Flood global social media with fake accounts used to advance an authoritarian agenda. Make them look real and grow their numbers of followers. Seek out online critics of the state – and find out who they are and where they live.
China’s government has unleashed a global online campaign to burnish its image and undercut accusations of human rights abuses. Much of the effort takes place in the shadows, behind the guise of bot networks that generate automatic posts and hard-to-trace online personas.
Now, a new set of documents reviewed by The New York Times reveals in stark detail how Chinese officials tap private businesses to generate content on demand, draw followers, track critics and provide other services for information campaigns. That operation increasingly plays out on international platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which the Chinese government blocks at home.
The documents, which were part of a request for bids from contractors, offer a rare glimpse into how China’s vast bureaucracy works to spread propaganda and to sculpt opinion on global social media. They were taken offline after The Times contacted the Chinese government about them.
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On May 21, a branch of the Shanghai police posted a notice online seeking bids from private contractors for what is known among Chinese officialdom as public opinion management. Officials have relied on tech contractors to help them keep up with domestic social media and actively shape public opinion via censorship and the dissemination of fake posts at home. Only recently have officials and the opinion management industry turned their attention beyond China.
Shanghai police were looking to create hundreds of fake accounts on Twitter, Facebook and other major social media platforms. The police department emphasized that the task is time sensitive, suggesting that it wants to be ready to unleash the accounts quickly to steer discussion.
Botlike networks of accounts such as those that the Shanghai police wants to buy have driven an online surge in pro-China traffic over the past two years. Sometimes the social media posts from those networks bolster official government accounts with likes or reposts. Other times they attack social media users who are critical of government policies.
Recently, Facebook took down 500 accounts after they were used to spread comments from a Swiss biologist by the name of Wilson Edwards, who had purportedly written that the United States was interfering with the World Health Organization’s efforts to track the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. The Swiss embassy in Beijing said Wilson Edwards did not exist, but the fake scientist’s accusations had already been quoted by Chinese state media.
The Shanghai police’s social media effort is not just a numbers game, and this portion of the document underscores efforts to shift from brute-force tactics like using bot armies to something more subversive:
Disguise and maintain overseas social media accounts. Suppliers should package a portion of the overseas accounts into a group of premium accounts, that is, accounts that survive for a long period of time, have a certain number of fans, and can be used to promote information. Each month on each platform three accounts must be maintained, and an increase in fans must be guaranteed each month. Note: this project has intermediate time sensitivity. Each week, the number of posts and survival rate of accounts will be calculated. If an account is suspended, it needs to be fixed in a timely fashion.
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The police department was seeking an upgrade in sophistication and power: a series of accounts with organic followers that can be turned to government aims whenever necessary.
The request suggested that police officials understood the need for strong engagement with the public through these profiles-for-hire. The deeper engagement lends the fake personas credibility at a time when social media companies are increasingly taking down accounts that seem inauthentic or coordinated.
Bot networks that have been linked to China’s government stand out for their lack of engagement with other accounts, disinformation experts say. Though they can be used to troll others and boost the number of likes on official government posts, most of those automated accounts have little influence individually since they have few followers.
In their submission, authorities used a common phrase among Chinese police online that targeted a real person behind a social media account: “touch down.”
With the increase in frequency, the national internet police are hunting and threatening internet users who express their views. Initially, its agents focused on local social media platforms. In 2018, they launched a new campaign to arrest Twitter users within China – account holders who had found ways to get around government blocks – and forced them to delete their accounts.
Now, the campaign has extended to Chinese citizens living outside of China. The report described how Shanghai police wanted to obtain the identities of people who used certain accounts and track their users in the country. Its officials may then threaten family members in China or shut down account holders when they return to the country to force online critics to delete posts or accounts altogether.
In previous Chinese intelligence campaigns, botlian-like accounts have been used to add to the false value of popular and re-posting of government posts and state news. The quantity of targeted traffic can make posts more likely to be displayed by recommendation algorithms on many social media sites and search engines.
In recent weeks, a similar pattern has emerged in a network of bottled accounts that amplify the evidence published by state media, which aims to show that tennis player Peng Shuai was safe, having a comfortable dinner in Beijing and attending a youth tennis tournament.
Shanghai police have very clearly defined the department’s desired performance, showing familiarity with the complimentary algorithms on social media. Its approach emphasizes something that professional propagandists know: A bunch of unwanted accounts can briefly make a single post from an official account look good, make it clearer and offer more credibility.
As China’s overseas propaganda campaigns have advanced, they have become increasingly reliant on image sources. Officials were looking to the company to not only keep and issue fraudulent accounts, but also to produce original content. Demand for videos is high.
A separate article reviewed by The Times shows that the local Shanghai police branch purchased video production equipment from a different company in November. Police have asked the supplier to provide at least 20 videos a month and distribute them on local and overseas social media platforms. The document refers to this work as the production of the first videos that will be used to fight the “civil war.”
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Earlier this year, an analysis of the New York Times and ProPublica showed that thousands of videos showing members of a small group of Uyghurs living a happy and free life were an integral part of the Twitter campaign that eventually claimed to have been made by the Chinese Communist Party. While Twitter demolished the network after this post, it lowered its contractor-linked accounts to help capture pornographic videos. A Twitter spokesman declined to comment.
Three weeks after the Shanghai police department’s application was made public, a company called Shanghai Cloud Link won the bid, documents said. In its case, the company has listed itself as having only 20 employees. According to the LinkedIn page of its founder, Wei Guolin, the company works with international companies and provides services to “digital government” and “smart cities.”
Wei did not respond to a request for comment. The Shanghai Pudong Public Security Bureau did not respond to a request for comment.
Work as prescribed by Shanghai Cloud Link is probably just an iceberg theme. Local governments and police across China have made similar requests for resources to have an impact on overseas communications platforms but are often unclear. Sometimes certain details are revealed. In 2017, for example, Inner Mongolia police purchased software that allowed trolleys to be sent directly to multiple communication sites, inside and outside China, according to documents reviewed by The Times.
In another incident, a contractor downloaded hundreds of Facebook feed access details, allowing it to collect information on who posted what posts and when. Facebook did not immediately comment.
The Shanghai Cloud Link winning bid offers a window on how much some of these types of disinfection services can cost.
In many cases, technology contractors want to sell Chinese hardware and software directly to the Chinese authorities. In this regard, the Shanghai Cloud Link proposal introduced a new service-based model, where officials pay monthly – a form of fraudulent registration on social media.