China social media presence
Introduction
Social media platforms are some of the most used platforms in the world, with billions of posts circulating within a year. They are hence a source of lot of information, which affects people’s lives to a large extent, including making to more friends, finding upskilling opportunities, influencing decisions etc. Specifically, for political domain, they serve a vital role in promoting transparency by providing objective news and hence encourage equal opportunities among to all candidates during the election or regarding a policy.
However, with increasing information it becomes more difficult to monitor and restrict harmful and biased content. According to the study by Oxford (Bradshaw et al. 2021), in analyzing state troops in more than 80 countries, all of countries were found to have social media accounts manipulating information. Facebook and twitter removed around 317,000 accounts and pages belonging to cyber troops in 2020.
Almost all of te countries had accounts run by humans, while more than half used bots to post propaganda material on the media, potentially as a means to balance the trade off between the authenticity and cost required. Most of the cyber troops used misinformation as a means to drive public opinion with data driven approach being used the least. This might be due to difficulty in gathering data as well as possible verification by organisations.
Overall this not only undermines the spirit of media platforms but also negatively influences public opinion potentially leading to national security issues.
China’s state based presence
According to the (ASD 2023), China had the largest number of tweets by state funded accounts, more than 2.35 million, compared to the other monitored regions, between Jan 2021 to July 2023. The number of tweets were the lowest in France, less than 70,000. This might be due to increased tension between China and USA, as well as the recent political unrest in Iran and Russia.
Penetration by region
The attempts of China government to influence public opinions extends beyond the scope of China. The social media accounts funded by the state have varying levels of penetration in different regions of focus.
The penetration is measured by the proportion of total number of followers of the state backed accounts across various platforms compared to total number of social media accounts in that region.
The state backed accounts operating in Anglosphere and Afghanistan regions have a penetration score greater than one. Also, some of the countries have significantly low follower proportions, including India, Maldives and Egypt. Interestingly, the only around 25% of the total users in China are following the state funded accounts, much less compared to other regions.
Generally, the penetration scores are higher in regions with large proportion of residents with ancestral history connecting to China.
The high penetration score for Anglosphere and Afghanistan might be because of a lot of overlap between the followers of the account or due to large number of state based accounts pretending to be from these regions. Also, the low proportion of people following these accounts are in regions with higher propaganda by the national governments. This might also be due to internet access in these countries being restricted mostly to people with higher levels of income compared to the average, thus the users in these regions have more awareness about propaganda activities.
Furtermore the proportion of people following the state funded accounts in China are relatively less, only 25%. This indicates that the people in the China might have higher awareness.
Data Correctness
The data used is for a few hundred state funded accounts only. Also, only the regions recorded for the accounts were taken, rather than countries. The population of Anglosphere was calculated by summing the population of the core five countries.
Futhermore, the total number of followers were calculated by first finding the maximum number of followers for each account across multiple platforms and then summing over the entire regions.
While the overlaps between followers is kept to a minimum using maximum values over the platforms, there might still be large overlaps in some regions, reflected in abnormal penetration scores.
For China, a lot of accounts are focused on specific state and provinces. The followers of these accounts were not included for China, to prevent overlapping accounts. However, this might have resulted in underestimation of the penetration of State Funded accounts in China.
The graphs show the distribution of the state funded accounts by region. Since, anglosphere is constituted of 5 core countries and many other smaller countries, the imbalance due to being a combination of countries was taken into account in the second graph.
Most of the accounts are concentrated in the United States, followed by United Kingdom, Canada, China and Australia. Out of the top 5 priority regions, 4 of them constitute the Anglo-sphere, aligning with the fact that Anglo-sphere has the highest level of penetration.
Interestingly, China has the second most accounts after the Anglospheric countries, indicating that the government is trying to influence public opinion in China, yet have not been able to. This might be due to accounts from provinces are not counted for China.
Entity Owners and Parent Organisations
The Ministry of foreign affairs fund highest number of accounts followed closely by the CMG corporation. Other organisations among the top 5 are either large corporations or media organisations. This indicates that the most used method for influencing social media by the China government is through ministry of foreign affairs and media groups both of which have strong presence in the regions of focus, thereby increasing the scale and ease of influence.
The word cloud shows all the different entities in China owning a state funded account.
