China Fakes 488 Million Social Media Posts a Year To Deceive Its Citizens (bloomberg.com)

In an attempt to keep its citizens from seeing bad news and getting involved in sensitive political debates, China's government fabricates about 488 million social media comments a year, reports Bloomberg citing a study (PDF). The propaganda workers who post comments are known as Fifty Cent Party because they are believed to be paid 50 Chinese cents by the Chinese government for every comment they post. From the report: Although those who post comments are often rumored to be ordinary citizens, the researchers were surprised to find that nearly all the posts were written by workers at government agencies including tax and human resource departments, and at courts. The researchers said they found no evidence that people were paid for the posts, adding the work was probably part of the employees' job responsibilities. Fifty Cent Party is a derogatory term since it implies people are bought off cheaply. About half of the positive messages appear on government websites, and the rest are injected into the 80 billion social media posts that enter China's Internet. That means one of every 178 social media posts on China's micro blogs is made up by the government, the researchers said. The sites affected include those run by Tencent Holdings Ltd., Sina Corp. and Baidu Inc.

Comments

Whats worse, them or the Putin / Russia shills?

[oic0]

Seems on english speaking sites I run in to far more Putin shills.

Re:Meanwhile in the USA...

[wardrich86]

You're right. After I made my silly bathroom post, I remembered reading about Hillary Clinton having her own Propaganda machine hitting sites like Reddit to try to convince people that she's not a bought-out liar.

Re:Meanwhile in the USA...

[AmiMoJo]

Thanks to Snowden we know for a fact that GCHQ, a sub-division of the NSA, does in fact do a lot of manipulation of social media. In fact they mention Slashdot by name.