scholarly journals Who Not What: The Logic of China's Information Control Strategy

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Mary Gallagher ◽  
Blake Miller
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Information Control ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Qualitative And Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Media Companies ◽  
Government Documents ◽  
Or Groups ◽  
Open Discussion ◽  
The Government ◽  
Media Company

Abstract In this paper, we examine how the Chinese state controls social media. While social media companies are responsible for censoring their platforms, they also selectively report certain users to the government. This article focuses on understanding the logic behind media platforms’ decisions to report users or content to the government. We find that content is less relevant than commonly thought. Information control efforts often focus on who is posting rather than on what they are posting. The state permits open discussion and debate on social media while controlling and managing influential social forces that may challenge the party-state's hegemonic position. We build on Schurmann's “ideology and organization,” emphasizing the Party's goals of embedding itself in all social structures and limiting the ability of non-Party individuals, networks or groups to carve out a separate space for leadership and social status. In the virtual public sphere, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues to apply these principles to co-opt, repress and limit the reach of influential non-Party “thought leaders.” We find evidence to support this logic through qualitative and quantitative analysis of leaked censorship documents from a social media company and government documents on information control.

scholarly journals The Limits of Commercialized Censorship in China

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Blake Miller
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Market Competition ◽  
Principal Agent ◽  
Hegemonic Discourse ◽  
Sina Weibo ◽  
Media Companies ◽  
Large Databases ◽  
Principal Agent Problem ◽  
The Government ◽  
Media Company

Despite massive investment in China’s censorship program, internet platforms in China are rife with criticisms of the government and content that seeks to organize opposition to the ruling Communist Party. Past works have attributed this “openness” to deliberate government strategy or lack of capacity. Most, however, do not consider the role of private social media companies, to whom the state delegates information controls. I suggest that the apparent incompleteness of censorship is largely a result of principal-agent problems that arise due to misaligned incentives of government principals and private media company agents. Using a custom dataset of annotated leaked documents from a social media company, Sina Weibo, I find that 16% of directives from the government are disobeyed by Sina Weibo and that disobedience is driven by Sina’s concerns about censoring more strictly than competitor Tencent. I also find that the fragmentation inherent in the Chinese political system exacerbates this principal agent problem. I demonstrate this by retrieving actual censored content from large databases of hundreds of millions of Sina Weibo posts and measuring the performance of Sina Weibo’s censorship employees across a range of events. This paper contributes to our understanding of media control in China by uncovering how market competition can lead media companies to push back against state directives and increase space for counter-hegemonic discourse.

scholarly journals How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, Not Engaged Argument

2017 ◽  
Vol 111 (3) ◽  
pp. 484-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
GARY KING ◽  
JENNIFER PAN ◽  
MARGARET E. ROBERTS
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Common Knowledge ◽  
Chinese Government ◽  
Controversial Issues ◽  
Information Control ◽  
Theoretical Understanding ◽  
Strategic Objective ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government

The Chinese government has long been suspected of hiring as many as 2 million people to surreptitiously insert huge numbers of pseudonymous and other deceptive writings into the stream of real social media posts, as if they were the genuine opinions of ordinary people. Many academics, and most journalists and activists, claim that these so-called 50c party posts vociferously argue for the government’s side in political and policy debates. As we show, this is also true of most posts openly accused on social media of being 50c. Yet almost no systematic empirical evidence exists for this claim or, more importantly, for the Chinese regime’s strategic objective in pursuing this activity. In the first large-scale empirical analysis of this operation, we show how to identify the secretive authors of these posts, the posts written by them, and their content. We estimate that the government fabricates and posts about 448 million social media comments a year. In contrast to prior claims, we show that the Chinese regime’s strategy is to avoid arguing with skeptics of the party and the government, and to not even discuss controversial issues. We show that the goal of this massive secretive operation is instead to distract the public and change the subject, as most of these posts involve cheerleading for China, the revolutionary history of the Communist Party, or other symbols of the regime. We discuss how these results fit with what is known about the Chinese censorship program and suggest how they may change our broader theoretical understanding of “common knowledge” and information control in authoritarian regimes.

scholarly journals COVID -19- Infodemic overtaking Pandemic? Time to disseminate facts over fear

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2 (Supp)) ◽  
pp. 264-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Praveen Kulkarni ◽  
Sudhir Prabhu ◽  
Sunil Kumar ◽  
Balaji Ramraj
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Health Care Providers ◽  
World Health ◽  
Care Providers ◽  
Humanitarian Emergency ◽  
Global Epidemic ◽  
Media Companies ◽  
Active Involvement ◽  
The Government ◽  
Health Organization

