“NOTICE: We request every internet commenter carry out the following task today,” begins an email from the supervisor.
It’s just another day in the propaganda department of Zhanggong, a district in southeast China’s modestly sized city of Ganzhou. Employees and freelancers are paid to post pro-government messages on the internet, part of a broader effort to “guide public opinion,” as the Chinese Communist Party frequently puts it.
The details of these directives are usually hidden from public view. But thousands of emails obtained from the Zhanggong propaganda department by a Chinese blogger—and released on his website—offer a rare view into the mechanics of manipulating web conversation in China at its most local level.
Among the hacked documents are instructions to paid commenters, their posting quotas, and summaries of their activity. The emails reveal hundreds of thousands of messages sent to Chinese microblogging and social media services like Sina Weibo, Tencent, and various internet forums, including working links to the actual posts. All told, they demonstrate the Chinese state’s wide reach on the internet, even at the lowest levels of government.
Zhanggong’s propaganda department comes across as surprisingly large, yet comically unsophisticated. To get a sense of its inner workings, Quartz examined emails related to a single event: an online Q&A with the local Communist Party secretary earlier this year. What we found was a Potemkin online village of adoring citizens posting favorable messages and easy questions—all manufactured by the propaganda department.
Zhanggong district is Ganzhou’s administrative center and home to about 460,000 people. “There are at least 5,000 districts this size or bigger,” said Qiang Xiao, editor of China Digital Times (CDT), a news site affiliated with the University of California Berkeley that first reported on the emails.
Despite its small size, Zhanggong employs nearly 300 wangpingyuan, or “internet commentators,” according to the emails.
People in China have long known that internet mercenaries are paid to post comments that laud government officials and attempt to influence public opinion. These commenters are widely known as as the wumao dang, or “50-cent party,” a reference to a 2010 editorial in the state-run Global Times that said commenters are paid 50 cents renminbi per post. During large protests or large-scale government screw-ups, it’s not hard to identify posts by wumao trying to influence the conversation.
“What I didn’t expect to find is that there are now wumao in virtually every department,” said Xiaolan, the blogger who obtained and released the emails. “I was really shocked.”
http://qz.com/311832/hacked-emails-reveal-chinas-elaborate-and-absurd-internet-propaganda-machine/
Han Han's comments on the 50 Cent party:
Han Han: Fifty Cent Party Must Work Overtime
Are You Xiao Ming*?
I don’t know if everyone has noticed or not, but recently there have more and more Fifty Cent Party [wu mao dang] members on major forums and the comments of news sites. Of course, I don’t support calling anyone who disagrees with you “Fifty Cent Party“, but the Fifty Cent Party is very easy to recognize because people who’ve sold their souls, especially people who’ve sold their souls for cheap, have no [emotional] foundation for their words so even the climax [of what they are saying] lacks drama. When I first discovered this phenomenon, I was perplexed and thought it was just the relevant departments increasing the [number of Fifty Cent Party members], but I read a piece of news that said the economic crisis has spread to the Fifty Cent Party. Section 17 of the fifth chapter of the “Hengyang Internet Comment Management Methods” states that internet commenters will be paid 10 cents for each post. From this we can infer that across the country the Fifty Cent Party is being paid less; this could explain why it seems like suddenly there are five times as many Fifty Cent Party members: actually the people are still the same, but now they’re working overtime! Before, one often found that when there was a Fifty Cent Party member everyone could surround and watch them, but now with all the deletions and scrubbings [i.e., increased internet censorship], at some places one can now see Fifty Cent Party members outnumbering and surrounding [regular people].
Chinese internet users
According to classified files about the makeup of the Fifty Cent Party, 50 writing experts, 100 talented writers, and 500 other writers constitute a “fifty cent agency”. This outpouring of Fifty Cent Party members, according to my judgment, is mostly focused on those “other writers”, but from time to time a talented writer will come out to test the waters, and as for the expert writers, they probably have duties within the system as up to now very few of them have appeared. Of course, the main reason is that with Spring Festival coming they’re busy with social visits and receiving gifts.
The recent flood of Fifty Cent Party members is one reason I opened this Sina microblog, first because the reactions of the Fifty Cent Party are relatively slow and I think that to many “talented writers” registering and logging into QQ is already the most they can do. Besides, on microblogs, you cannot speak anonymously and they are afraid to register. Moreover, if they perform well on microblogs, the authorities may notice and ask them to use their cell phones to guide public opinion moment by moment. To them, this is a disaster: at first it was 10 cents for one post, and that was good, but sending a text message to influence [public opinion] costs ten cents, plus there’s the cost of electricity for charging their phones, anyway they’re losing a little bit of money. Don’t ridicule them, they sell themselves for one mao, for a thousand kuai they would sell a kidney; to them, a little money is still money. They are truly living at the lowest level of society, but they are the species with ideology that most directly aligns with that of the ruling class.
