Many
countries in the world today exert different forms of free Internet
access, privacy, expression or deliverability. Almost always they echo
the official government policies with varying flexibility. When you read
the article below, it may strike you just how deep a country can
involve its propaganda to influence their netizens! Let's do all we can
to bring the world to a place where any nationality or demographic can
have the best truthful content we all should have.
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The photo is of George Orwell
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Beware what you read.(Reuters/Jianan Yu)
December 18, 2014 qz.com
“NOTICE: We request every internet commenter carry out the
following task today,” begins an email from the supervisor.
It’s just another day in the propaganda department of
Zhanggong, a district in southeast China’s modestly sized city of Ganzhou.
Employees and freelancers are paid to post pro-government messages on the
internet, part of a broader effort to “guide public opinion,” as the
Chinese Communist Party frequently puts it.
The details of these directives are usually hidden from
public view. But thousands of emails obtained from the Zhanggong propaganda department
by a Chinese blogger—and released on his website—offer a rare view into the
mechanics of manipulating web conversation in China at its most local level.
Among the hacked documents are instructions to paid
commenters, their posting quotas, and summaries of their activity. The emails
reveal hundreds of thousands of messages sent to Chinese
microblogging and social media services like Sina Weibo, Tencent, and
various internet forums, including working links to the actual posts. All told,
they demonstrate the Chinese state’s wide reach on the internet, even at the
lowest levels of government.
Zhanggong’s propaganda department comes across as
surprisingly large, yet comically unsophisticated. To get a sense of its inner
workings, Quartz examined emails related to a single event: an online Q&A
with the local Communist Party secretary earlier this year. What we found was a
Potemkin online village of adoring citizens posting favorable messages and easy
questions—all manufactured by the propaganda department.
Ganzhou’s urban population is roughly 1.9
million, according to the latest government figures, making it a relatively
small city by China’s standards. Zhanggong district is
Ganzhou’s administrative center and home to about 460,000 people.
“There are at least
5,000 districts this size or bigger,” said Qiang Xiao, editor of China Digital
Times (CDT), a news site affiliated with the University of California
Berkeley that first reported on the
emails.
Despite its small size, Zhanggong employs
nearly 300 wangpingyuan, or “internet commentators,” according
to the emails.
People in China have long known that internet
mercenaries are paid to post comments that laud government officials
and attempt to influence public opinion. These commenters
are widely known as as the wumao dang, or “50-cent
party,” a reference to a 2010 editorial in the state-run Global
Times that said commenters are paid 50 cents renminbi per
post. During large protests or large-scale government screw-ups, it’s not hard
to identify posts by wumao trying to influence the
conversation.
“What I didn’t expect to find is that there
are now wumao in virtually every department,”
said Xiaolan, the blogger who obtained and released the emails. “I was
really shocked.”
“Generally the passwords for government departments
are the name of the department followed by ‘123456’ or something like that.”
Xiaolan—he only goes by that name—communicated with Quartz
through encrypted chat messages. He said he was able to hack into
Zhanggong’s propaganda department’s email account the easy way: by guessing the
password.
“Generally, the passwords for government departments are the
name of the department followed by ‘123456’ or something like that,” Xiaolan
said. In this case, the mailbox password was “xcb123456,” with “xcb”
representing the first letter of the romanization of each character in å®£ä¼ éƒ¨—”propaganda department.”
“The most complicated passwords,” Xiaolan said, “are
like name of department plus phone number.”
Ask me anything non-controversial
Shi Wenqing, an affable 60-year-old, was appointed secretary
of the Ganzhou branch of the Communist Party—a position akin to mayor—in
2011. He sits on Zhanggong’s standing committee, giving him considerable
sway over local politics.
He also appears to be a propaganda innovator.
In April, Shi convened a meeting of his fellow party members in
Ganzhou on improving their “system of propaganda thinking and culture.” An
official report (link
in Chinese) says, “Under Shi’s encouragement, attendees broke convention, and
skipped small talk and discussion of personal achievements to get right to the
point naming problems and offering solutions.”
Whether any of that is true, it shows that Shi wants to
present himself as a fresh thinker to his superiors in the party.
The email mentioned at the top of this story suggests
another way Shi tries to do things differently: He holds occasional
“internet exchanges,” taking to television to answer questions posted
on a forum run by a local news website. Shi is personable and polite,
frequently beginning his answers with something like, “Thank you, my
internet friend, for asking this question!”
But this is not like an Ask
Me Anything session on Reddit: During Shi’s town halls, people are
paid to post comments that make him and the government look as
good as possible.
Guiding public opinion
The internet exchange Quartz examined took place on
January 16, 2014, with the online discussion hosted by Ganzhou Net, a local
news portal managed by the propaganda department. (The full video of the interview is
available online, in Chinese.) In its email announcing the Q&A to wangpingyuan,
the department told each of them to post in the forum at least once,
suggesting seven “discussion points” to focus on in their comments.
Here’s one:
It’s almost Chinese New Year, but it seems like taxis are
far more orderly than in past years. Also, taxi drivers are using their meters
more reliably and the service is just generally better. Let’s keep it up!
Paid commenters tend to paste these
suggestions word-for-word to meet their quotas and move on, and that’s
what many of them appear to have done in this case.
