In a bid to undercut global accusations of human rights abuses, China has unleashed a global online campaign in the guise of bot networks that generate automatic posts and hard to trace online personas.
A new set of documents reviewed by The New York Times revealed how Chinese officials tap private business to generate content on-demand, draw followers, track critics and provide other services for information campaigns.
That operation increasingly plays out on international platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
On May 21, a branch of the 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, The New York Times reported.
The Shanghai police are looking to create hundreds of fake accounts on Twitter, Facebook and other major social media platforms. The police department emphasises that the task is time-sensitive, suggesting that it wants to be ready to unleash the accounts quickly to steer the discussion, the media outlet reported further.
Bot-like networks of accounts such as those that the Shanghai police want 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.
Recently, Facebook took down 500 accounts after they were used to spread comments from a Swiss biologist by the name of Wilson Edwards, who had purportedly written that the United States was interfering with the World Health Organization's efforts to track the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Swiss embassy in Beijing said Wilson Edwards did not exist, but the fake scientist's accusations had already been quoted by Chinese state media, as per The New York Times.
( With inputs from ANI )
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