David Bandurski: China’s Guerrilla War for the Web
Posted on September 24, 2008 by David Bandurski
They have been called the “Fifty Cent Party,” the “red vests” and the “red vanguard.” But China’s growing armies of Web commentators—instigated, trained and financed by party organizations—have just one mission: to safeguard the interests of the Communist Party by infiltrating and policing a rapidly growing Chinese Internet. They set out to neutralize undesirable public opinion by pushing pro-Party views through chat rooms and Web forums, reporting dangerous content to authorities.
By some estimates, these commentary teams now comprise as many as 280,000 members nationwide, and they show just how serious China’s leaders are about the political challenges posed by the Web. More importantly, they offer tangible clues about China’s next generation of information controls—what President Hu Jintao last month called “a new pattern of public-opinion guidance.”
It was around 2005 that party leaders started getting more creative about how to influence public opinion on the Internet. The problem was that China’s traditional propaganda apparatus was geared toward suppression of news and information. This or that story, Web site or keyword could be banned, blocked or filtered. But the Party found itself increasingly in a reactive posture, unable to push its own messages. This problem was compounded by more than a decade of commercial media reforms, which had driven a gap of credibility and influence between commercial Web sites and metropolitan media on the one hand, and old party mouthpieces on the other.
In March 2005, a bold new tactic emerged in the wake of a nationwide purge by the Ministry of Education of college bulletin-board systems. As Nanjing University, one of the country’s leading academic institutions, readied itself for the launch of a new campus forum after the forced closure of its popular “Little Lily” BBS, school officials recruited a team of zealous students to work part time as “Web commentators.” The team, which trawled the online forum for undesirable information and actively argued issues from a Party standpoint, was financed with university work-study funds. In the months that followed, party leaders across Jiangsu Province began recruiting their own teams of Web commentators. Rumors traveled quickly across the Internet that these Party-backed monitors received 50 mao, or roughly seven cents, for each positive post they made. The term Fifty Cent Party, or wumaodang, was born.
The push to outsource Web controls to these teams of pro-government stringers went national on Jan. 23, 2007, as President Hu urged party leaders to “assert supremacy over online public opinion, raise the level and study the art of online guidance, and actively use new technologies to increase the strength of positive propaganda.” Mr. Hu stressed that the Party needed to “use” the Internet as well as control it.
One aspect of this point was brought home immediately, as a government order forced private Web sites, including several run by Nasdaq-listed firms, to splash news of Mr. Hu’s Internet speech on their sites for a week. Soon after that speech, the General Offices of the cpc and the State Council issued a document calling for the selection of “comrades of good ideological and political character, high capability and familiarity with the Internet to form teams of Web commentators … who can employ methods and language Web users can accept to actively guide online public opinion.”
By the middle of 2007, schools and party organizations across the country were reporting promising results from their teams of Web commentators. Shanxi Normal University’s 12-member “red vanguard” team made regular reports to local Party officials. One report boasted that team members had managed to neutralize an emerging BBS debate about whether students should receive junior college diplomas rather than vocational certificates, the former being much more valuable in China’s competitive job market. “A question came up among students about what kind of diplomas they would receive upon graduation,” the university report read. “A number of vanguards quickly discovered the postings and worked together to enforce guidance with good results.”
China’s Culture Ministry now regularly holds training sessions for Web commentators, who are required to pass an exam before being issued with job certification. A Chinese investigative report for an influential commercial magazine, suppressed by authorities late last year but obtained by this writer, describes in some detail a September 2007 training session held at the Central Academy of Administration in Beijing, at which talks covered such topics as “Guidance of Public Opinion Problems on the Internet” and “Crisis Management for Web Communications.”
In a strong indication of just how large the Internet now looms in the Party’s daily business, the report quotes Guan Jianwen, the vice president of People’s Daily Online, as saying during the training session: “In China, numerous secret internal reports are sent up to the Central Party Committee through the system each year. Of those few hundred given priority and action by top leaders, two-thirds are now from the Internet Office [of the State Council Information Office].”
The CCP’s growing concern about the Internet is based partly on the recognition of the Web’s real power. Even with the limitations imposed by traditional and technical systems of censorship—the best example of the latter being the so-called “Great Firewall”—the Internet has given ordinary Chinese a powerful interactive tool that can be used to share viewpoints and information, and even to organize.
But the intensified push to control the Internet, of which China’s Web commentators are a critical part, is also based on a strongly held belief among Party leaders that China, which is to say the CCP, is engaged in a global war for public opinion. In Gongjian, a book released earlier this year that some regard as President Hu’s political blueprint, two influential Party theorists wrote in somewhat alarmist terms of the history of “color revolutions” in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. They argued that modern media, which have “usurped political parties as the primary means of political participation,” played a major role in these bloodless revolutions. “The influence of the ruling party faces new challenges,” they wrote. “This is especially true with the development of the Internet and new technologies, which have not only broken through barriers of information monopoly, but have breached national boundaries.”
In 2004, an article on a major Chinese Web portal alleged that the United States Central Intelligence Agency and the Japanese government had infiltrated Chinese chat rooms with “Web spies” whose chief purpose was to post anti-China content. The allegations were never substantiated, but they are now a permanent fixture of China’s Internet culture, where Web spies, or wangte, are imagined to be facing off against the Fifty Cent Party.
Whatever the case, there is a very real conviction among party leaders that China is defending itself against hostile “external forces” and that the domestic Internet is a critical battleground. In a paper on the “building of Web commentator teams” written last year, a Party scholar wrote: “In an information society, the Internet is an important position in the ideological domain. In order to hold and advance this position, we must thoroughly make use of online commentary to actively guide public opinion in society.”