Coronavirus (COVID-19) is a humanitarian emergency. World Health Organization (WHO) and National Governments are making their best efforts to prevent the spread of disease. But a global epidemic of misinformation which is rapidly spreading through social media platforms and other outlets is posing serious problem to the public health interventions. This rapid spread of all sorts of information pertaining to the epidemic which makes its solution difficult is termed as infodemic. Infodemic creates fear, confusion and stigmatization among people and makes them more vulnerable to practice the measures which are not evidence based and scientifically sound. Hence there is an urgent need to identify the source of misinformation and prevent them from further spreading. WHO and the government of India have taken several steps in controlling this problem but there is a need for active involvement of social media companies, professional bodies, health care providers and general public in identification of misinformation and combating its spread.

What’s next for social media companies? The digital regulatory scene in Turkey during the COVID-19 pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-95
Author(s):  
Aslı Tunç
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Media Law ◽  
Media Companies ◽  
The Law ◽  
Draft Bill ◽  
Media Company

In the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic, on 9 April 2020, a draft bill was presented to fight against the spread of COVID-19 in Turkey. Eight articles were buried deep in the proposed legislation, which mostly included economic measures and aid packages, directly targeting any social media company that had a platform accessed by over one million users daily. Although the articles on social media were dropped from the parliamentary schedule on 14 April 2020 to make way for more urgent bills on the economy and health, the uncertainty regarding social media companies’ situation in the country remained. Then, on 29 July 2020, the new social media law, officially ‘The Law on Making Amendments to the Law on Regulation of Publications on the Internet and Combating Crimes Committed by Means of Such Publication’, numbered 7253 was adopted by the parliament. This article approaches this issue from the perspective of social media companies, specifically Facebook and Twitter, and analyses the post-Coronavirus digital scene and public policy attempts from the corporate point of view.

scholarly journals Information control by public punishment: The logic of signalling repression in China

2020 ◽  
pp. 0920203X2096301
Author(s):  
Lotus Ruan ◽  
Jeffrey Knockel ◽  
Masashi Crete-Nishihata
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
The State ◽  
Regulatory Environment ◽  
Information Control ◽  
State Repression ◽  
Private Companies ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Government ◽  
Intermediary Liability

When does repression of online expression lead to public punishment of citizens in China? Chinese social media is heavily censored through a system of intermediary liability in which the government relies on private companies to implement content controls. Outside of this system the Chinese authorities at times utilize public punishment to repress social media users. Under China’s regulatory environment, individuals are subject to punishment such as fines and detention for their expressions online. While censorship has become more implicit, authorities have periodically announced cases of repression to the public. To understand when the state escalates from censoring online content to punishing social media users for their online expressions and publicizes the punishment, we collected 468 cases of state repression announced by the authorities between 1 January 2014 and 1 April 2019. We find that the Chinese authorities most frequently publicize persecutions of citizens who posted online expression deemed critical of the government or those that challenged government credibility. These cases show more evidence of the state pushing the responsibility of ‘self-regulation’ further to average citizens. By making an example of individuals who post prohibited content even in semi-public social media venues, the state signals strength and its determination to maintain authority.

PENERAPAN ALGORITMA K-MEANS UNTUK PENGELOMPOKAN DAERAH RAWAN BENCANA DI INDONESIA

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Amril Mutoi Siregar
Keyword(s):  
Natural Disasters ◽  
Accurate Data ◽  
Disaster Victims ◽  
Central Java ◽  
North Sulawesi ◽  
Natural Beauty ◽  
Or Groups ◽  
Disaster Data ◽  
The Government ◽  
Almost All

Indonesia is a country located in the equator, which has beautiful natural. It has a mountainous constellation, beaches and wider oceans than land, so that Indonesia has extraordinary natural beauty assets compared to other countries. Behind the beauty of natural it turns out that it has many potential natural disasters in almost all provinces in Indonesia, in the form of landslides, earthquakes, tsunamis, Mount Meletus and others. The problem is that the government must have accurate data to deal with disasters throughout the province, where disaster data can be in categories or groups of regions into very vulnerable, medium, and low disaster areas. It is often found when a disaster occurs, many found that the distribution of long-term assistance because the stock for disaster-prone areas is not well available. In the study, it will be proposed to group disaster-prone areas throughout the province in Indonesia using the k-means algorithm. The expected results can group all regions that are very prone to disasters. Thus, the results can be Province West java, central java very vulnerable categories, provinces Aceh, North Sumatera, West Sumatera, east Java and North Sulawesi in the medium category, provinces Bengkulu, Lampung, Riau Island, Babel, DIY, Bali, West Kalimantan, North Kalimantan, Central Sulawesi, West Sulawesi, Maluku, North Maluku, Papua, west Papua including of rare categories. With the results obtained in this study, the government can map disaster-prone areas as well as prepare emergency response assistance quickly. In order to reduce the death toll and it is important to improve the services of disaster victims. With accurate data can provide prompt and appropriate assistance for victims of natural disasters.

