An army of suspicious “super-spreader” social media accounts stationed around the world is helping Chinese diplomats amplify the country’s persp

The fake social media accounts amplifying Chinese propaganda

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2021-05-21 06:30:08

An army of suspicious “super-spreader” social media accounts stationed around the world is helping Chinese diplomats amplify the country’s perspective on current events, according to a new investigation.

The findings of seven months of research were published in a study by the Oxford Internet Institute last week, analyzing every tweet and Facebook post by Chinese diplomats and 10 of the nation’s largest state-controlled media outlets between June 2020 and January 2021.

The researchers examined 189 accounts attributed to China’s embassies, ambassadors, consuls, and other embassy staff. It discovered an extraordinarily high level of engagement on social media: Chinese diplomats tweeted 201,382 times, averaging 778 times a day for a nine-month period. Their posts were liked nearly seven million times and retweeted 1.3 million times. Many of the shared posts helped amplify content from China’s state-backed media, enabling the diplomats to act as bridges between state media and local communities.

The investigation has also found evidence showing that social media audiences engage with Chinese diplomatic Twitter accounts in large numbers. Chinese diplomatic accounts were retweeted more than 735,664 times between June 2020 and January 2021. Moreover, this engagement is dominated by a small number of “super-spreader” accounts, which rapidly engage with content posted by Chinese diplomats.