Mr. Hu’s policy of both controlling and using the Internet, which the authors of Gongjian emphasize as the path forward, is the Party’s war plan. Chinese Web sites are already feeling intensified pressure on both counts. “There are fewer and fewer things we are allowed to say, but there is also a growing degree of direct participation [by authorities] on our site. There are now a huge number of Fifty Cent Party members spreading messages on our site,” says an insider at one mainland Web site.
According to this source, Web commentators were a decisive factor in creating a major incident over remarks by CNN’s Jack Cafferty, who said during an April program that Chinese were “goons and thugs.” “Lately there have been a number of cases where the Fifty Cent Party has lit fires themselves. One of the most obvious was over CNN’s Jack Cafferty. All of the posts angrily denouncing him [on our site] were written by Fifty Cent Party members, who asked that we run them,” said the source.
“Priority” Web sites in China are under an order from the Information Office requiring that they have their own in-house teams of government-trained Web commentators. That means that many members of the Fifty Cent Party are now working from the inside, trained and backed by the Information Office with funding from commercial sites. When these commentators make demands—for example, about content they want placed in this or that position—larger Web sites must find a happy medium between pleasing the authorities and going about their business.
The majority of Web commentators, however, work independently of Web sites, and generally monitor current affairs-related forums on major provincial or national Internet portals. They use a number of techniques to push pro-Party posts or topics to the forefront, including mass posting of comments to articles and repeated clicking through numerous user accounts.
“The goal of the government is to crank up the ‘noise’ and drown out progressive and diverse voices on China’s Internet,” says Isaac Mao, a Chinese Web entrepreneur and expert on social media. “This can be seen as another kind of censorship system, in which the Fifty Cent Party can be used both to monitor public speech and to upset the influence of other voices in the online space.”
Some analysts, however, say the emergence of China’s Web commentators suggest a weakening of the Party’s ideological controls. “If you look at it from another perspective, the Fifty Cent Party may not be so terrifying,” says Li Yonggang, assistant director of the Universities Service Centre for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “Historically speaking, the greatest strength of the CCP has been in carrying out ideological work among the people. Now, however, the notion of ‘doing ideological work’ has lost its luster. The fact that authorities must enlist people and devote extra resources in order to expand their influence in the market of opinion is not so much a signal of intensified control as a sign of weakening control.”
Whatever the net results for the Party, the rapid national deployment of the Fifty Cent Party signals a shift in the way party leaders approach information controls in China. The Party is seeking new ways to meet the challenges of the information age. And this is ultimately about more than just the Internet. President Hu’s June 20 speech, the first since he came to office in 2002 to lay out comprehensively his views on the news media, offered a bold new vision of China’s propaganda regime. Mr. Hu reiterated former President Jiang Zemin’s concept of “guidance of public opinion,” the idea, emerging in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Massacre, that the Party can maintain order by controlling news coverage. But he also talked about ushering in a “new pattern of public-opinion guidance.”
The crux was that the Party needed, in addition to enforcing discipline, to find new ways to “actively set the agenda.” Mr. Hu spoke of the Internet and China’s new generation of commercial newspapers as resources yet to be exploited. “With the Party [media] in the lead,” he said, “we must integrate the metropolitan media, Internet media and other propaganda resources.”
Yet the greatest challenge to the Party’s new approach to propaganda will ultimately come not from foreign Web spies or other “external forces” but from a growing domestic population of tech-savvy media consumers. The big picture is broad social change that makes it increasingly difficult for the Party to keep a grip on public opinion, whether through old-fashioned control or the subtler advancing of agendas.
This point became clear on June 20, as President Hu visited the official People’s Daily to make his speech on media controls and sat down for what Chinese and Western media alike called an “unprecedented” online dialogue with ordinary Web users. The first question he answered came from a Web user identified as “Picturesque Landscape of Our Country”: “Do you usually browse the Internet?” he asked. “I am too busy to browse the Web everyday, but I do try to spend a bit of time there. I especially enjoy People’s Daily Online’s Strong China Forum, which I often visit,” the president answered.
On the sidelines, the search engines were leaping into action. Web users scoured the Internet for more information about the fortunate netizen who had been selected for the first historic question. Before long the Web was riddled with posts reporting the results. They claimed that Mr. Hu’s exchange was a “confirmed case” of Fifty Cent Party meddling. As it turned out, “Picturesque Landscape of Our Country” had been selected on three previous occasions to interact with party leaders in the same People’s Daily Online forum.
For many Chinese Internet users, these revelations could mean only one thing—Party leaders were talking to themselves after all.
Mr. Bandurski is a free-lance journalist and a scholar at the China Media Project, a research program of the Journalism & Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong.
A security guard at the Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing. (Mark Schiefelbein/AP)
Internet researchers have long known that the Chinese government manipulates content on the Internet. Not only does it censor heavily, but it also employs hundreds of thousands of people, the so-called 50 cent army, to write comments on the Internet.
New research by Gary King, Jennifer Pan and Margaret Roberts (whom I’ll refer to as KPR for convenience) uses sophisticated techniques of gathering and analyzing massive amounts of data to tell us what is going on.
The fake commenters are being paid by the government
It’s hard to figure out exactly who is being paid to comment by the Chinese government and who is not. While accusations of membership in the 50 cent army are rife on social media, these accusations are at best unreliable and at worst downright misleading. However, KPR were able to take advantage of a major leak of information to figure out what is happening. A blogger released a trove of emails from the propaganda office of a mid-sized unit of China’s local government. These emails included a little over 40,000 unambiguous examples of 50 cent army comments. KPR were able to use these comments to draw conclusions about how fake commenting works. They were also able to train a specialized machine learning algorithm to hunt down and identify similar comments on Chinese social media so that they could get a broader understanding of the ecology of government-sponsored comments in China.
