Reports: Whitewashing Hong Kong and East Turkistan
Tim Niven (寒山), Research Lead, Doublethink Lab
Executive Summary
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) Hong Kong and East Turkistan propaganda is whitewashing genocide and human rights abuses, and enabling transnational repression.
To inform the public and policymakers, this report analyzes a broad spectrum of the CCP’s propaganda practices, including official state media, participatory propaganda, and amplification through coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB).
Throughout 2021 and 2022, we collected 1,647 East Turkistan and 5,704 Hong Kong Twitter/X posts by official state media accounts in Chinese to analyze this broad spectrum of propaganda.
We find that users on Twitter were exposed to official CCP state media accounts, pro-CCP nationalists, and influencers, all spreading pro-CCP propaganda. Inauthentic assets also engaged in coordinated behavior to boost both state media and influencers, which would have increased the likelihood of other real users seeing the CCP’s whitewashing propaganda campaign.
We developed a codebook of official propaganda tropes, and will show how they are employed by state media and participatory propagandists. Five key tropes connect to the CCP’s narratives distorting the situation in East Turkistan: Amazing Xinjiang, Happy Uyghurs, Social Progress, Magnificent Development, and Western Hegemony. Eight key tropes connect to the CCP’s narratives distorting the situation in Hong Kong: Vandals and Traitors, Western Hegemony, Law and Order, Perfected Hong Kong Democracy, Red Hong Kong, Powerful Ancestral Motherland, Magnificent Development, and Social Progress.
By analyzing state media usage of these tropes, we find that Happy Uyghurs and Western Hegemony are used to respond to negative events as they occurred, and sought to distort international narratives and distract global audiences. We find that throughout 2021 and 2022, the CCP found itself less on the defensive about international accusations of human rights abuses. They were able to focus on reinforcing their alternative, positive vision of Xinjiang, relative to other narratives.
We find that the Hong Kong tropes connect to the CCP’s master narrative, “From chaos, to stability, to prosperity,” and that their usage over time follows this narrative progression.
We also analyzed a pro-CCP community of 585 Twitter accounts which we previously identified in a study on the Ukraine biolabs conspiracy in Chinese on Twitter, composed of authentic PRC nationalists, influencers, and inauthentic assets. Throughout 2021 and 2022, these accounts published 4,632 East Turkistan tweets, 32% of which (or one in every three tweets) contained one of our official propaganda tropes; and 7,038 Hong Kong tweets, 20% of which (or one in every five tweets) contained one of our official propaganda tropes.
Tweet engagement metrics, which included likes, retweets and replies, suggest that “prestigious, ingroup, moral and emotional” (PRIME) propaganda performs best in this participatory propaganda community.
We find that the pro-CCP community overwhelmingly uses simplified characters, whereas official accounts mostly use traditional characters, which suggests official accounts are targeting audiences in Hong Kong, and to a lesser extent Taiwan.
In this pro-CCP community, we also observed inauthentic accounts supporting participatory propagandists, particularly influencer accounts, as well as official state media accounts. Our investigations pursuing other inauthentic accounts connected to these accounts lead us to believe we have only scratched the surface of inauthentic networks engaging in coordinated behavior to boost each other, and amplify influencers trying to build clout. Given previous findings of extensive inauthentic amplification of state media and diplomats, an important question for future research is whether the same is happening for influencers.
Finally, we provide four key recommendations:
- Media literacy efforts should help to raise awareness of the nature of trope-based propaganda in general, and the CCP’s propaganda tropes in particular, in order to reduce their power to manipulate, and to raise awareness of the nature of influencers monetizing the attention of niche audiences through PRIME propaganda.
- Platforms need to be incentivized to invest the necessary resources to combat and remove CIB. The inauthentic accounts involved in CIB identified above were easy to find, and have been active for a long time on Twitter/X. Platforms should also provide transparency about sponsored content shared by influencers, and about how and why content is recommended to users. Platforms should seriously consider the recommendation to demonetize the PRC’s multichannel networks, through which party-approved influencers are allowed to monetize PRIME propaganda on global platforms.
- Researchers should pay more attention to participatory propaganda and the utilization of influencers in the CCP’s propaganda apparatus. In particular, efforts to monitor CIB may benefit from increased attention to the amplification of pro-CCP influencers. We suspect this battleground is going to be of increasing importance in the future.
- Governments should enforce legislation and regulations that hold social media platforms accountable for the spread of propaganda and disinformation — the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) offers a good model for other countries to follow. Governments should provide a mechanism through which suspected transnational repression through targeted disinformation, propaganda, and harassment can be reported to the security organs in respective countries, such as the FBI in the United States, for investigation and action. They should impose targeted sanctions on individuals and entities involved in Uyghur abuses and propaganda campaigns. For instance, the DSA creates unprecedented sanctions for platforms.
Download Full Reports
English
- Report: Whitewashing Hong Kong
- Report: Whitewashing East Turkistan