Presence by platforms
The analysis of accounts across popular platforms, including Facebook, Twitter and youtube shows significant influence of state funded accounts.
The CCTN and Xinhua News Agency has the highest number of followers, with CGTN Arabic and Xinhua Fly over china being in the lowest among top 20 accounts. The top 20 accounts are owned by only six entities, with CMG owning the CCTN and Xinhua News Agency owning all accounts staring with Xinhua. The China daily press and CICG has only one account in the top 20, but with relatively high follower count.
Interestingly, Ministry of Foreign Affairs only has two account in the top 20, despite having the largest number of accounts overall.
Also, around 75% of top 20 accounts use English to write content, followed by China and least in French. The languages used in the top 20 accounts are specific to regions with large political unrest.
Furthermore, the organisations with multiple accounts follow a general pattern of having one account with high following and the rest with relatively low follower count. This might be due to cost concerns and these organisations using more popular accounts to re tweet the tweets of smaller accounts.
The facebook account with most followers is CGTN, same as that of twitter. Furthermore the top accounts in twitter also has relatively higher number of facebook followers indicating that these accounts might be attracting followers through other platforms.
The top 20 accounts in facebook are concentrated to only five entity owners, with most accounts belonging to CMG and least to CICG. Interestingly, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs does not have any account among top ten on Facebook.
The top language is still English, but the facebook accounts have a lot more variety, with addition of Hindi, Tamil and Urdu. These languages are generally spoken in developing countries, with lower awareness and higher vulnerability to state based manipulation.
Similar trends to twitter are observed with entities having one account with very large number of followers and other small accounts. Also, for facebook, more accounts about content other than news, including science and tech, are among the top 20 compared to twitter.
YouTube
The top account on you tube is Mango TV International, which is an online tv streaming company owned by Hunan International. The other top channels are CGTN and IPanda, both owned by CMG. Xinhua News Agency has relatively lower followers compared to CTGN, but still among the top 10.
Futhermore, the top 20 accounts are owned by only 6 entities, with CMG owning more than half, indicating very network on YouTube. Xinhua Agency owns only one of the top 20 accounts on YouTube.
The top language on YouTube is Chinese, with half of the accounts using Chinese followed by English. The YouTube accounts also have a relatively high use of Arabic compared to twitter and facebook.
The entity owning the highest number of accounts, CMG, has multiple accounts with high following. This indicates that it is not following the same patterns as in twitter or facebook.
The top accounts on instagram is iPanda and CTGN, followed by Xinhua Net and Xinhua News Agency. The top two accounts are owned by CMG and the other two by Xinhua News Agency. The Xinhua agency has more stronger presence on instagram compared to YouTube. This might be due to the inherent nature of the platforms, with instagram focusing more on static content compared to youtube.
The top 20 accounts are owned by only 6 entities, with CMG again having more than 10 accounts, followed by Xinhua who owns 3. The rest of the entities only has one account among the top 20.
The number of accounts using English is the highest, followed closely by Chinese. Also, the languages used among the top 20 are more focused on the European and the Middle East region near Turkey.
Tiktok
The top accounts on tiktok is People’s daily and iPanda, followed closely by Global Times. The People’s Daily and Global Times are owned by People’s Daily Press.
The top 20 accounts are owned by 8 entities, with CMG owning 11, followed by People’s Daily Press and Holdings Limited. However, the accounts owned by People’s Daily Press have very number of followers.
The most used language is English with more than 10 accounts using english, followed by Chinese, Burmease and Arabic.
Platform comparison
The presence of china ## Conclusion
The China state government has a large presence on the social media, especially within the English speaking countries. Furthermore the entities and parent organisations owning the most influential accounts are very large media corporations.
References
ASD. 2023. “GMF ASD Data Search.” https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/asd-social-data-search/?q=*&start-date=2021-01-01&end-date=2023-11-19&product=%28product+eq+%27Hamilton%27+or+product2+eq+%27Hamilton%27%29.
Bradshaw, S., H. Bailey, P. N. Howard, and Oxford Internet Institute. 2021. Industrialized Disinformation: 2020 Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation. Computational Propaganda Project at the Oxford Internet Institute. https://books.google.com.au/books?id=aGaUzgEACAAJ.