China’s ruling Communist Party has launched a new front in its long-running, aggressive campaign to influence global public opinion: Western social media.
Liu Xiaoming, China’s former ambassador to the United Kingdom, is one of the party’s most effective foot soldiers on this changing online battlefield. He entered Twitter in October 2019, when a flood of Chinese diplomats flooded the site, which is blocked in China.
Since then, Liu has skillfully raised his public profile, amassing a fan base of over 119,000 as an exemplar of China’s latest razor-sharp “wolf fighter” diplomacy, a phrase derived from the title of a top-grossing Chinese action film.
“As far as I can see, there are so-called ‘wolf warriors’ because there are ‘wolves’ in the universe, and you need warriors to battle them,” Liu, now China’s Special Representative on Korean Peninsula Affairs, tweeted in February.
From June to February, his messages — principled and brave retweets to Western anti-Chinese racism to his supporters, offensive bombast to his critics — were retweeted more than 43,000 times.
However, much of the widespread support Liu and many of his colleagues seem to have on Twitter has been fabricated.
The Associated Press and the Oxford Internet Institute, a department at Oxford University, conducted a seven-month investigation and discovered that China’s rise on Twitter has been fueled by an army of fake accounts that have retweeted Chinese diplomats and state media tens of thousands of times, covertly amplifying propaganda that can reach hundreds of millions of people — even without disclosing the fact that
This method of study is possible because Twitter provides more data to analysts than most social media sites do on a regular basis.
From June to January, more than half of Liu’s retweets came from accounts banned by Twitter for breaking the platform’s laws, which forbid manipulation. More than one out of every ten retweets received by 189 Chinese diplomats during that time period came from accounts that Twitter had suspended by March 1.
However, Twitter’s suspensions had no impact on the pro-China amplification rig. An additional swarm of bogus pages, many of which impersonate U.K. Citizens continued to promote Chinese government material, garnering over 16,000 retweets and replies until Twitter suspended them late last month and early this month in response to the AP and Oxford Internet Institute’s investigation.
This fiction of success will elevate the prestige of China’s messengers, generating the illusion of widespread support. It can also skew website algorithms intended to increase the dissemination of common content, potentially exposing more legitimate users to Chinese government propaganda. Although individual fake accounts do not seem to have much effect on their own, such networks may distort the information ecosystem over time and at scale, increasing the scope and credibility of China’s messaging.
“You have a seismic, gradual but massive continental change in narratives,” said Timothy Graham, a senior lecturer in social networks at Queensland University of Technology. “Steering things just a little bit at a time will have a huge impact.”
Twitter and others have previously established fake pro-China networks. The AP/Oxford Internet Institute investigation, however, demonstrates for the first time that large-scale inauthentic amplification has broadly driven engagement through official government and state media accounts, adding to evidence that Beijing’s appetite for guiding public opinion — covertly, if necessary — extends beyond its borders and beyond core strategic interests such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Xinjia.
Twitter’s takedowns were often the product of weeks or months of action. Overall, the Associated Press and the Oxford Internet Institute reported 26,879 accounts that retweeted Chinese diplomats or state media almost 200,000 times before being removed. They contributed for a sizable portion — often more than half — of the overall retweets received from several diplomatic accounts on Twitter.
It was impossible to tell if the accounts were sponsored by the Chinese government.
Twitter told AP that many of the accounts had been sanctioned for manipulation, but refused to elaborate about any other network breaches that could have occurred. Twitter said it was looking at whether the activity was linked to a state-sponsored intelligence campaign.
“We will continue to review and take action against accounts that breach our site manipulation policies, including accounts affiliated with these networks,” said a Twitter representative in a tweet. “If we have strong evidence of state-affiliated intelligence operations, our first priority is to apply our laws and delete accounts that are engaged in this behaviour.” When our inquiries are over, we publish all of the accounts and content in our public archive.”
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that it did not engage in social media deception. “There is no so-called false propaganda, nor is a paradigm of online public opinion advice being exported,” the ministry said in a statement to the Associated Press. “We hope that the concerned parties will drop their racist stance, remove their tinted lenses, and adopt a peaceful, reflective, and fair solution in the spirit of transparency and inclusion.”
BATTLEFIELD OF IDEOLOGY
Twitter and Facebook serve as formidable — but one-sided — global megaphones for China’s ruling Communist Party, amplifying messaging narrowly set by central authorities.
