Social-Media
The Chinese Government fakes almost 450 million comments a year from social media.
Internet researchers have been aware for a long time that the Chinese Government is controlling Internet content. Not only does it censor extensively, it also uses the so-called 50 cents army to make Internet comments, which are made by hundreds of thousands of people.
A fantastic techniques to collect and analyze large data volumes are employed in Gary King, Jennifer Pan and Margaret Roberts (whom I will refer to as KPR for convenience) new work.
The government pays the fake commentators
It is difficult to figure out just who the Chinese government pays for comments and who does not. Although there are social media complaints about membership in the 50 cent group, these claims are at least untrustworthy and, at worst, baseless. But KPR may use a big information leak to find out what is happening. An email from the propaganda office in a Chinese local government mid-sized unit is published by a blogger. Included in these e-mails were over 40,000 simple descriptions of 50 hundred military statements.
These comments were used by KPR to draw conclusions about how false comment operates. They were also able to train the machine learning algorithm to map the ecology of state-sponsored comments in China, so that similar remarks can be made in China's social networks.
A shocking initial result. Many assume that the 50 cents army is an independent contractor who is paid a small sum of money for every message. This is far from being the label if KPR is correct.
Local government employees tend to be the commentators found in the leak. The sample of emails that King, Pan and Roberts examine suggests that they work for the Communist Party or the local government bodies and that such statements will probably be published in its official capacity.
Around 450 million reviews from the government rise annually.
The KPR employs statistical methods to assess how many ads the government charges on social media.
The results are surprising. About 448 million government employees comment annually. More than half of these statements, even though claiming to be commentary by regular people, are posted at government pages. The rest is on business pages, combined with family news, dog pictures and the like. As KPR reports, the effect is "the government produces a significant number of state website comments and about one in 178 social media outlets on commercial websites."
These figures, to be obvious, rely on some extrapolation and educated assumptions which KPR describes in the paper. Yet their outcome is plausible. They asked a random sample of the people who described their strategies to write for the government if they did it professionally. They also asked people who they thought the government should pay, since they were known as professionals paid or not by leak. About the same proportion of the two classes — almost 60% — accepted it effectively.
Controversy-building comments will not be charged
There are numerous popular rumors about what public commentators do. Some — especially non-Chinese commentators — believe that hate and anger from foreign countries like the United States are brought to life. Others think that they are paying with faulty argumentative points to respond to criticism by the government.
Data from KPR shows that both are incorrect. Commentators from a paid government tend to say a lot of negative things about aliens. Nor do they argue on the Internet in this matter.
They love and distract instead. You write posts that the government cheerleads. They often attempt to distract the public, especially when they believe that demonstrations or other social and political activity may be dangerous to the government. In particular, when people complain about the government, they seem not to care. Instead, they act when the possibility of popular uprisings is significant.
In KPR’s words: Since disrupting discussion of grievances only limits information that is otherwise useful to the regime, the leaders have little reason to censor it, argue with it, or flood the net with opposing viewpoints. What is risky for the regime, and therefore vigorously opposed through large scale censorship and huge numbers of fabricated social media posts, is posts with collective action potential.