One initial result is surprising. Many people think of the 50 cent army as independent contractors who are paid a small amount of money for each comment they make. If KPR are right, then this is far from the mark. The commenters identified in the leak appear to be regular government employees. The sample of emails that King, Pan and Roberts analyze suggests that they work directly for the Communist Party or for different organs of the local government, and presumably are expected to write these comments as part of their official duties.
Nearly 450 million government comments go up every year
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KPR use statistical techniques to figure out how many social media comments are generated by people paid by the government. The results are startling. Government employees generate about 448 million comments every year. A little over half of these comments are made on government sites, albeit pretending to be comments made by ordinary citizens. The rest are made on commercial sites, mixed into streams with family news, dog photos and the like. The result, as KPR describe it, is that a “large proportion of government web site comments, and about one of every 178 social media posts on commercial sites, are fabricated by the government.”clear, these figures depend on a certain amount of extrapolation and educated guesswork, which KPR describe in the paper. Even so, their results are plausible. They asked a random sample of the people whom their techniques identified as paid to write for the government, whether they were doing this professionally. They also asked people whom they knew to be paid by the government, because they were identified thanks to the leak, whether or not they were paid professionals. More or less the same percentage of both groups — nearly 60 percent — effectively admitted that they were.
Fake commenters are not paid to stir up controversy
There are many popular rumors about what government-paid commenters do. Some — especially non-Chinese commentators — think they are paid to stir up hatred and resentment of foreign countries such as the United States. Others believe that they are paid to respond to criticism of the government with bogus argumentative talking points.
KPR’s evidence suggests that both of these are incorrect. Paid government commenters don’t seem to say many nasty things about foreigners. Nor, for that matter, do they engage in argument on the Internet. Instead, they praise and distract. They write posts that cheerlead for the government. They also try to distract the public, especially when they fear that there might be protests or other social and political activity that might be dangerous for the government. They don’t appear to care particularly when people complain about the government. Instead, they act when there is a real risk of popular upheaval. 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.
In China, Government Workers Push Rosy, Diverting Views Online
HONG KONG — China heavily censors its Internet, limiting what its people can see or say online to channels that the government can control.
But China’s managing of its message does not end there. It also taps untold masses of people to cheer for its side on online message boards and social media. The common belief that they are paid 50 cents per post leads people in China to call them the Fifty Cent Party.
A new study says those people are closer to the government than previously thought.
The study, from researchers at Harvard, Stanford and the University of California, San Diego, says the legions of online commenters are not all freelancers paid by the post. In fact, it says that most are government employees, preaching the principles of the Chinese Communist Party on social media while carrying out their jobs in the local tax bureau or at a county government office.
They are also incredibly prolific. The study, released by Gary King, Jennifer Pan and Margaret E. Roberts, estimates that the Chinese government each year fabricates and posts around 488 million social media posts in China, or about one for every 178 social media posts on Chinese commercial sites. Posts are usually written in bursts around politically sensitive events, like protests or key national political events, and are often intended to distract the public from bad news.
The study could shed light on an active but shadowy part of China’s complex system of tools used to guide online public opinion at home. Its best-known tool is the Great Firewall, the sophisticated system of Internet filters and blocks that prevents people in China from accessing Facebook, Twitter and Google, as well as foreign media sources such as The New York Times.
But it has others that depend on China’s manpower and spending to manage. Prodding people to write comments online represents the Chinese Communist Party’s longstanding effort to channel public opinion, said David Bandurski, editor of the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong. “The whole premise being that the party needs to be more savvy and clever in directing the agenda,” he said.
China’s top Internet monitor, the Cyberspace Administration of China, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
China’s push to polish its image at home and abroad has gained new traction under President Xi Jinping. Domestically, China has tightened Internet restrictions and limited criticism. It has also raised Mr. Xi’s profile online and aimed its digital propaganda efforts at foreign as well as domestic audiences. Chinese propaganda outlets, like the Communist Party’s People’s Daily newspaper, are now fixtures on social media services banned in China like Facebook and Twitter.
In some cases, that has left American companies to face uncomfortable contradictions. For example, Twitter is blocked in China and used by a large and vocal Chinese dissident community. But last month, its new China chief said on Twitter to China Central Television, China’s official broadcaster, “Let’s work together to tell great China story to the world!”
Domestically, the report found that Beijing primarily sought to guide public opinion by having commenters write posts designed to “regularly distract the public and change the subject” rather than rebut arguments against the government line.
“Distraction is a clever strategy in information control in that an argument in almost any human discussion is rarely an effective way to put an end to an opposing argument,” it said.
The effects of this strategy are amplified by highly coordinated campaigns in which bursts of messages are posted around news or events as they go viral, according to the report.
Based on a trove of leaked emails from a local Internet propaganda office in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangxi in 2013 and 2014, the report examined 43,000 confirmed government-sponsored posts and cited a number of examples of government-backed comment campaigns.
In one example, following a riot in the western region of Xinjiang in 2013, the Internet propaganda office reported posting hundreds of comments about local economic development and the China Dream, one of Mr. Xi’s propaganda initiatives emphasizing China’s rising global power.
The study also tracked the sources of almost all of the 43,000 posts back to groups and individuals from 200 different government agencies. While 20 percent came from the district Internet propaganda office, other comments came from local township governments and even further afield, from people in the district sports bureau and the district human resources bureau. The fact that most commenters are employed by the government likely allows for quick and efficient coordination, according to the report.
To determine the total number of posts in China, the researchers used their knowledge of the number of government-fabricated posts in a single county in 2013 and extrapolated how many government-sponsored posts there were per Internet user there.