At least 270 Chinese diplomats are now participating on Twitter and Facebook, spread across 126 countries. They monitor 449 Twitter and Facebook accounts, which updated nearly 950,000 times between June and February, in collaboration with Chinese state media. According to the Oxford Internet Institute and AP’s study, these tweets were liked over 350 million times and responded to and forwarded over 27 million times. Three-quarters of Chinese diplomats on Twitter have only been there for two years.
The shift to Western social media comes as China fights for power – both at home and abroad – on the internet, which President Xi Jinping has referred to as the “main battlefield” for public opinion.
“Whether we can withstand and win on the battleground of the Internet is closely linked to our country’s ideological security and political security,” he said in 2013, not long after taking office. Xi gave another speech in September 2019, when Chinese diplomats flocked to Twitter, encouraging party cadres to improve their “war spirit.”
Xi has restructured China’s internet regulation, tightening regulations and further tying Chinese media to the government, as he said in a 2016 interview, to ensure that the media “loves, defends, and supports the party.”
This closeness was formalised in 2018, when the party centralised institutional oversight of major print, radio, film, and television networks under the Central Propaganda Department, which it oversees.
Chinese Ambassador to the United Kingdom Liu Xiaoming, left, chats with Britain’s Prince William, Duke of Cambridge at the Tusk Conservation Awards at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London on November 30, 2016. (Photo by Stuart C. Wilson/Pool via AP, File)
China, like other countries, has realised the importance of social media in amplifying its messages and strengthening its influence. However, unrestricted access to Western social media has provided Beijing with a unilateral edge in the global battle for power.
Within China, Twitter and Facebook are barred, and Beijing monitors the discourse on domestic substitutes such as WeChat and Weibo, effectively closing off unmediated links to the Chinese public.
“It poses a huge threat to Western democracies.” “Because China has walled off its internet, we don’t have the same potential to manipulate foreign audiences,” said Jacob Wallis, a senior researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s International Cyber Policy Centre. “This provides a substantial asymmetric advantage.”
Despite high levels of Chinese government involvement, Twitter and Facebook have repeatedly refused to mark state material. Twitter started labelling accounts belonging to “key government officials” and state-affiliated media last year in an attempt to provide users with more information. However, as of March 1, Twitter had labelled just 14 percent of Chinese diplomatic accounts on the site, failing to flag thousands of authenticated profiles.
According to Twitter, not all diplomatic accounts would be flagged in accordance with its policy of labelling senior officials and organisations who talk on behalf of a country abroad. It included no further information about how such choices are taken and refused to include a list of Chinese accounts that have been classified.
Last year, Facebook started adding accountability marks to state-controlled media pages. However, despite the fact that Chinese state material is widely distributed in Spanish, French, and Arabic, among other languages, disclosure is particularly poor in languages other than English.
As of March 1, Facebook had named two-thirds of a survey of 95 Chinese state media accounts in English, but just a quarter of accounts in other languages. Facebook, unlike Twitter, does not flag diplomatic pages, the vast majority of which are official embassy and consulate accounts.
Facebook labelled a further 41 Chinese state media outlets called to their notice by the Associated Press and the Oxford Internet Institute, raising the total percentage of labelled accounts from less than half to approximately 90%. The organisation stated that it was looking into the remaining issues.
“We add the branding on a rotating basis and will continue to label more publishers and sites over time,” a group spokeswoman told the Associated Press in a tweet. The corporation refused to include a complete list of the Chinese state media accounts that it has flagged.
The Chi is a kind of bird.
According to Twitter, not all diplomatic accounts would be flagged in accordance with its policy of labelling senior officials and organisations who talk on behalf of a country abroad. It included no further information about how such choices are taken and refused to include a list of Chinese accounts that have been classified.
Last year, Facebook started adding accountability marks to state-controlled media pages. However, despite the fact that Chinese state material is widely distributed in Spanish, French, and Arabic, among other languages, disclosure is particularly poor in languages other than English.
As of March 1, Facebook had named two-thirds of a survey of 95 Chinese state media accounts in English, but just a quarter of accounts in other languages. Facebook, unlike Twitter, does not flag diplomatic pages, the vast majority of which are official embassy and consulate accounts.
Facebook labelled a further 41 Chinese state media outlets called to their notice by the Associated Press and the Oxford Internet Institute, raising the total percentage of labelled accounts from less than half to approximately 90%. The organisation stated that it was looking into the remaining issues.
“We add the branding on a rotating basis and will continue to label more publishers and sites over time,” a group spokeswoman told the Associated Press in a tweet. The corporation refused to include a complete list of the Chinese state media accounts that it has flagged.