Quartz compared the propaganda department’s discussion
points to the full text of all the forum posts, and found that four of the
seven were posted exactly as suggested at least once. The fourth, translated
above, appears verbatim three separate times in the forum,
each from an anonymous user. The first—about a new policy “giving Ganzhou
wings”—was posted 17 times.
“These commenters just write their work report, send it, and
are finished,” said Xiao, the CDT editor. “Their tasks are totally
mechanical.”
Not all paid comments are copy-and-paste jobs,
however.
In 2012, Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei offered to buy an iPad
for any wangpingyuan willing to answer questions about
their work. Asked if they ever take liberties with their posts, the
commenter who spoke to Ai said, “When transferring the attention of
netizens and blurring the public focus, going off the topic is very
effective.”
#PartySecretaryFaceToFace# I firmly believe Party
Secretary Shi can lead Ganzhou to a better tomorrow. (Tencent Weibo)
Indeed, subtle comments are probably
more effective than verbatim copies. “The netizens are used to seeing
unskilled comments that simply say the government is great or so and so is a
traitor,” Ai’s interviewee said. “They know what is behind it at a glance. The
principle I observe is: don’t directly praise the government or criticize
negative news.”
That commenter looks to be more nuanced than most: In
Zhanggong, barely anyone observes this principle. The text of an
email sent to the propaganda department from Zhanggong’s Dongwai subdistrict
shows three comments that are unmistakably intended cast Shi and
the government in a positive light (translated here into English):
Dongwai subdistrict posts from
January 16, 2014:
1. (Link to post on
Tencent Weibo) Party Secretary Shi is an exemplary Party
Secretary! The people of Ganzhou support you!
2. (Link to forum) I
really admire Party Secretary Shi, what a capable and effective Party
Secretary! I hope he can be the father of Ganzhou for years to come.
3. (Link to forum) Hello
Party Secretary Shi! I really admire you, you are so bold and effective in your
work, honest to the people; our great Party Secretary! You have my support.
Pro-government sentiment is not limited to the Ganzhou
Net forum, as the post from microblogging service Tencent Weibo above shows.
Another email, sent to the department from the Jiefang subdistrict on January
20, lists 127 messages related to Shi’s “internet exchange.” They
were posted on the Ganzhou forum, Tencent Weibo, and Sina Weibo, the
country’s largest microblogging site. Here is a sample:
6. #PartySecretaryFaceToFace# I
firmly believe Party Secretary Shi can lead Ganzhou to a better tomorrow.
(Tencent Weibo)
17. #PartySecretaryFaceToFace# The
government works so hard, and the results are easy to see. The happy
people give our compliments. (Sina Weibo)
80. The greatest achievement
we’ve seen since Party Secretary Shi took over has been securing national
support for Ganzhou’s revival plan. Advantageous new policies await us, and we
thank you! (Sina Weibo)
109. Party Secretary Shi’s dialogue
with internet users is the embodiment of connecting with the people. It’s
commendable how he is taking in the views of the public. (Tencent Weibo)
In addition to posting directly, commenters use
accounts that repost the right kind of messages, like a retweet on
Twitter.
On January 19, three days after Shi’s interview
and just as state news outlets began running stories about it, the
department sent an email telling wangpingyuan to
repost, “especially on Sina Weibo,” agreeable comments using the hashtag
“#PartySecretaryFaceToFace” (our translation). It tells each
“internet commenter unit” to “repost 200 or more times before 5:00pm on January
21.”
The 200-post quota probably backfired. Most commenters
appear to have done the bare minimum needed to fulfill their
requirements and send their work report.
For example, one Sina Weibo account used for reposts
is “suaisydua”. An email summary informs superiors that the account
made 70 related reposts during the specified time. That user’s Sina Weibo page reveals that all
70 reposts happened within 30 minutes of each other. As anyone who has
used Twitter knows, 70 retweets in a half hour is not the most
effective strategy.
There’s additional evidence that that account is under
the government’s thumb. A March 5, 2014, email mentions that
suaisydua is “one of 113 Weibo repost participant accounts” that
would no longer be used for that purpose. The post history matches up.
Beginning the next day, the account stopped its stream of reposts related
to politics and Shi, moving on to more mundane topics like the opening of
a local play and “12 kitchen-cleaning techniques you didn’t know.”
Some comments are more subtle. One post in
the discussion forum, which is also mentioned in a summary email to the
propaganda department, expresses love for Ganzhou before sneaking in an
endorsement for a controversial urban development project: “Ganzhou has made
great strides, it’s a new dawn for us! We’ve even started work on the
Rongjiang development project. Ganzhou is adorable and charming.”
This is just a small event
in a small town
It’s not clear the degree to which paid comments influence
the conversation the way Communist Party members hope they do.
Xiaolan thinks it’s bad enough that they “take up space on your
computer.” CDT’s Xiao says the paid commenters could be adding noise
to the conversation simply to drown out normal people’s desire to converse
online.
The Zhanggong propaganda department’s efforts around
Shi’s Q&A, at least, reveal an effort that is large in scale but weak on
quality.
But urban Ganzhou is home to just 0.1% of the Chinese
population. The campaign may not have been particularly intricate, but
Shi’s department was able to deploy hundreds of commenters
to sway public opinion in his favor. A single event on a single day generated
dozens of emails and over a thousand comments on forums and
microblogs. There are many Chinese cities bigger than Ganzhou, and
each likely has a propaganda department at least as large. Issues of
national attention presumably are subject to still more elaborate efforts.
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