The authors also theorized that the government sees its commenters as a friendlier method of opinion guidance than censorship, which frustrates many users. Commenters have “the additional advantage of enabling the government to actively control opinion without having to censor as much as they might otherwise.”
Tracking government activity has become trickier, as Chinese users shift away from social-media services that are broadly accessible to anybody. They increasingly use mobile-chat apps, like China’s WeChat, where only friends connected over the app can see one another’s posts.
Correction: May 25, 2016
An article on Monday about online commenters in China who are paid to post messages favorable to the government misstated the university affiliations of two of the three authors of a study showing that most commenters are government employees. The study was not by “researchers at Harvard”; while Gary King is a professor there, Jennifer Pan is an assistant professor at Stanford, and Margaret E. Roberts is an assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego.
Who Are the Chinese Trolls of the '50 Cent Army'?
October 07, 2016 2:50 AM
Joyce Lau
FILE - Customers surf the Internet at an Internet cafe in Beijing, China.
HONG KONG —
Online, a different sort of army is also deployed. The “50 Cent Army” is a group of state-backed internet commenters whose numbers have reportedly ranged from 500,000 to two million. The root of the nickname - the idea that the government pays 50 renminbi cents per pro-China post - has long been debunked.
However, “wu mao” (or “50 cents” in Chinese) is still a common online insult, and even the official state media have acknowledged that there are government agents posing as ordinary, patriotic netizens.
A Harvard study published in August analyzed 44,000 posts related to an email leak to paint a picture of this “army.”
It concluded that “50 Centers” are not raging Chinese youth typing furiously away in their moms’ basements, as the stereotype goes, but government bureaucrats in unrelated fields like taxation or sports management, employed overtime to churn out posts allegedly by ordinary citizens.
They are not typical trolls. Instead of arguing about jailed dissidents or naval disputes, they mostly blanket the internet with blandly positive posts. “Almost none of the Chinese government’s 50c party posts engage in debate or argument of any kind,” the Harvard study said.
Not surprisingly, “50 Centers” are found to be busiest when the state wishes to boost patriotism (like National Day) or when it wishes to cover up news, like October independence protests in Hong Kong.
“On an anniversary, everyone is on the edge of their seats,” David Bandurski, editor of the University of Hong Kong’s China Media Project, said in a telephone interview. “It doesn’t matter if it’s an anniversary of the Cultural Revolution or Communist Party or National Day – it’s always a nervous moment. That’s the point of control.”
Bandurski was one of the first Western commentators to write about the 50 Cent Army in 2008, when Beijing was struggling with Tibetan unrest, the deadly Sichuan earthquake and human rights protests ahead of the Beijing-hosted Summer Olympics. At the time, the government diverted Chinese netizens’ attention – and ire – to an American CNN commentator who had criticized China.
“Redirecting public opinion is nothing new,” Bandurski said. “It’s been official policy since 2008.”
The 50 Cent Army is not really an army; it’s just a platoon in a much larger propaganda apparatus. All those positive posts are planted in an environment that bans most Chinese from legally accessing social media like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, as well as critical news media like The New York Times and Bloomberg.
While “50 Centers” may distract viewers with pro-government posts, other branches of the Propaganda Department are busy censoring controversial articles and key words. When the “50 Cent Army” emerged in the early 2000s, online discourse was concentrated in chatrooms, bulletin boards and comment fields under articles. Today, when many millennials are connected to the internet constantly via their phones and watches, their tactics may seem outdated.
FILE - A computer user sits near displays with a message from the Chinese police on the proper use of the internet at an internet cafe in Beijing, China.
“Now is the era of Weibo,” Bandurski said, referring to a popular Chinese social media channel. “By this point, everyone is interacting online in real time.”
Younger internet users may also not be moved by rather dull state propaganda produced by tax bureaucrats working overtime.
In July, the Propaganda Department tried to pep up the Communist Party’s staid 95th anniversary with videos featuring digital animation and hip-hop – though still with torturous lyrics like “You are probably also confused about the situation of Taiwan.”
One of those videos was produced by the Communist Youth League, a powerful group with 89 million members aged 14 to 28 – a demographic better placed to appeal to youthful internet users.
In August, the government released a plan to involve the CYL in its goal to “purify” the internet.
CYL members are certainly more aggressive than the “50-Centers” described in the Harvard study. They also seem adept at jumping The Great Firewall of China to troll subjects on foreign social media.
They have also written posts criticizing entertainers deemed to be insufficiently patriotic.
They left 40,000 angry messages on the Facebook page of Australian swimmer Mack Horton, who beat his Chinese counterpart at the Rio Olympics and accused him of being a “drug cheat.”
A similar thing happened in January when Tsai Ing-wen became the first woman elected president of Taiwan, a self-governed island that Beijing considers a renegade province.
According to Foreign Policy, a campaign was started on a forum on Baidu, a Chinese search engine, to flood Tsai with anti-Taiwan comments. In 12 hours, there were 40,000 negative comments on her Facebook page.
“These are volunteer armies of mobilized angry youth,” Bandurski said. “They are happy to heed the call to, say, spam the Taiwan president.”
“To what extend they are state-organized, we don’t know,” he added. “Is it volunteering? State-encouraged volunteering? It’s so complicated. They are like ‘The 50 Cent’ 2.0.”
One prominent commenter is Lei Xiying, a Chinese PhD student at The Australian National University who produced a video criticizing rights lawyers and activists.
It went viral, especially after it was posted on official government websites. But Lei is not a “50 Center.” He is not posting under a falsified name, nor is there evidence that he is paid to do so.
Experts see China using more savvy ways of controlling opinion online. In the same way that the actual People’s Liberation Army is modernizing – focusing on technology and skill, as opposed to sheer numbers – the “50 Cent Army” is being overhauled, too.
