A new probe, via Reuters:
Australia on Thursday established an investigation into potential foreign political interference through social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and WeChat.
The review comes amid heightened Australian concerns that China is seeking to interfere in Canberra’s affairs, and after U.S. intelligence analysts found Russia had used social media to try and influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The bipartisan parliamentary Senate select committee was established after the ruling coalition government backed the opposition Labor Party’s proposal.
“The rise of ‘fake news’ and misinformation campaigns present a very real and present danger to democracy not only in Australia, but across the globe,” Labor lawmaker Penny Wong said.
“We must protect our democracy from malicious foreign actors.”
The investigation will need to report its findings by May 2022, around the time Australia will hold its next general election.
This about WeChat of course. It’s censorhsip is well known and is spreading, via the Canadian National Post:
As publisher of one of Canada’s few Chinese-language newspapers that dares to cover Beijing critically, Jack Jia feels he has a duty to give his readers balanced, skeptical reporting.
To that end, he tries to spread the reach of Chinese News by posting its articles on WeChat, the ubiquitous Chinese communications app used extensively by the diaspora here.
But that practice hit a sudden obstacle last month, when WeChat began restricting his use of the site, blocking access to his account and delivering an ominous message. Jia had been reported for “multiple instances of non-compliance,” it said.
He has been blocked three more times in recent weeks — the latest incident this past Sunday — but that was not all.
For six months, messages Jia posts in group chats have been invisible to users in China. And articles and other posts he puts on his WeChat Moments page, similar to a Facebook timeline, have been inaccessible even to people in Canada and the United States, he says.
WeChat’s censorship in China itself — a private-sector brick in the Great Firewall around the internet there — has been well-documented, but the publisher says he was stunned to find the app is now extending its tight control over content to this country, too.
His experience is not unique. Two other Chinese Canadians told the National Post of facing similar restrictions from WeChat, though none were told exactly why. An American activist began a White House petition calling for government help to counter the technology giant’s controls.
“I want to stop WeChat from brainwashing us,” said Jia. “I learned from Canadians, if you don’t like something, change it. It’s time for our lawmakers to change the law, so we can counter propaganda.”
It’s all part of the plan, via Mercator Institute of China Studies:
Click bait and propaganda
The content posted and promoted by party-state media on Western channels varies from fluff to polemical attacks, but most is subtle and aimed at building Chinese media’s brands.
Much of the content consists of regular news stories that are similar to those reported by western news outlets, although it differs from these in that there is more “positive news” and “success stories” about China, such as development achievements in minority areas like Tibet and Xinjiang. On Twitter, the #Tibet and #Xinjiang hashtags are filled with images of animals and landscapes by party-state media. Attractive visuals and curious content or human-interest stories are used by most CCP media to draw in users, featuring cuddly pandas, other baby animals, impressive landscapes, and China’s technological achievements.
Mixed into this is content that is overtly political, such as posts promoting the Chinese political system or justifying directly China’s repressive policies in its minority areas. For instance, Chinese party-state media have highlighted supposed praise by foreign diplomats for the CCP’s policies in Xinjiang, where an estimated one million people have been interned in camps and many more are affected by the Party’s repressive policies. Some of the tweets posted by Chinese party-state media have been highly misleading, such as presenting protests in Hong Kong against the government as pro-government protests. In other cases, Xinhua used its Facebook account to dehumanize Hong Kong protesters by depicting them as cockroaches.
Some editors of party-state media are also quite active on platforms such as Twitter, like Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of the English-language newspaper Global Times, who has over 100,000 followers, and the China Daily’s Europe bureau chief Chen Weihua. They frequently weigh in on hot topics like the Hong Kong protests, Huawei, the West’s supposed lack of freedom of speech, and “Western hypocrisy” towards China.
How successful these are is hard to gauge. The high number of followers suggest (though do not prove) that Chinese party-state media may have artificially inflated their followers and likes: On Facebook, China’s international news channel CGTN has 87 million likes, Xinhua has 67 million, and the People’s Daily has 70 million. By contrast, CNN “only” has 31 million and the BBC has 49 million. On Twitter, the English language version of Xinhua’s principal news account @XHNews has 12 million followers, and the People’s Daily has over 5.5 million.
A partial pushback from social media platforms
Up until recently, the Chinese party-state has been able to exploit the asymmetry in the information environment created by China’s internet censorship machine, colloquially known as the Great Firewall. Just a month after it started using social media platforms in the West in 2009, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were blocked in China. Now, however, there appears to be a pushback. All the major CCP media had been making heavy use of the option to pay for promoted content, but very recently Twitter has stopped accepting paid content from party media as part of tightened rules on political and state-sponsored content. And responding to the larger debate in Western countries about “fake news” and political manipulation, Facebook has introduced an Ad Library to improve transparency around political advertising. This Ad Archive provides basic information on ads that are no longer active, such as how much was paid for the post and who the target audience was. Twitter also has an Ad Transparency platform, but only offers limited information on ads run over the past seven days.
Nevertheless, Chinese paid online commentators seem to have increased their activity on social media: In August, Twitter and Facebook announced that they had taken down accounts that had engaged in disinformation on the protests in Hong Kong. The same day, Twitter also announced that it would no longer allow most state media to promote tweets.
China targets multiple audiences
It is not possible to get a complete picture of who the ads were targeted at. Some information is available on Facebook, where ads are still permitted, but is not provided for ads that are still active. From the limited information we have, most of the discontinued ads on Facebook were targeted at the Global South. In these cases, CCP media appeared to be using displays of European support for China and its policies as a legitimizing force. For example, CGTN promoted an article on Angela Merkel stating that she wanted to strengthen multilateralism with China, and an article on an Asia-Europe meeting to promote the message that Europe recognizes China as a reliable partner. However, it is not just the Global South that has been targeted in this way. One ad targeted at the Balkans used the “success story” of Chinese investment in Africa rather than speaking about Chinese investment in the region directly.
While China experts may find much of this propaganda crude, it is clear that these people are not the target audience. As Liz Carter, a former translator at China Digital Times, said recently: “The point is not to convince everyone, but to convince enough people to win a public opinion war and drown out voices of reason. This is an often-overlooked aspect of CCP strategy, because those who know enough to care about it are the least likely to be affected by it, and the most likely to underestimate its harmful impact.”
Success of China’s strategy is difficult to assess
Looking at only the official accounts gives limited information on the resources the Chinese party-state can draw on to promote its messages through Western social media. Party-state media’s accounts on Western social media are just one part of the CCP’s attempts to gain more influence over global public opinion, and they are part of a long-term initiative to change how people globally talk about China.
It is difficult to draw conclusions about the success, or otherwise, of these media in influencing public opinion outside China. However, it is clear that they add to the overall asymmetry in the information environment, where Chinese media can spread their messages while western media are cut off from access to Chinese audiences. In order to ensure that this access is not used to systematically spread misleading news, a higher degree of transparency and more systematic investigation into communication patterns of the party-state’s media are required.
As we all read comments on this site it is obvious that there is a very steady flow of CCP astroturfers at work. If it is happening at MB then it is happening everywhere.
