investigation into the extent of China’s attempt to spread a positive image of the nation internationally. The report reveals a significant expansion of the country’s online public diplomacy efforts, with not only state-controlled media outlets used in this mission but also the 270 or so diplomatic accounts on sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
Social diplomats
The analysis revealed that Chinese diplomats had tweeted over 200,000 times during the nine-month study period, or around 780 times per day. These tweets received nearly seven million likes, one million comments and around 1.3 million retweets. On Facebook, there were just over 34,000 posts made during the same period.
The report highlights that while most government and state-controlled media accounts are labelled as such on social media, this doesn’t always occur. For instance, just one in eight diplomatic accounts is labelled as government-controlled.
The researchers were then able to identify around 8,000 accounts that regularly retweeted the content posted by the diplomats and who had been suspended by Twitter for violating their rules.
“In total, more than one in ten retweets of a PRC diplomat between June and January came from an account which was subsequently banned for violating Twitter’s policies, which prohibit platform manipulation,” they say.
Social manipulation
Many of these accounts were designed to impersonate fellow natives of the diplomats concerned. For instance, of the 31 accounts suspended who regularly retweeted content from the UK ambassador, most were impersonating British citizens, including a supposed interest in political affairs and an English name. These accounts were responsible for nearly half of all retweets of the ambassador and there were clear signs of coordination between them.
“Nearly a third of the accounts were created within minutes of each other on just five days and the vast majority only amplify and engage with the PRC’s diplomats to the UK, but no other PRC diplomats,” the researchers say.
Indeed, there was also a clear consistency in the type of language used in the tweets and the frequency with which accounts were used. For instance, many retweets happened within seconds of each other, which the researchers believe indicates a single human operator using multiple accounts in sequence.
“In a world where social media platforms have been increasingly influential in global communications, our study has identified another area where powerful actors systematically exploit the facilities provided by these platforms,” the report says. “Our study provides extensive evidence for where and how a powerful state actor like the PRC may be able to create an illusion of inflated influence over global discourse.”