“The 50 Cent Army doesn’t just fade away,” Bandurski said. “They have their teams and infrastructure, and they will continue. But now it’s become more sophisticated and more refined. They are being nuanced and savvy. They’re crunching data. They have a lot of resources.”
China’s 50 Cent Party: The Other Side of Censorship
Russia has its famed “troll factories” – shadowy organizations quietly supported by the Kremlin to flood Internet comment sections with vitriolic anti-U.S. posts intended to provoke the worst sorts of responses.
Iran may boast of its “halal Internet,” a giant nationwide web only for those inside Iran supposedly being built to keep out “unclean” or anti-Islamic content, as well as critical comments about the government.
But when it comes to altering or censoring the web, the worldwide leader by far is China. For decades, Beijing has celebrated what it calls the Golden Shield, what the rest of the world has come to know as the “Great Firewall of China.”
But the Great Firewall is only one-half of China’s efforts to alter what’s seen online by its citizens. For years, it’s been rumored the government has been paying an army of volunteers to post bogus comments and posts on Chinese websites.
It even has a name: the “50 Cent Party”, so-named for the approximate fee volunteers get for fake posts. Now, a new study conducted by researchers at Harvard University not only confirms the existence of the 50 Cent Party, but reveals it’s much larger than anyone previously imagined.
FILE - A man surfs Internet on his laptop computer at a Starbucks cafe in Beijing, Feb. 16, 2015.
Changing the subject
“What everybody thought they were writing about, all these 50 Cent Party people, was all wrong,” says professor Gary King, Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University and study co-author.
“The theory was that the 50 Cent Party people would just argue with you if you said something bad about the government. It turns out that's completely wrong,” King said. “They don't argue with anybody. What they do is distract. Their posts are about cheer-leading for the government.”
King and his colleagues spent several years analyzing the patterns of millions of posts on Chinese websites, cross-referencing comments, user IDs and other factors. The report concluded that over 440 million social media posts every year can be traced back to the 50 Cent Party; often in predictable ways.
“The posts don't appear just randomly all the time,” King told VOA. “What happens is they appear in bursts and directed for specific purposes. And when they use it, they marshal them at particular times in a very big, very sophisticated operation with military-like precision.”
Moreover, King says the posts have a singular purpose: namely, short-circuiting any discussion that might lead to protests or unrest, and diverting attention to something else.
“Think of the last time you had a real good argument,” King said. “About the single worst way to end it is coming up with the best possible counter argument. A much better way is to say ‘Hey, let's go get ice cream’ or ‘Look at big shiny thing out the window.’
“Just change the subject; that's the logic the Chinese government follows. They say, ‘Hey, let's change the subject.’ And big bursts of activity, at very specific times, they change the subject.”
“A lost generation”
“Of course I really hate these 50 Cent Party members,” says Chinese journalist and activist Su Yutong, now living in Germany. “But what I really hate is the ones that hire them – the Chinese government and the Ministry of Propaganda.”
Su had long heard rumors of such activity, and came face-to-face with it while working with student volunteers at a Beijing-based NGO.
“We found out one of them was using the volunteer position to gather information of our projects,” she told VOA. “So I had a long chat with him, and he was very moved and disclosed some secrets to me,” of his 50 Cent Party activities.
“He told me that he was paid by the Chinese government to do this; he was paid 800 yuan per month, so that’s quite a handsome sum for some students, especially those that are from impoverished areas and families," she said. “If they refuse to do this, they may not be able to graduate from college. If they were very active, posting bogus posts on the Internet, they may even gain credit points from their professors.”
Su cites the recent election of Tsai Ing-Wen as President of Taiwan as an example of how Beijing can unleash the 50 Cent Party for propaganda purposes.
“The Chinese government allowed a large number of 50 Cent Party members – around 10,000 – to go online to post on social media (comments) bad mouthing and vilifying Tsai and democracy. Usually the Chinese government has this Great Firewall, and it’s hard for people to go on the Internet uncensored. But they let these 50 Cent Party members go through to post comments attacking her.”
The flood of critical comments did not go unnoticed in Taiwan. In response, Tsai Ing-Wen simply posted “Welcome to the free world.”
Su worries that the millions of 50 Cent Party members forced into concocting phony posts is creating what she calls “a lost generation.”
“It’s very worrying, such a large number of young people who work as 50 Cent Party members. They’re confused and lost about basic values. This is really bad as a whole for Chinese society, because they obviously know what they’re doing is wrong, and they’re learning how to lie,” Su said.
Harvard’s Gary King says the activities of the 50 Cent Party suggests a great deal about what the current regime sees as its greatest threat.
“They only care about talk of protest or some collective action, because that's the thing that could create instability as they call it or potentially get them thrown out of power,” King said.
“So that's why they use these 50 Cent Party posts to distract from any kind of collective action activity. Any kind of crowd formation. Anybody that has the ability to move crowds outside the government – that’s who they're concerned about.”
The 50 Cent Party: China's Paid Internet Commenters
“50 Cent Party” (五毛黨, wu mao dang) is a slang term that’s used, mostly on the internet, to refer to pro-government commenters.
WHAT IS THE 50 CENT PARTY?
The 50 Cent Party is an unofficial name for a group of government employees in China who are paid to influence public opinion by posting comments, articles, and tweets by pretending to be ordinary citizens and defending or promoting the government’s point of view.
The name comes from the fee that one group of government commenters was reportedly paid for their work: 5 mao, or 50 Chinese cents, per post. In actuality, there is a range of pro-government commenters working for various government offices, and their pay can vary quite widely.
