Chinese state bloggers write 1.3 million comments per day

It is no secret that the Communist Party of China protects its citizens from harmful information. She tries to prevent the spread of false rumors and Western propaganda. The state controls the media, monitors the dissemination of information in social networks, etc.

It has long been suspicion that on the Internet, the Chinese authorities are not limited to passive filtering, but also actively form a healthy public opinion. For this, an army of bloggers works. They massively publish similar messages with the support of the party and the government on forums and on media sites, as well as on social networks.

May 19, 2016, scientists at Harvard University published the results of the first large-scale study of comments on social networks in China (pdf). The study allows an estimate of the number of the “Party 50 cents”, that is, public content bloggers who receive a reward for each comment.

The analysis was carried out on the basis of archives that were posted on the Internet by an anonymous hacker Xiaolan at the end of 2013 and the beginning of 2014. The archives belong to a division of Internet propaganda (网 宣 办), a division of the Propaganda Department of Ganzhou County with a population of about 500 thousand inhabitants. Apparently, such units are formed in many cities of China.

Mail archives contain letters with applications in different formats. Harvard researchers conducted a systematic analysis of the letters, highlighting those that contain the text of the comments. These are either reports for the payment of remuneration, or tasks that managers send to ordinary bloggers. A total of 1245 such letters were found, almost in every one - a lot of comments from social networks. A total of 43,797 samples of paid comments from the mail archive are included in the database.

Another source of commentary samples is the content of accounts on the Weibo social network for those users who have been convicted of working for the state (“leaked accounts” on the chart). In total, the database includes 167 971 comments on the social network from 498 deanonymized bloggers.

Scientists, researchers topic comments and their distribution in time. Peaks on the chart are in important events in the life of the country that require large-scale commenting on social networks.



The meaning of the comments often refer to inspirational calls (cheerleading). Much less common is the publication of real facts and an irrelevant position. Even less often - a reasoned position or criticism. The last group of topics is mocking comments about foreign countries.



Extrapolating Ganzhou statistics across the entire Chinese Internet, scientists estimated the number of comments paid by the state to be 448 million annually. Approximately 52.7% of the published comments are posted on government websites, the rest are being introduced into the daily stream of 80 billion ordinary comments on social networks. Thus, approximately 1 out of 178 of all comments and posts on China’s social networks is created by the “Party of 50 Cents.”