Gaslighting: Propaganda and Censorship on Chinese Social Media

• In Event: Global Social Media and Information Flows from Authoritarian Regimes

Abstract

We study the ramifications of coordinated censorship and propaganda by evaluating how propaganda account managers, who are delegated by the state, control their comment sections on Chinese social media. We create a unique dataset by collecting terabytes of real-time social media data. In particular, we scrape the comment sections of these propaganda accounts every five minutes, so that most of the comments on the propaganda posts are captured before they are removed. Based on the comments collected, we design a survey experiment using reconstructed HTML webpages presenting the comment sections of these propaganda accounts with and without censorship. Our results demonstrate that removing critical comments from the comment sections will lead Chinese social media users to significantly and substantially overestimate the proportion of people agreeing with the regime’s positions or policies. However, leveraging our high-frequency observational data and a stacked interrupted series design, we show that comment censorship will also reduce user engagement of propaganda posts, as measured by the number of likes and reposts. We further demonstrate that propaganda account managers exhibit strategic behavior to navigate the tradeoff between censoring criticisms and fostering engagement with propaganda content: The majority of comment sections are not filtered, and these account managers utilize different censorship options based on their local knowledge of internet dynamics and the likelihood of certain posts triggering public backlash. Our findings provide key insights into the holistic consequences of information manipulation in China, elucidating its efficacy in distorting public perception while maintaining digital engagement in the realm of social media.

Authors

• Qitong Cao, Stanford Graduate School of Business

• Yiqing Xu, Stanford University

• Leo Yang, University of California San Diego