It’s not clear how many pro-government commenters are working in China at any particular time. The government is open about its use of these commenters, and it is even possible to receive a certification from China’s Ministry of Culture that qualifies one to hold a position as a paid internet commenter. But there is no official data on how many commenters are employed nationwide; estimates range from a few thousand to several hundred thousand.
WHY DOES THE GOVERNMENT HIRE INTERNET COMMENTERS?
At the beginning of the 21st century, China’s government realized that the internet was an important new public sphere and that political discussions were taking place online.
Just as it attempts to influence public opinion through the use of state-owned media outlets like the CCTV television networks or the People’s Daily newspaper, it sought to influence public opinion online as well. Early local efforts at hiring commenters to counter negative posts with pro-government opinions proved successful, and by 2007 then-President Hu Jintao was urging the government to work even harder on online public opinion management and “positive publicity.”
WHAT DO 50 CENT PARTY MEMBERS DO?
Depending on the office and the specific job, pro-government commenters may be full-time employees or freelance contractors who work on the side. They may be given free reign to promote the government position in a general way as the situation dictates, or they may be given highly specific guidelines that describe how arguments should be framed. One pro-government commentator described it thusly:
Almost every morning at 9am I receive an email from my superiors – the internet publicity office of the local government – telling me about the news we’re to comment on for the day. Sometimes it specifies the website to comment on, but most of the time it’s not limited to certain websites: you just find relevant news and comment on it.
Regardless of their directives, though, they are never instructed to openly admit that they are being paid to post their opinions. Instead, they pose as regular internet users engaging in conversation.
For this reason, it is virtually impossible to tell whether or not a pro-government post is a real person’s genuine opinion or whether it is an opinion that has been commissioned by the government. As a result, “50 Cent Party” has become something of an insult on China’s internet, and accusations are likely to be thrown at anyone who expresses a pro-government opinion, even if they’re not being paid by anyone for their posts.
Posts from members of the 50 Cent Party can be found everywhere, from local web forums to national social media platforms like Sina Weibo or Renren. For obvious reasons, they tend to focus on discussions with some degree of political relevance, and when a controversial national political issue arises, they tend to turn out in large numbers. Their tactics can be quite advanced. From an interview with a pro-government commenter:
In a forum [discussion], there are three roles for you to play: the leader, the follower, the onlooker or unsuspecting member of the public. The leader is the relatively authoritative speaker, who usually appears after a controversy and speaks with powerful evidence. The public usually finds such users very convincing. There are two opposing groups of followers. The role they play is to continuously debate, argue, or even swear on the forum. This will attract attention from observers. At the end of the argument, the leader appears, brings out some powerful evidence, makes public opinion align with him and the objective is achieved. The third type is the onlookers, the netizens. They are our true target “clients”. We influence the third group mainly through role-playing between the other two kinds of identity. You could say we’re like directors, influencing the audience through our own writing, directing and acting.
Paid commenters will also sometimes use jokes, off-topic ramblings, offensive rants, and other forms of distraction to keep net users from paying attention to the substance of a particularly thorny political issue.
EFFECTIVENESS AND PERCEPTION
Pro-government commenters are generally not well-liked on China’s internet; as previously mentioned, the term “50 Cent Party” is generally used as a derogatory slur. But their tactics can still be effective in derailing or refocusing discussions, and it’s not rare to see regular commenters abandon a thread in frustration, grumbling about “50 cent party members” real or imagined. One pro-government commenter estimated that something like 10-20 percent of China’s online comments was coming from paid commenters; with that level of saturation, it’s quite likely these workers are having at least some effect.
'Look, a Bird!' Trolling by Distraction
Rather than debating critics directly, the Chinese government tries to derail conversation on social media it views as dangerous.
In April 2014, an attack at the main railway station in Urumqi, a city in the northwest Chinese province of Xinjiang, killed three people and injured dozens more. The incident—an explosion followed by a knife attack—came at the end of President Xi Jinping’s first visit to the restive region since he took office, during which he had promised to ramp up the government’s response to terrorism.
Immediately after, the Chinese government’s online-censorship apparatus sprung into action. Searches for “Urumqi blast” were blocked on Baidu, the country’s largest search engine, and on Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like social network that’s very popular in China. Meanwhile, paid government trolls flooded Sina Weibo and various other Chinese social networks with more than 3,000 posts, in a coordinated burst of activity.
But, curiously, the posts had nothing to do with what had just happened in Urumqi. They didn’t start contentious debates, or push back against political arguments. Instead, they waxed poetic about China’s good governance, economic opportunities for Chinese people, and the “mass line.”
They were distractions. Rather than engage with chatter around the attack in Xinjiang, or try to tamp down political expression, the posts seemed to be designed to derail the conversation. Other big events—riots in another part of Xinjiang province in July 2013, for example, or a pair of important political meetings in February 2014—were met with similar spikes in government-sponsored social-media activity.
The coordinated volleys of posts are described in a research paper that will be published this year in the American Political Science Review, in which three scholars—Harvard’s Gary King, Stanford’s Jennifer Pan, and Margaret Roberts at UC San Diego—analyzed tens of thousands of posts written by China’s official social-media trolls.
The fact that the government coordinates friendly social-media posts isn’t new: The people behind them are known colloquially as the “50 Cent Party,” for the rumored sum they’re paid for each post. (They’re not actually members of a political party.) But by studying a large archive of emails leaked from one of the internet propaganda offices in Ganzhou—a city located in China’s southeastern Jiangxi province—the researchers were able to piece together details about how the operation works, and make some inferences about the campaign’s motivations.
Before setting out to research the 50 Cent Party, the scholars largely subscribed to the conventional wisdom among academics and journalists: that ordinary citizens were enlisted to debate with rabble rousers, and take a hard pro-government stance. Instead, they found very few instances of 50 Cent posts engaging in a back-and-forth, and a large volume of innocuous “cheerleading” posts that simply express goodwill about the government and its policies. Criticism on social media is largely tolerated, they found, but as soon as the risk of mobilization and collective action begins to loom, the government jumps in to disrupt the conversation.
