In May 2021, the Oxford Internet Institute published a report on the use of bots and inauthentic activity to amplify the presence of Chinese diplomats on digital platforms.
This Wednesday, CCLP Global Communication Policy Fellow Nick Cull hosted a virtual convening of experts and scholars to discuss the implications of the report and analyze its findings. Panelists included:
- Orville Schell, CCLP Senior Fellow and Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations, Asia Society
- Hannah Bailey, Doctoral Candidate at Oxford Internet Institute’s Programme on Democracy and Technology
- Marcel Schliebs, Data Scientist at Oxford Internet Institute’s Programme on Democracy and Technology
To open the discussion, Schell contextualized the significance of the report by talking about the Chinese Communist Party’s current public diplomacy goals. According to Schell, China maintains a “deep-seated yearning to be esteemed and respected” on the world stage. Efforts towards this front are designed to restore a state of greatness akin to the one China upheld before the nation’s dynastic system began to collapse at the turn of the nineteenth century. He compared the government’s influence operations to those of a Leninist propaganda system in which an image of success is amplified while any unflattering portrayals are destroyed. In such a scheme, “respect can be forced and contrived,” rather than earned, which is precisely what appears to be taking place on digital platforms today.
Bailey and Schliebs, co-authors of the aforementioned report, spoke about the methods used to boost Chinese diplomacy on Western social media. What they found in their specific case study was a network of thousands of accounts displaying a coordinated effort to popularize the online presence of Chinese diplomats in the United Kingdom. Schliebs pointed out, for instance, that a prominent Chinese ambassador on Twitter was receiving a high volume of likes and retweets that appeared to be inauthentic, meaning that this engagement was manufactured.
To explain what made the network’s activity appear fabricated, the researchers pointed out several patterns they noticed in their data, including bulk creation of accounts, synchronized activeness, repeated language usage, and quote tweets that matched replies verbatim. Compared to everyone else engaging with Chinese diplomats on social media, the massive network of accounts exhibited behaviors that were too similar to be purely coincidental.
The discovery of the inauthentic amplification network (which has now been suspended from Twitter) shows a dedicated effort to make Chinese public diplomacy campaigns appear more successful. Bailey expressed that social media engagement can be both a measurement and a tool, allowing users to see how well an account or a piece of content is performing, or creating opportunities to artificially inflate popularity. The scholars agree that such activity deserves vigilant attention not just from the United Kingdom, but on a global scale.