I have a different reading of the Fifty Cent Party. First, I feel we should permit the Fifty Cent Party to exist; everyone has the right to hire someone else to speak for them and those hired have the right to speak anywhere they please. If you can beat Xiao Ming* once, and then with the money stolen off of him hire someone to curse him once, that counts as a talent. Every government has a mechanism for propagating their perspective, [so] that is excusable. But the Fifty Cent Party is the government’s mistake, before I thought they existed to guide public opinion, but it seems I was wrong, because you wouldn’t, upon seeing a crowd of people eating shit, squeeze your way in to have a bite yourself. The Fifty Cent Party is a result of the higher levels toadying to the highest level, but in the wake of the Fifty Cent Party’s rampage, many glorious and correct personages need only to open their mouths, which clearly costs nothing, and they become [referred to as] Fifty Cent Party members, which greatly hurts their enthusiasm. Originally, if you went into a hotel and booked a room for a one night stand, when you came out the next morning the whole world would call you a chicken [i.e. dick], this goes without saying. If you suddenly found the Fifty Cent Party, [… suddenly] all of your former supporters are suspicious of the Fifty Cent Party. Why do I rarely praise the government? First, I fear being called a Fifty Cent Party member; second, if you criticize the lack of freedom then praise is meaningless; third, I have already paid my taxes, and the people’s taxes pay the fees of the Fifty Cent Party, which is equivalent to me indirectly supporting the government.
and a story from the BBC:
China's internet 'spin doctors'
By Michael Bristow
BBC News, Beijing
China is using an increasing number of paid "internet commentators" in a sophisticated attempt to control public opinion. These commentators are used by government departments to scour the internet for bad news - and then negate it. They post comments on websites and forums that spin bad news into good in an attempt to shape public opinion.
Chinese leaders seem aware that the internet - the only public forum where views can be freely expressed - needs close attention. China's Communist Party leaders have long sought to sway public opinion by controlling what the media can report. That policy was extended to the internet, and many websites are blocked by a system sometimes dubbed the "great firewall of China".
Rumours and opinions
But cyberspace - where views can be expressed instantly and anonymously - is not as easy to control as traditional news outlets. Comments, rumours and opinions can be quickly spread between internet groups in a way that makes it hard for the government to censor. So instead of just trying to prevent people from having their say, the government is also attempting to change they way they think.
To do this, they use specially trained - and ideologically sound - internet commentators. They have been dubbed the "50-cent party" because of how much they are reputed to be paid for each positive posting (50 Chinese cents; $0.07; £0.05). "Almost all government departments face criticism that is beyond their control," said Xiao Qiang, of the University of California at Berkeley. "There is nothing much they can do, other than organise their own spinning teams to do their public relations," said the journalism professor, who monitors China.
Spin machine
A document released by the public security bureau in the city of Jiaozuo in Henan province boasts of the success of this approach. It retells the story of one disgruntled citizen who posted an unfavourable comment about the police on a website after being punished for a traffic offence. One of the bureau's internet commentators reported this posting to the authorities within 10 minutes of it going up. The bureau then began to spin, using more than 120 people to post their own comments that neatly shifted the debate.
"Twenty minutes later, most postings supported the police - in fact many internet users began to condemn the original commentator," said the report.
These internet opinion-formers obviously need to show loyalty and support to the authorities. They also need other skills, as a document from the hygiene department in the city of Nanning in Guangxi province makes clear. "[They] need to possess relatively good political and professional qualities, and have a pioneering and enterprising spirit," the document said. They also need to be able to react quickly, it went on.
'Tens of thousands'
The practice of hiring these commentators was started a couple of years ago by local governments which found it hard to control public opinion. They could not rely on Beijing to monitor and block every single piece of news about their localities, so they came up with their own solution. Internet commentators have now become widespread, according to experts. Some estimate that there are now tens of thousands of them There are also reports that special centres have been set up to train China's new army of internet spin doctors.
Their job is more important than it would be elsewhere in the world. "Politically, the internet is more important in China than in other societies because it's the only public space where people can express themselves," said Professor Xiao.
That is a point that has not escaped Chinese President Hu Jintao. When he chatted online in an internet forum earlier this year he said it was important to set up "a new pattern of media guidance" for the internet.
China's teams of state-sponsored commentators have a lot of work ahead of them.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7783640.stm