Throughout the project, the researchers enjoyed unusual access to the inner workings of the Chinese government. The emails leaked from the Zhanggong propaganda office, for example, included the text of more than 43,000 50 Cent posts, sent from commenters proving that they’d completed their assignments, and messages from the propaganda office to higher-level offices.
The commenters themselves, it turned out, were nearly all identifiable as government workers. (There’s no evidence, the researchers said, that the government used bots to amplify its message.) They worked in various offices and bureaus, and didn’t appear to be paid at all for the posts. It may be that they were simply expected to post coordinated messages as part of their government jobs.
In emails from the propaganda office, commenters were instructed to “promote unity and stability through positive publicity,” and to “actively guide public opinion during emergency events”—where “emergency events” refer to events that might stoke collective action.
Based on what they found in the leaked archive, the researchers extrapolated the scale of the propaganda operation to the rest of China, estimating that the loosely-defined 50 Cent Party posts a total of 448 million messages on social media every year. “If these estimates are correct, a large proportion of government web site comments, and about one of every 178 social media posts on commercial sites, are fabricated by the government,” the researchers wrote.
To check their assumptions, the research team did something unusual: They reached out directly to social-media users they suspected of being 50 Cent party members. To make sure they’d developed a good model of telling 50 Cent posts from organic posts, they simply asked, kindly and in in Chinese, “I saw your comment, it’s really inspiring, I want to ask, do you have any public opinion guidance management, or online commenting experience?”
When they asked people they knew to be in the 50 Cent Party (because their information had turned up in the email leak) 57 percent admitted to being a part of a government operation. When they asked suspected 50 Cent members, 59 percent confirmed their status. Since the difference between the proportions was not statistically significant, the researchers concluded that they were accurately able to guess which posts belonged to 50 Cent commenters。
Even more unexpectedly, the researchers got semi-official confirmation that their findings were largely correct from the Chinese government itself. After an early draft of the research attracted media attention last May, the Global Times, a newspaper with strong ties to the government, published an editorial about it. The piece, which was written only in Chinese, defended the practices that the study uncovered: “Chinese society is generally in agreement regarding the necessity of ‘public opinion guidance,’” it read. (A quick study of social-media responses didn’t support the editorial’s conclusion: While only 15 percent of comments on the newspaper’s website were critical of “public opinion guidance,” 63 percent of comments on Weibo were disapproving.)
The piece also didn’t dispute any of the material points in the research, nor did it seek to discredit the contents of the leaked email archive. “For all practical purposes, the editorial constitutes the answer to a simple sample survey question,” the researchers wrote. “That is, instead of asking [50 Cent Party] members about their status as we [did earlier], we (inadvertently) asked the Chinese government whether they agreed with our results, and they effectively concurred.”
The distraction tactics that China’s troll army favors could just as easily be deployed elsewhere. Debating detractors directly, or censoring them outright can backfire—political scientists have found that more repression is sometimes correlated with increased mobilization—but derailing the conversation or diluting the intensity of collective criticism can be a sneaky way to defuse it.
“The activity and especially the scale we discovered in China was surprising and even shocking to us (and others), but the general strategy is not unique. You can find aspects of it on smaller scales from elected officials, corporation heads, citizens, and numerous others,” wrote Gary King, one of the researchers behind the study, in an email. “Usually it is not the official policy of a government.”
China Banned The Term '50 Cents' To Stop Discussion Of An Orwellian Propaganda Program
Oct. 17, 2014, 3:44 PMThe Chinese government doesn't just censor its internet. It also pays people to leave fake comments that make the country and its communist regime look good.
As detailed in "Blocked on Weibo" by Jason Q. Ng, one of the many phrases the social media site banned is "50 cents." The term references a huge set of people hired by the government to post internet comments spinning the news in China's favor. They're supposedly paid 50 cents of Renminbi for every post.
While the Chinese government has only implicitly acknowledged its existence, the brigade likely functions at various levels, with some commenters even employed by websites or internet providers themselves.
An estimated 250,000 to 300,000 belong to the "party," researchers from Harvard University wrote in the American Political Science Review in May 2013. "The size and sophistication of the Chinese government's program to selectively censor the expressed views of the Chinese people is unprecedented in recorded world history," the authors wrote.
In 2011 an internal directive for 50 Cent members leaked, China Digital Times reported. The assigned tasks for 50 Cent members include making America the "target of criticism" as well as using "the bloody and tear-stained history" of China to create pro-Party sentiments. The goal is to prevent democratic encroachment from its sovereign island neighbor, Taiwan.
British magazine the New Statesman actually tracked down one of these hired propagandists in 2012. The anonymous 26-year-old said he had "too many usernames" to count and that he recieved an email from the local internet publicity office every morning explaining what news he should focus on that day.
"It's kind of psychological ... You can make a bad thing sound even worse, make an elaborate account, and make people think it's nonsense when they see it," he told the Statesman's Ai Weiwei.
China's censorship program, the Golden Shield Project, known to the West as the "Great Firewall," has existed for nearly a decade. It blocks foreign websites that threaten the Communist message, as well as surveils and filters content on home soil. Journalists and netizens alike who don't abide by the rules face prison — or worse.
Aside from that, however, the government started to add its own comments to the mix in 2005, when anti-Japanese protests erupted across China, The Economist reports. Controlling the internet wasn't enough. The party needed to "use" the internet, as then-president Hu Jintao said in 2007. And Sina Weibo's birth in 2009 forced the 50-Centers to become even more active.