The China Media Project, a Hong Kong-based research organisation, discovered that openness labels matter: Twitter users enjoyed and exchanged less tweets from Chinese news outlets after August 2020, when the site began flagging them as state-affiliated media and stopped amplifying and recommending their content.
“We need the labels,” said David Bandurski, director of the China Media Project, but he cautioned that they risk portraying all Chinese media with the same broad brush, even outlets like Caixin that have managed to retain some freedom. “It’s all about appropriating the storey. Telling China’s storey means that only we, the party, get to tell China’s storey. This is also occurring in Portuguese, Spanish, and French. It really is a multinational strategy.”
Hu Xijin, the vocal editor-in-chief of China’s Global Times, recognised the effect right away. On August 14, he expressed his displeasure with the addition of the “China state-affiliated media” mark to his profile, claiming that his follower growth had plummeted. He wrote, “It seems Twitter will finally choke my account.”
CONSENSUS ON COUNTERFEITING
In early February, China’s state news agency Xinhua released a “reality check” of 24 “lies” about Xinjiang that it said were circulated by anti-China forces in the West. China is accused of genocide in Xinjiang for its barbaric, systemic persecution of minority Uighur Muslims.
According to Xinhua, the real issue in Xinjiang is Uighur extremism, not human rights. According to Xinhua, Beijing has brought peace and economic prosperity to its restive western area, and evidence to the contrary has been distorted by US intelligence services, a racist academic, and lying witnesses.
The news was picked up by other Chinese state media outlets, emphasised at a press briefing by China’s foreign ministry, and broadcast on Twitter by the foreign ministry and Chinese diplomats in the United States, India, Djibouti, Canada, Hungary, Austria, Tanzania, Kazakhstan, Jordan, Liberia, Grenada, Nigeria, Lebanon, Trinidad and Tobago, Qatar, and the United Kingdom.
It was then amplified by devoted yet enigmatic followers, such as gyagyagya10, whose account sent out an identical quote-tweet and reaction, within seconds, to a message about Xinjiang posted by China’s Embassy in London, saying, “Ethnic groups in China are well covered, whether in economic or cultural aspects.”
Messages set by key state media outlets and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs are picked up by Chinese diplomats around the world, who repackage the material on Twitter, where it is compounded by networks of bogus and dubious accounts operating covertly to manipulate public opinion for the benefit of China’s ruling Communist Party.
Gyagyagya10, who had only one follower, was part of a network of 62 accounts devoted to amplifying Chinese diplomats in the United Kingdom that Marcel Schliebs, the Oxford Internet Institute’s lead researcher on the initiative, discovered exhibited various patterns indicating teamwork and inauthenticity.
The picture of abstract art shared as a profile photo and the absence of any kind of personal description reveal nothing about gyagyagya10. Indeed, none of the accounts in the network had fully fleshed-out profiles complete with familiar names and authentic profile photographs.
Gyagyagya10’s account launched in mid-August, along with more than a dozen other accounts dedicated solely to supporting tweets by the Chinese Embassy in London and Ambassador Liu. They then fell silent after Liu resigned his post at the end of January.
The network’s 62 accounts retweeted and responded to posts by Chinese diplomats in London almost 30,000 times between June and the end of January, according to the Oxford Internet Institute. They displayed distinct trends in the ways they amplified information.
They, like gyagyagya10, frequently posted similar quote-tweets and responses, and they frequently used identical phrases in their messages, such as “Xinjiang is beautiful” and “shared future for mankind.” Others who interacted with the two diplomatic accounts did neither.
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They were also slavish in their dedication, responding to more than three-quarters of the ambassador’s tweets at times. The fake accounts produced at least 30 to 50 percent of all retweets of Ambassador Liu and the Chinese Embassy in London most weeks.
By March 1, Twitter had removed 31 accounts in the pro-China U.K. network and removed two. The remaining 29 accounts, including gyagyagya10, continued to run, generating over 10,000 retweets and nearly 6,000 responses in favour of China’s UK diplomats until Twitter permanently suspended them for site manipulation at the end of April and beginning of May in response to this investigation.
“We are also mindful of questions about some of the Twitter rules,” China’s Embassy in the United Kingdom said in a statement to the Associated Press. “If retweeting the Chinese Embassy’s tweets is against social media laws, shouldn’t the same rules apply to retweets with misleading rumours, smears, and fake facts against China? We assume the relevant organisations should not apply double standards.”
