This Study Thinks It's Figured Out How China's Internet Trolls Actually Work
An estimated 488 million social media comments are generated by Chinese government staff per year, according to newly published research.
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Some estimates have guessed that as many as two million people are dutifully toeing the party line in discussions across the web. Chinese internet users coined a name for these supposed users: the "50-cent party," based on the rumor that the government pays them 50 cents ($0.08 in U.S. dollars) for each comment. But a new study just showed that everyone might have had the wrong idea about China's online cheerleaders.
"I think there is no such thing as the '50-cent party,' actually they are just government employees," Gary King told BuzzFeed News in a phone interview. King, a distinguished political scientist at Harvard University specializing in data analysis of information control, headed a three-person team that conducted the first deep research into these commenters.
The study, published on Tuesday on the university's website, came to that conclusion after analyzing over 2,000 emails leaked from a district Internet Propaganda Office and identifying more than 43,000 comments and their authors, who are said to be mostly contributing part-time outside of their regular jobs. It also estimates an astronomical number of posts — 488 million — are fabricated by these government employees throughout China in a year, based on a variety of factors including population and internet penetration rate.
“How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, not Engaged Argument,” Gary King, Jennifer Pan, Margaret E. Roberts, 2016 / Via gking.harvard.edu
In fact, they seem more interested in acting as boosters for the state and trumpeting their own patriotism, but avoiding controversial topics. (The exception is posts calling for citizens to take action, which as King puts, is "like [when] your hair's on fire and you have to do something right away.") That way, the government also gets to keep records of genuine public opinion on controversial issues.
"They don't argue in part because criticism is useful for them, for example to know which officials receive the most complaints and which to promote," King said.
The team behind the study usually focuses on Chinese censorship and published several papers on the subject before a large batch of emails from the Internet Propaganda Office of Zhanggong, a district of Ganzhou City with a population of less than half a million, leaked online in 2014. Many of the emails — released by an anonymous blogger, who the Harvard team didn't have contact with — contain attachments giving reports about the staff's efforts to seed pro-government comments throughout the Internet. But "exactly zero" comments have been found to fall into the categories of "taunting of foreign countries" or "argumentative praise or criticism," according to the paper.