BEIJING — Inside the Potemkin village of China’s propaganda, the
Winter Olympics have unfolded as an unalloyed success, a celebration of sports
and political harmony that has obscured — critics say whitewashed — the
country’s flaws and rights abuses.
اضافة اعلان
At Beijing 2022, the hills are snowy, not brown as usual this
time of year. A Uyghur skier is the symbol of national unity, the tennis player
Peng Shuai just a curious spectator. Athletes and foreign journalists praise
the polite volunteers and marvel at the high-speed trains and the robots that
boil dumplings and mix drinks.
While China’s control of what its domestic viewers and readers
consume is well established, the country has spread its own version of the
Games beyond its borders, with an arsenal of digital tools that are giving China’s
narrative arguably greater reach and more subtlety than ever before.
With bots, fake accounts, genuine influencers and other tools,
China has been able to selectively edit how the events have appeared, even
outside the country, promoting everything that bolsters the official, feel-good
story about the Winter Olympics and trying to smother whatever does not.
“For the Chinese Communist Party, the Winter Olympics are
inseparable from the broader political goal of building up the country’s
national image,” said David Bandurski, director of the China Media Project, a
monitoring organization. Referring to the country’s leader, he added, “This is
what Xi Jinping has called ‘telling China’s story well.’”
On Twitter, which is banned in China, Chinese state media
outlets and journalists, as well as diplomats, have tried to buff the image of
the Games, raving about venues and cooing over the Olympic mascot.
China has also sought to influence online discussions in more
concealed ways. The New York Times and ProPublica identified a network of more
than 3,000 inauthentic-looking Twitter accounts that appeared to be
coordinating to promote the Olympics by sharing state media posts with
identical comments, for instance. Such accounts tended to be recently created
with very few followers, tweeted mostly reposts and nothing of their own, and
appeared to operate solely to amplify official Chinese voices.
Some of their efforts have centered on an account called Spicy
Panda, which has been posting cartoons and videos to push back against calls
for a boycott of the Olympics. In one cartoon, Spicy Panda accused the United
States of wielding “its deceiving propaganda weapon to stain the Olympics.”
The tweet was reposted 281 times, all by the fake-looking
accounts, but received little other engagement, a strong indication that the
network was mobilized to promote the message. Aside from the bursts of
promotion, Spicy Panda’s posts about the Olympics received almost no attention.
An analysis of Spicy Panda’s supporters turned up 861 accounts —
90% of which were created after Dec. 1. The accounts’ first wave of coordinated
posts pushed Beijing’s stance that Hong Kong’s legislative council elections
were legitimate, though critics have called the vote a sham. Then the accounts
turned their attention to the Olympics. (By Thursday, all but one of the
accounts had been suspended, shortly after the Times and ProPublica asked
Twitter about them.)
Spicy Panda appears to have a connection with iChongqing, a
state media-linked multimedia platform based in Chongqing, a city in central
China. The accounts that shared Spicy Panda’s posts often did the same with
tweets by iChongqing’s account. IChongqing did not immediately respond to a
request for comment.
Other botlike accounts promoted hashtags that seemed aimed at
drowning out criticism of China, a hallmark of previous campaigns.
They promoted content under hashtags like #Beijing2022 and
#TogetherForASharedFuture, this year’s official Olympic motto. Some accounts
repeatedly posted tweets with identical wording, such as, “China’s hosting of
the #Beijing2022 as scheduled has boosted the world’s confidence in defeating
the pandemic.”
Twitter said in an emailed statement that it had suspended
hundreds of the accounts identified by the Times and ProPublica for violations
of its platform manipulation and spam policies. It said it was continuing to
investigate the accounts’ links to state-backed information operations.
Even the Games’ official mascot, Bing Dwen Dwen, a cuddly panda
in a suit of ice, has been the subject of an organized campaign on Twitter,
according to Albert Zhang, a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy
Institute’s International Cyber Policy Center.
Thousands of new or previously inactive accounts have helped the
mascot go viral, he said — which China’s state media presented as evidence of
the mascot’s popularity and, by extension, that of the Games.
“If you want to push out a lot of content on something like the
Beijing Olympics, this is an easy way to do it,” Zhang said. He added that the
campaign now underway was like others sponsored by the Chinese state to push
Beijing’s narrative on topics such as COVID-19 and the crackdown on Uyghur
Muslims in Xinjiang.
The information space inside China is not unlike the elaborate
measures that have created the “closed loop” that keeps athletes, journalists
and other participants strictly segregated from the general public.
Inside the “closed loop” of official propaganda, the state
carefully curates almost anything ordinary Chinese people see or read. The
effect has been an Olympics free of scandal or criticism or bad news.
China has defended its use of Twitter and Facebook, platforms
that it bans at home. A foreign ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, said last
year that such sites were an “extra channel” to combat negative portrayals in
the West.
One American company, Vippi Media, based in New Jersey, signed a
$300,000 contract with the consulate general of China in New York to help
promote the Games, according to the company’s filing with the Justice Department
under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Under the contract, first reported by the research group Open
Secrets, the company has been promoting the Games by recruiting “social media
stars” to post on Instagram,
YouTube and TikTok, the company’s founder,
Vipinder Jaswal, said in a telephone interview.
“They were very clear and I was very clear that it’s about the
Olympics and the Olympics only, nothing to do with politics,” he said.
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