• ABOUT
  • ADVERTISE
  • SUPPORT
  • CONTACT
  • WORK
Tuesday, January 26, 2021
Shanghaiist
8 °c
Shanghai
7 ° Sat
6 ° Sun
6 ° Mon
5 ° Tue
5 ° Wed
9 ° Thu
  • NEWS

    The “world’s tallest swing” is now open in Chongqing and it looks absolutely terrifying

    Kid falls from second story while imitating Kobe Bryant’s fadeaway

    Guy wearing police uniform for “safety” pulled over by highway cops

    Dalian to test 190,000 residents after 3 new confirmed cases are reported

    One-legged Chinese baller inspires others with his hard work and three-point shot

    Chinese courier company caught using mannequins as security inspectors

    China opens another world’s longest glass-bottomed bridge in Guangdong province

    3-year-old girl and her grandma beaten with shovel in horrific “revenge” attack

    Workers spotted burning documents as US orders China to close its Houston consulate

    LOOK: Massive landslide blocks river in Hubei province

    IKEA to open new downtown location in Shanghai this week

    Hunan bus drivers block road to pass bag of betel nuts across opposite lanes

    Jilin driver delayed by 20 minutes by wild Siberian tiger relaxing on the road

    6-year-old boy drowns to death during first swimming lesson at public pool

    Neighbor smoothly catches toddler falling from 5th floor

    Dude spotted chillaxing on self-made raft on river in Chongqing during flood season

    Shanghai dude gets part of ear bitten off while stopping drunk guy from assaulting woman

    Woman mysteriously disappears from home in Hangzhou, leaving behind no trace

    Two women get stuck in elevator at home for 4 days, drink their own urine to stay alive

    Urumqi goes on lockdown as fears rise of a new coronavirus outbreak in Xinjiang

  • L!FE
  • FOOD
  • GALLERY
  • VIDEO

    WATCH: Colorized footage of life in Beijing a century ago

    Hunan high school turns gym into cafeteria to keep students separated

    Kung fu school reopens teaching students how to swing bricks from their balls

    Dancing aunties and uncles return to Wuhan sidewalks

    Xi Jinping actually made a joke!

    Shanghai dad builds Death Stranding like safety pod to protect baby from coronavirus

    Tag along on food tour of Lanzhou, the hometown of hand-pulled noodles

    Man smashes bus window, jumps out after being stuck in traffic for 20 minutes

    Scooter driver somehow survives being squashed by massive panes of glass

    How students at a Xuzhou primary school have taken jump rope to the next level

    How this Chinese martial arts master “jumps on water”

    Bringing your date to your studio apartment of great shame

    Male designer loses 25 kg, goes viral modeling women’s clothing

    Take a look inside Taiwan’s “most luxurious university dormitories”

    Racers take the stairs in 119-floor vertical marathon up the Shanghai Tower

    Meet China’s captivating “roly-poly girl” who defies gravity with a smile

    Awful Chinese propaganda rappers take on Hong Kong protests, sample Trump

    Trying the food at a Chinese Muslim wedding in Kaifeng

    What it’s like visiting home after living in China

    Watch this Chinese teen jump rope 228 times in just 30 seconds

  • TICKETS
    • FAQ
  • ★ BE A PATRON
    • ★ DONATE
No Result
View All Result
Shanghaiist
No Result
View All Result
Shanghaiist
No Result
View All Result

Chinese trolls write 488 million fake social media posts a year and don’t even earn 50 cents for it

by Alex Linder
May 5, 2018
in News

fake_posts2.jpg
While China’s Communist Party has more than 87 million members, it turns out that the most productive party in China may just be the infamous “50 Cent Party” (五毛党, wǔmáodǎng).
“50-centers” or wumao are popularly imagined to be feckless netizens who earn 0.5 kuai per pro-China post that they make online at the behest of government censors. If this were true, then they have likely amassed quite a fortune by this time, with the CCP giving them 244 million yuan yearly by our count.
That’s based on a recent study led by Gary King, a political scientist at Harvard University, which found that the Chinese government fabricates about 488 million social media comments a year. Half on government sites, and the other half on Chinese social media, where one of every 178 posts is authored at the behest of the government (seems a little low).
Utilizing leaked documents from an internet propaganda county office in Jiangxi, this first-ever systematic study of China’s “50 Cent Party,” found out that apart from their obvious productivity, pretty much everything we thought we knew about the wumao is wrong.
“The content of [50-center] posts was completely different than what had been assumed by academics, journalists, activists, and participants in social media,” Jennifer Pan, an assistant professor at Stanford and one of the report’s authors, told Foreign Policy. “They — and we before we did this study — turned out to be utterly wrong”
It turns out that despite popular belief, 50-centers aren’t out to engage in never-ending debates with critics of the ruling Party. Instead, they are primarily deployed in mass when news about a politically sensitive event breaks in order to create a smokescreen of positive, and often unrelated praise, in order to distract from the issue at hand, a method of controlling the conversation that the Chinese government prefers over all-out censorship.
For example, researchers said that following a 2013 riot in Xinjiang, there was a sudden spike of posts about local economic development and Xi Jinping’s “China Dream,” as China’s 50-centers worked to distract from the controversial issue at hand.
“In retrospect, this makes a lot of sense — stopping an argument is best done by distraction and changing the subject rather than more argument — but this had previously been unknown,” King said in an e-mail to Bloomberg.
In what might come as even more of a shock. The researchers discovered that the vast majority of the posts were written not by freelancing shills, but by actual government employees.
And the final bombshell. It turns out that we really shouldn’t even be calling these people “50-centers” at all. Apparently these workers’ responsibilities at local courts, tax bureaus and government offices also include making pro-government posts on Weibo when called upon, and they don’t get an extra 50 cent for doing so.
Mind blown.


[AD]: Experience a 10-day culinary adventure in top restaurants around China from May 20 to 29!
elitedw-bannerblast.jpg

Share this:

  • Pocket
  • Telegram
  • Print
Shanghaiist

© 2005-2018 Shanghaiist - China in bite-sized portions!

Navigate Site

  • About
  • Advertise
  • Be a Patron
  • Join the Community
  • List Your Event
  • Be a Venue Partner
  • Submit a Gallery
  • Work with us
  • Privacy & Terms
  • Contact

Follow Us

No Result
View All Result
  • NEWS
  • L!FE
  • FOOD
  • GALLERY
  • VIDEO
  • TICKETS
    • FAQ
  • ★ BE A PATRON
    • ★ DONATE

© 2005-2018 Shanghaiist - China in bite-sized portions!