A recent study led
by Gary King, a political scientist at Harvard University, revealed that
China’s government fabricates roughly 488 million social media comments a year in
a massive effort to distract its citizens from bad news and sensitive political
debates, i.e. the truth.
King led a group of three
scholars who specialize in utilizing quantitative data to analyze public
policy. They ran the first systematic study of a group known as the “Fifty Cent
Party,” China’s online propaganda workers who are popularly believed to be paid
50 Chinese cents (8 cents American) by
the government for every social media post. The researchers found that nearly
all the posts were written not by ordinary citizens, but by workers at
government agencies including courts and tax and human resource departments.
The researchers found no evidence that people were paid for the posts, adding
the work was probably part of the employees’ job responsibilities. These
government employees work to distract public attention from hot topics by highlighting
the positive, cheering the state, symbols of the regime and the Communist
Party’s current “successes” and glorious revolutionary past.
"In retrospect, this makes
a lot of sense -- stopping an argument is best done by distraction and changing
the subject rather than more argument,” King said via e-mail.
Experts in the United States are
busy analyzing the data. One of them, on condition of anonymity, told me that
he “was floored-just absolutely blown away- by the sheer number of false and
fabricated posts that China blitzes their social media with every year.”
Putting the staggering output into perspective, he exclaimed, “Dear Lord,
that’s nearly half as many false statements as the Hillary Clinton campaign
puts out there on a yearly basis. Extraordinary!”
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