PRC Supporters’ Online Responses to Uyghur Activists-in-Exile

• In Event: Conflict, Coercion, and Radicalization through the Lens of Text as Data

Abstract

Social media platforms have emerged as a crucial arena for marginalized voices from repressive regimes to mobilize transnational political action. Among these voices, dissidents in exile are uniquely capable of leveraging online platforms to share first-hand accounts and evidence of repression in their home countries to a global audience (Michaelsen 2018). Accordingly, they pose a formidable challenge to the abusive governments that they originally sought refuge from. While recent scholarship has uncovered how exile transforms the advocacy of dissidents in global social media spaces (Esberg and Siegel 2022), relatively little is known about how nondemocratic regimes and their supporters use these platforms to undermine exiled dissidents on the global stage.
In this paper, we examine how supporters of nondemocratic governments respond to prominent exiled dissidents on Twitter. We argue that, within a target population of exiled regime critics, pro-government users direct more vitriol towards individuals with characteristics that are more politically threatening to their home country's nationalism. With a focus on supporters of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and their engagement with prominent Uyghur activists-in-exile, we formulate two hypotheses. First, compared to male regime critics, female regime critics are more likely to be targeted with vitriol. Second, compared to regime critics who frequently tweet in Mandarin Chinese, those who tweet less frequently in Chinese are targeted more aggressively. We test our hypotheses using pro-PRC tweets constructed with digital traces of online responses to exiled Uyghur dissidents that are identified based on incidents reported in the China's Transnational Repression of Uyghurs (CTRU) dataset (Lemon, Jardine, and Hall 2023). We construct the text corpus used for analyses using a pro-PRC stance classifier based on GPT-4 architecture.
The findings of this research substantiate our theoretical expectations concerning pro-government vitriol and its correlation with regime critics’ proximity to nationalist identity. By employing the Perspective API’s toxicity scores as a metric to gauge the usage of aggressive language (Conversation AI 2018; Jigsaw LLC 2021), we observe that, on average, women who are critical of the regime and those who communicate less frequently in Chinese tend to be subjected to a higher volume of toxic content. The results indicate a potential systemic bias in pro-government discourse where differences in gender and linguistic identity inadvertently result in heightened toxicity. By projecting more vitriol toward exiled dissidents whose identities are more politically threatening to PRC nationalism, PRC supporters can maximize their efforts to curtail the global public sphere in their favor without sounding the alarm for social media companies' content moderators or triggering sanctions from the international community.
Overall, the contributions of this research bolster our collective knowledge of how pro-government actors contribute to the aims of global authoritarianism using social media. The evidence presented in this research has broader implications for understanding the digital dimensions of conflict, the global repression-dissent nexus, and human rights in the digital age.

Authors

• Allison Wun-hui Koh, University of Birmingham

• Joshua A. Tucker, New York University