China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology took the party's abilities a step further in 2014, setting up a training center, according to Radio Free Asia. The program intends to teach aspiring members how to direct and control online discussions.
"There was never this sort of system or professionalization in the past," independent website publisher Wang Jinxiang told RFA. "It seems that this is a new set of qualifications."
Protesters hold their mobile phones as they block the main street to the financial Central district, outside the government headquarters in Hong Kong.
Hackers Leak Files Showing Inner Workings of 'China's 50-Cent Army'
2015-05-2
Netizens surf the web at an Internet cafe in China's Zhejiang province in a file photo. AFP
A Chinese hacker group says it has penetrated the computer system of the ruling Chinese Communist Party's powerful Youth League, exposing 100 internal documents that reveal the inner workings of a nationwide network of online propagandists known as the "50-cent army."
"Our heroic team of hackers has captured a bandit stronghold, the database of the headquarters of the 50-cent army," a group calling itself Unicorn Nocturne said in a statement on its Facebook page on Wednesday.
The post linked to a shared folder in Google Drive containing 100 documents, including confidential internal directives and reports giving an unprecedented glimpse into China's online propaganda machine.
The files reveal the personal details of "50-cent" online propaganda workers at top Shanghai colleges, including the city's University of Politics and Law and Foreign Studies University.
The leaked files include lists of real names, student numbers, QQ chat addresses, WeChat numbers, microblog accounts, and even cell phone numbers of the League branch secretaries and propaganda secretaries in each university department.
They also contain a progress report on the League's development of its online propaganda army and an April 4 report into online public opinion from Shanghai's Donghua University, which includes reports on online reaction to recent news items considered sensitive by the government.
'Paying close attention'
Monitored news items include the People's Liberation Army (PLA) naval escort fleet in Yemen, and the Myanmar envoy's formal apology regarding the deaths and injuries of Chinese residents near the border after bombing by the Myanmar air force.
Comments on President Xi Jinping's setting up of the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and Apple's rollout of an iPhone exchange scheme in China are also tracked.
The files also show that Youth League propagandists are actively monitoring the Chinese Internet for posts or comments linked to the forthcoming anniversary of the military crackdown on the 1989 student-led pro-democracy movement on Tiananmen Square.
The documents include an emergency directive and working requirements from the municipal Youth League committee's education department.
"Universities should immediately seek to understand and keep their finger on the pulse of ideological attitudes and collective activities among students during the June 4 period," the directive says.
"At the same time, they must pay close attention to properly carrying out the work of monitoring and closely following individuals, microblogs, and [student] forums," it said.
A sensitive anniversary
Chongqing-based academic and political commentator Zhang Qi said the forthcoming anniversary of the June 4 massacre still remains sensitive, even 26 years on.
"They see [June 4] as a political problem that is an important part of their work," Zhang said.
He said the League's online operations are similar to its offline activities when he was at college.
"Actually, this was already the case when I was at university, when there were a few goody-two-shoes students among the student population," he said.
"And yet they had rather vague opinions on a number of issues. They weren't student leaders, but they acted as a bridge between teachers and students."
The files show that the Chinese government is actively recruiting large numbers of hard-liners to serve in the "50-cent army," so named because of the rumored word rate earned by its members, Zhang said.
"The fact that these documents have been leaked shows that they are looking for people with hard-line politics and the correct ideology to serve as online propagandists," Zhang said.
But he said people who had been trained to think like everyone else wouldn't make good propagandists.
"Trying to win an ideological victory with a bunch of thought slaves is never going to happen," Zhang said.
Suspect propagandists
Suzhou-based high school teacher Pan Lu said the 50-cent army in China is already regarded with great suspicion among China's 642 million netizens, however.
"They want to control the comments that come on the back of news stories, so as to mislead people," Pan said, saying the rhetoric used harks back to the political turmoil of the Mao-era Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).
"There's not much difference between their thinking and that of the big-character posters of the Cultural Revolution, and their aim is to protect the one-party dictatorship of the Communist Party," she said.
"They want to laud the Communist Party and endorse all of its actions," Pan said. "Their methods are shameless."
She said the hacker attack constituted a "normal protest activity on the part of citizens."
"[The hackers] are using their actions to promote social progress, to make a contribution," she said.
According to Zhang Qi, the leak will likely shock those in charge. "I bet they didn't expect them to be leaked from their immediate superiors," he said.
"This is very funny, and it illustrates a popular Chinese saying: 'Responsibility devolves to the front line, while problems come from the top.'"
He said the files appear to have been leaked from fairly high up with the Shanghai municipal government.
"There are files there from all the [universities in Shanghai]," Zhang said.
"At the very least this will have come from a student organization that is of the highest ranking within the municipal Youth League committee," Zhang said.
'Ideological battlefield'
A Youth League document leaked last month said there are now around one million volunteer youth propagandists on China's tightly controlled Internet, with higher education as their main focus.
The leak came as an official Chinese military newspaper warned that the Internet had become an "ideological battlefield" where wars could be lost and won against "hostile Western force."
"The Internet has grown into an ideological battlefield, and whoever controls the tool will win the war," a People's Liberation Army (PLA) Daily editorial said on Wednesday, calling for cyber-security measures to ensure "online ideological safety."
"Western hostile forces along with a small number of Chinese 'ideological traitors,' have maliciously attacked the Communist Party of China, and smeared our founding leaders and heroes, with the help of the Internet," the paper warned in a translation published by the official Xinhua news agency.
It further warned that Western powers seek to overthrow the regime with a "color revolution" and "constitutional democracy."
"Regime collapse that can occur overnight often starts from long-term ideological erosion," the paper warned.
Reported by Qiao Long for RFA's Mandarin Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.
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