: China buying influence to manipulate FB and Twitter: Report #IndiaNEWS #Feature New Delhi: A new set of documents show how Chinese officials tap private businesses to generate content on demand, draw

China buying influence to manipulate FB and Twitter: Report #IndiaNEWS #Feature
New Delhi: A new set of documents show how Chinese officials tap private businesses to generate content on demand, draw followers, track critics. That operation increasingly plays out on international platforms like Twitter and Facebook which the Chinese government blocks at home, New York Times reported.
The documents which were part of a request for bids from contractors offer a rare glimpse into how Chinas vast bureaucracy works to spread propaganda and sculpt opinion on global social media, the report said.
In May, 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, New York Times reported.
Shanghai police is looking to create hundreds of fake accounts on Twitter, Facebook and other major social media platforms. The police department emphasizes that the task is time sensitive, suggesting that it wants to be ready to unleash the accounts quickly to steer discussion, the report said.
Bot-like 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, the report said.
Bot networks that have been linked to Chinas 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, it added.
The authorities used a phrase common among Chinas internet police that refers to tracking down the actual person behind a social media account: touching the ground.
With growing frequency, the countrys internet police has hunted down and threatened internet users who voice their opinions. At first, its agents focused on local social media platforms. In 2018, they began a new campaign to detain users of Twitter inside China account owners who had found ways around the governments blocks and force them to delete their accounts, the report said.
Now, the campaign has extended to Chinese citizens who live outside of China. The document spells out how the Shanghai police wants to discover the identities of people behind certain accounts and to trace their users connections to the mainland.

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