Hong Kong Protesters Use Memes to Make Chinese Internet Trolls Target Pro-Beijing Officials
Protesters create fake captions for pictures of pro-Beijing officials, making them targets for Chinese Internet commenters on social media.
Luo Huining, the new Director for the Hong Kong Liason Office, probably didn’t expect to be targeted by Chinese Internet commenters from the first day he sat down at his new desk. So when people who you’d assume would support him begun channelling their anger at him, he probably wondered just what on earth was going on.
Little did he know that it was the result of handiwork by the Hong Kong protest movement’s internet brigade, who had used memes to turn Chinese internet commenters against him by creating fake captions for pictures of him. In one image, which pictures Luo Huining holding up his hand to wave, protesters wrote that he was holding up five fingers to express support for the protest movement’s five demands.
A few week backs, Matthew Cheung Kin-chung, the Chief Secretary for Administration for Hong Kong’s government, was forced to publicly denounce rumours that there had been an internal dispute between him, Carrie Lam, and a number of other officials after Hongkongers had shared a so-called copypasta on social media.
Protesters had changed such a pasta from the 2012 European Football Championships when fans fabricated a story that some players from the Netherlands had brawled about who was at fault after a loss to Portugal, this time replacing the names of the players with those of the officials and sharing it on social media.
“There have been rumours that government officials have been fighting. Such claims are of course entirely fabricated and very boring.”
Entirely made up, the protesters tricked Chinese commenters who failed to catch on to the joke into turning against the officials. In a statement on his Facebook page, Cheung eventually said that “there have been rumours that government officials have been fighting. Such claims are of course entirely fabricated and very boring.”
The protesters are “sick and tired,” said Scarlett, a 30 year-old office worker and protester, of the so-called wumaos, or the 50 Cent Army. These are a group of Chinese allegedly state-backed internet commenters who flood anti-China content on social media and get paid 50 cents per comment they post, though mostly used in slang.
The protesters hope to trip up the wumaos’ efforts by misleading them with fake captions, or what some have accused of being fake news, said Scarlett.
Scarlett, who does the majority of her torch-waving on the frontlines of the internet, told me that “there are so many Chinese trolls on social media. We try to report them but it’s painfully slow and ineffective, so the next best solution is to make fun of them, to troll them and to expose them.”
She said the goal of her efforts is to weaken the “wumao army”. “Even if it’s just a few hundreds, it’s a success,” she said. “Those people will always copy the government’s views, so when we create memes of officials ‘supporting’ the protest movement, they eat it up like candy.”
“They don’t stop to think, ‘hey, maybe this is fake’. They just start arguing with them on social media, and it creates a lot of frustration for everyone.”
No more waving
Han Kuo-yu, an established Taiwanese pro-Beijing politician, was also targeted by Chinese commenters after protesters from Hong Kong screenshotted an image of him holding up five fingers while live-streaming. The Hongkongers shared it on social media with the fictional caption “five demands, not one less.”
“When the wumaos attack us because they have been misled by the government, we mislead them them into attacking that government.”
Shortly afterwards, Chinese commenters flooded his social media to ask him just what was going on, while accusing him of being a liar and a traitor. Eventually, he was pressured into writing a public statement saying that he had made no such comments.
The campaign has been so effective that some pro-Beijing politicians have stopped making gestures that include holding up five fingers because they don’t want to be perceived as sympathetic to the protest movement. One person joked on Reddit that “the Chinese are going to wave with only four fingers now.”
But the protesters don’t only target political officials. One pro-Hong Kong Facebook page, HKACG memes, was shut down a few weeks back after they targeted the popular Chinese-developed video games ‘Azur Lane’ and ‘Girls Frontline’ with memes. Using fake captions, they claimed that some animated characters that held up five fingers were a means of expressing support for the protest movement.
As a result, the developers, Shanghai Manjuu and Xiamen Yongshi, were forced to respond to accusations of treason and threats of boycott from Chinese players, saying that it was not the intention.
John, a 21 year-old university student who ran the Facebook page, said that he was “trying to beat China at its own game. When the wumaos attack us because they have been misled by the government, we mislead them them into attacking that government.”
He also hopes that by targeting games that are popular among the Chinese, he can open their eyes to the ridiculousness of China’s censorship policies, he said. “If we make the Chinese government ban a game that’s popular in China, we can show the wumaos how nonsensical their government acts.”