According to China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, China uses social media in the same manner as other countries do, with the intention of strengthening friendly relations and promoting fact-based contact.
In reality, China’s Twitter network amplifies central authorities’ messaging, both for domestic and global consumption, as diplomats interpret, repackage, and amplify information from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and key state media outlets, network analysis, and scholarly research.
Zhao Alexandre Huang, a visiting assistant professor at Gustave Eiffel University in Paris, examined social media messaging at crucial points in the US-China trade conflict and discovered that material first published on China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Weibo account was repackaged and broadcast around the world by Chinese diplomats on Twitter.
“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs uses Weibo as a central intelligence kitchen,” Huang said. “It’s a polyphonic illusion.”
According to an AP network report, the most cited pages on Twitter belonged to China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its spokespeople, as well as People’s Daily, CGTN, China Daily, and Xinhua, and the most involved amplifiers were diplomats.
A core of hyperactive super-fans has aided the party’s activities on Twitter. From June to January, 151,000 users retweeted posts by Chinese diplomats. However, almost half of all retweets came from only 1% of those pages, which collectively blasted out almost 360,000 retweets, mostly in bursts separated by seconds.
Chinese diplomatic accounts in Poland, Pakistan, India, and South Africa, as well as China’s foreign ministry and its spokespeople, were among the main winners of this focused bulk interaction, which was not actually inauthentic.
Twitter later removed pro-China accounts that were involved in a variety of languages, with profile details in English, Mandarin, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, Italian, French, Russian, Korean, Urdu, Portuguese, Thai, Swedish, Japanese, Turkish, German, and Tamil. Some appeared to act as larger cells, dedicated to amplifying diplomats in a specific area, while others appeared to function as smaller cells, dedicated to amplifying diplomats in a specific location.
This fabricated chorus accounted for a sizable portion of the interaction received by several Chinese diplomats on Twitter. From June 2020 to January 2021, more than 60% of all retweets for the Chinese embassies in Angola and Greece came from suspended accounts. Hua Chunying and Zhao Lijian, spokespeople for China’s hawkish foreign ministry, received over 20,000 retweets from Twitter-approved accounts.
SYSTEMS OF INTERNET COMMENTING
Manipulation of online dialogue is now effectively institutionalised in China. It remains to be seen how aggressive – and competitive – China would be in imposing its paradigm of public opinion guidance on Western social media, which was built on very different democratic principles such as openness, honesty, and free exchange of ideas.
The party’s online public opinion-shaping mechanisms go far beyond censorship. Budget papers for Chinese propaganda and cyberspace agencies mention cyber troops, teams of professional online commentators charged with keeping online discourse consistent with the ruling party’s interests. Universities in China proudly advertise their teams of “internet commentators” and “youth media civilization volunteers,” who are made up entirely of recruits who “heart the motherland” and serve to direct public opinion by removing negative forces and sharing positive energies online.
The operation is massive in scope. According to Ryan Fedasiuk, a research analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, who analysed scores of government budget papers, university statements, and media accounts, China’s Communist Party had 20 million part-time volunteers, half of whom were professors, and 2 million paying commentators at its disposal last year to direct online debate.
According to Mareike Ohlberg, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund’s Asia Program, and Jessica Batke, a senior editor at ChinaFile, an online publication published by the Asia Society, for-profit organisations often contract with government departments to manage organised networks of social media pages, both human and digital, to help “guide public opinion.” They combed through thousands of Chinese government procurement notifications to find those tenders.
Although the bulk of the requests were for opinion control on domestic sites, Ohlberg told AP that an increasing amount of requests have been directed to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube since 2017. For example, one public security bureau in a relatively small city in northeastern China decided to purchase a “smart Internet-commenting device” capable of commenting on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube from thousands of separate accounts and IP addresses.
“This is just a natural continuation of what the group has been doing at home for a long time,” Ohlberg said. “Why will they change their model if they go international?”
China’s advance on Western social media is part of a much larger infrastructure of leverage that has influenced how Hollywood produces movies, what Western newspapers print, and how overseas Chinese-language media outlets interact with China’s massive diaspora.
According to Anne-Marie Brady, a lecturer at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and a specialist in Chinese propaganda, people do not even know that the material they get has been presented in part by China’s ruling Communist Party.
“The propaganda machine is massive, and it has infiltrated Western social media,” she said. “It has aided in reshaping views in China.” It does not create a special optimistic picture of China, but it does create a sense of hopelessness that little can be said with what China is doing to our democracies.”
