Tom Phillips
The Telegraph
September 8, 2014
Online smear campaign against outspoken Chinese author highlights Beijing’s growing attempts to influence discussion on Twitter. An online smear campaign against one of China’s most celebrated young authors has fuelled suspicions that Beijing is opening a new front in its propaganda war, this time on Twitter.
The Communist Party has expended huge resources on monitoring and gaining control of Chinese social media services including Weibo, the Twitter-like microblog, and WeChat, an increasingly popular social networking service.
In recent months that push appears to have extended to Twitter, with some experts speculating that Chinese propaganda chiefs are now more actively experimenting with ways of manipulating the debate on the American social media network.
In July the campaigning group Free Tibet accused Beijing of “the systematic use and abuse of Twitter” after discovering dozens of fake Twitter accounts that had been spreading government propaganda about Tibet.
The accounts used stolen profiles and photographs – including one of Syd Barrett, the late Pink Floyd vocalist – to pump out pro-government messages.
Free Tibet said Beijing was guilty of “cynical deception designed to manipulate public opinion”.
Now, claims have emerged that dozens of mysterious Twitter accounts have been circulating lengthy and detailed articles attacking Murong Xuecun, an acclaimed Chinese writer. Murong, whose real name is Hao Qun, has incurred Beijing’s anger by criticising it over issues including censorship, the Tiananmen Square massacre and religious freedom.
The articles attacking Murong have been retweeted by more than 800 different Twitter accounts, many of them recently created, according to an analysis by Xiang Xiaokai, a Chinese blogger. Mr Xiang said he believed many of those accounts were “robots” that had been set up for the sole purpose of automatically distributing propaganda discrediting a prominent Communist Party foe.
He suspected that the campaign was part of “an attempt to make Chinese-language Twitter more like Weibo” by trying to manipulate the debate.
“Sure, they can’t directly censor Twitter but they can interfere with it by making noise,” he said.
Murong admitted he had “no idea” who was behind the campaign but the level of detail involved in some of the information suggested a government connection.
“They must have got it through special channels. I believe they must have gone through my personal files carefully, trying to find weak spots,” he told The Telegraph.
“I guess it is the first time that there has been a smear campaign of this scale on Twitter,” added the author, who recently returned to China after a period in Australia.
Murong suspected that after successfully taming Chinese social media such as Weibo by intimidating outspoken users and introducing real name registration, Beijing was now turning its attention to Twitter.
“Weibo is under control and WeChat too, so maybe they think it is time to conquer the battlefield of Twitter.”
Jeremy Goldkorn, whose research firm, Danwei, studies the Chinese media and Internet, said “Internet public opinion guidance” had been a “core strategy of the Chinese government” for a number of years and had become increasingly important since 2012, the year Xi Jinping took over as Communist Party chief.
Attempts to steer the discussion on Chinese social media and the placing of pro-China comments on overseas news websites were long-standing practices.
But the recent engagement with Twitter was “definitely a new thing” and suggested an ongoing “experimentation” with methods of influencing the public debate on the American microblog, Mr Goldkorn added.
Without access to the IP addresses used by the Twitter accounts behind the online smear campaign it would be “pretty much impossible to prove” who was responsible, added Mr Goldkorn, but the campaign was “definitely fishy”.
Of Murong Xuecun’s assertion that the government was the likely culprit, Mr Goldkorn said: “I think he’s probably right”.
Nu Wexler, a spokesman for Twitter, said he could not comment on individual accounts “for privacy and security reasons” but pointed to the company’s rules on “targeted abuse” and spamming.
The Chinese government did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Murong, the author, conceded he was “no saint” but said he was angry that taxpayers’ money could be wasted on the online dissemination of “utter lies”.
“People just laugh at the absurdity of such fabrications,” he said.
