A report by Open Secrets on Monday said the Chinese government has hired an American consulting firm to flood U.S. social media with “influencers” who will promote the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) view of the Winter Olympics.
The move appears in part a response to coverage of President Joe Biden choosing to participate in the Olympics, honoring China as a host despite its long list of human rights atrocities, but not sending American diplomats to the event, which Biden’s administration has branded a “diplomatic boycott.” The Communist Party has responded that it never invited Biden administration officials to the Games, so their absence is not in any meaningful way a boycott.
The diplomatic boycott was proposed as a response to China’s human rights abuses, particularly its oppression of the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province, who have been herded into brutal re-education camps, sold as slave labor, and subjected to a campaign of cultural and physical eradication classified as “genocide” by international human rights organizations and the U.S. State Department.
The Open Secrets story could be taken as more evidence that President Joe Biden’s “diplomatic boycott” idea was never much of a threat to Beijing, since the Chinese are only spending pocket change to push back:
The influence operation is being coordinated by Vippi Media, a consulting firm based in New Jersey, as part of a $300,000 contract that spans through March 2022. China’s Consulate General in New York paid $210,000 in advance on Nov. 23.
As part of the online influence campaign to promote the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, and the 2022 Paralympics, the Chinese government is paying the firm to recruit influencers who are “to be activated to drive viewership, mass awareness and premium content” for China.
Most of the influencers’ posts are expected to focus on “Beijing & China elements,” including “Beijing’s history, cultural relics, modern life of people, new trends,” Chinese athletes’ preparations and “touching moments.”
Some of the Communist Party’s hired American social media guns have reportedly been assigned to tout “cooperation and any good things in China-U.S. relations,” including cooperation on “climate change.”
In other words, China – the world’s worst and most unrepentant polluter – is planning to slap Biden’s “diplomatic boycott” down with the joint declaration on climate change Biden gave the Chinese as an incredible political gift at the November climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland.
Open Secrets postulated the Communist Party views social media influencers as a highly cost-effective means of spreading propaganda since individual influencers can have millions of followers on platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, larger than the worldwide readership for Chinese state media publications.
The influencers are also presumably less likely to be seen as agents of the Chinese government by their followers. Open Secrets mentioned that under the contract with Vippi Media, only about ten percent of the “deliverable” content furnished to influencers will explicitly originate with the Chinese consulate.
The New York Times (NYT) on Monday reported on Beijing’s extensive use of YouTube influencers and other “social media personalities” who “paint cheery portraits of life as foreigners in China – and also hit back at criticisms of Beijing’s authoritarian governance, its policies toward ethnic minorities and its handling of the coronavirus.”
The NYT explained how China uses all manner of enticements, financial incentives, and leverage to push its propaganda through Western influencers, including offers to let favored social media content creators visit parts of China that are forbidden to credentialed journalists:
The videos have a casual, homespun feel. But on the other side of the camera often stands a large apparatus of government organizers, state-controlled news media and other official amplifiers – all part of the Chinese government’s widening attempts to spread pro-Beijing messages around the planet.
State-run news outlets and local governments have organized and funded pro-Beijing influencers’ travel, according to government documents and the creators themselves. They have paid or offered to pay the creators. They have generated lucrative traffic for the influencers by sharing videos with millions of followers on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.
The NYT duly noted that some of these influencers insist they are independent creators who control their own content and voluntarily decided to “counter the West’s increasingly negative perception” of China, but whatever their motivations, China has grown very adept at using them for propaganda purposes.
Furthermore, some of these influencers do have financial and ideological ties to the Communist Party that they prefer not to discuss, or reluctantly admitted the Chinese government covers their expenses when the NYT pressed them on the matter.
The report also noted that since these influencers have large followings and produce unique content with the indulgence or assistance of the Chinese state, they are generating a considerable amount of digital traffic, which is valuable to social media platforms and paid advertisers.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) last week published a report called “Borrowing Mouths to Speak on Xinjiang” that studied China’s use of foreign social media influencers to “shape and push messages domestically and internationally about Xinjiang that are aligned with its own preferred narratives.”
“Our research has found key instances in which Chinese state entities have supported influencers in the creation of social media content in Xinjiang, as well as amplified influencer content that supports pro-CCP narratives. That content broadly seeks to debunk Western media reporting and academic research, refute statements by foreign governments and counter allegations of widespread human rights abuses in Xinjiang,” ASPI wrote.
“Some foreign influencers who are promoting CCP propaganda operate outside traditional journalistic professional standards and aren’t disclosing key conflicts of interest (such as their participation in state-backed and funded tours of Xinjiang),” the report noted.
ASPI said the Communist Party has grown exceptionally fond of YouTubers, vloggers, and other video influencers because the Chinese state can influence their productions in many subtle ways, such as by steering them away from locations the Communist Party does not wish them to film. Also, most Western video platforms have loose or inconsistent requirements for labeling content as produced or influenced by state actors.
“When the locations weren’t chosen by the Chinese state, our analysis found that detention centers were sometimes accidentally filmed. Our analysis of one video, filmed by a ‘vlogger’ from Singapore, found that he unintentionally filmed seven separate detention facilities in a 15-minute YouTube video showing his airliner’s descent into Urumqi International Airport,” the report said.
Biden’s “diplomatic boycott” appears to be fizzling even without a Chinese propaganda counterattack.
Last Thursday, China warned any country that joins the four-nation boycott will “inevitably pay the price for their wrongdoing,” and France quickly announced that it would not participate. On Monday, the Associated Press (AP) found “little appetite” among European Union members for joining the boycott.
Several European diplomats told the AP they felt Biden’s boycott initiative was “politicizing” the Olympics – which is precisely the message the CCP is spending $300,000 to hire American social media influencers to repeat.
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