Chinese government fakes 488 million social media posts a year

China’s government fabricates about 488 million social media comments a year-nearly the same as one day of Twitter’s total global volume in a massive effort to distract its citizens from bad news and sensitive political debates, according to a study.

Three scholars led by Gary King, a political scientist at Harvard University who specialises in using quantitative data to analyse public policy, ran the first systematic study of China’s online propaganda workers, known as the Fifty Cent Party because they are popularly believed to be paid by the government, 50 Chinese cents for every social media post.

Contrary to popular perception inside China, the Fifty Cent Party avoids engaging in debates with critics and doesn’t make fun of foreign governments. Instead, it mostly works to distract public attention away from hot topics by highlighting the positive, cheering the state, symbols of the regime, or the Communist Party’s revolutionary past. Although those who post comments are often rumored to be ordinary citizens, the researchers were surprised to find that nearly all the posts were written by workers at government agencies including tax and human resource departments, and at courts.

The team based their findings on leaked archives of 2013 and 2014 e-mails from the Internet Propaganda Office of Zhanggong, a county-level district of nearly half a million people in GanzhouCity, in Jiangxi, a province in southeast China King and his team pulled out 2,341 e-mails of which more than half contained a Fifty Cent post, totaling 43,797 posts that formed a benchmark for identifying other propaganda posts. They were able to identify Fifty Centers by cross referencing names from leaked e-mails with online social media profiles.