EFFECT OF DIGITAL COMMUNITY TOWARDS DEMOCRACY PROCESS: DIGITAL PARTISIPATION ANALYSIS IN INDONESIA

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alih Aji Nugroho
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Critical Mass ◽  
Digital Society ◽  
Digital World ◽  
Digital Community ◽  
The Government

The world is entering a new phase of the digital era, including Indonesia. The unification of the real world and cyberspace is a sign, where the conditions of both can influence each other (Hyung Jun, 2018). The patterns of behavior and public relations in the virtual universe gave rise to new social interactions called the Digital Society. One part of Global Megatrends has also influenced public policy in Indonesia in recent years. Critical mass previously carried out conventionally is now a virtual movement. War of hashtags, petitions, and digital community comments are new tools and strategies for influencing policy. This paper attempts to analyze the extent of digital society's influence on public policy in Indonesia. As well as what public policy models are needed. Methodology used in this analysis is qualitative descriptive. Data collection through literature studies by critical mass digital recognition in Indonesia and trying to find a relationship between political participation through social media and democracy. By processing the pro and contra views regarding the selection of social media as a level of participation, this paper finds that there are overlapping interests that have the potential to distort the articulation of freedom of opinion and participation. - which is characteristic of a democratic state. The result is the rapid development of digital society which greatly influences the public policy process. Digital society imagines being able to participate formally in influencing policy in Indonesia. The democracy that developed in the digital society is cyberdemocracy. Public space in the digital world must be guaranteed security and its impact on the policies that will be determined. The recommendation given to the government is that a cyber data analyst is needed to oversee the issues that are developing in the digital world. Regulations related to the security of digital public spaces must be maximized. The government maximizes cooperation with related stakeholders.Keywords: Digital Society; Democracy; Public policy; Political Participation

Penerapan Strategi Social Media Marketing Untuk Meningkatkan Penjualan Pada Dealer Mobil Toyota, Daihatsu dan Honda Bandung

Infoman s ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-124
Author(s):  
Yopi Hidayatul Akbar ◽  
Muhammad Agreindra Helmiawan
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Search Engine ◽  
Social Media Marketing ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Media Companies ◽  
Social Media Networks ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
Marketing Activities ◽  
The University ◽  
Website Content

Social media is one of the information media that is currently widely used by several companies and personally to convey information, with the presence of social media companies no longer need to spread offers through print media, they can use information technology tools in this case social media to submit offers the products they sell to users globally through social media. This social media marketing technique is the process of reaching visits by internet users to certain sites or public attention through social media sites. Marketing activities using social media are usually centered on the efforts of a company to create content that attracts attention, thus encouraging readers to share the content through their social media networks. The application of the QMS method is certainly not only submitted through search engine webmasters, but also on a website keywords must be applied that relate to the contents of the website content, because with the keyword it will automatically attract visitors to the university website based on keyword phrases that they type in the search engine. With Search Media Marketing Technique (SMM) is one of the techniques that must be applied in conducting sales promotions, especially in car dealers in Bandung, it is considered important because each product requires price, feature and convenience socialization through social media so that sales traffic can increase. Each dealer should be able to apply the techniques of Social Media Marketing (SMM) well so that car sales can reach the expected target and provide profits for sales as car sellers in the field.

The Use of Social Media by the Botswana Government and Governance of Liquid Communication

Mousaion ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tshepho Lydia Mosweu
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Customer Service ◽  
Community Involvement ◽  
Media Content ◽  
Service Access ◽  
Communication Tool ◽  
African Countries ◽  
The World ◽  
The Government ◽  
Use Of Social Media

Social media as a communication tool has enabled governments around the world to interact with citizens for customer service, access to information and to direct community involvement needs. The trends around the world show recognition by governments that social media content may constitute records and should be managed accordingly. The literature shows that governments and organisations in other countries, particularly in Europe, have social media policies and strategies to guide the management of social media content, but there is less evidence among African countries. Thus the purpose of this paper is to examine the extent of usage of social media by the Botswana government in order to determine the necessity for the governance of liquid communication. Liquid communication here refers to the type of communication that goes easily back and forth between participants involved through social media. The ARMA principle of availability requires that where there is information governance, an organisation shall maintain its information assets in a manner that ensures their timely, efficient and accurate retrieval. The study adopted a qualitative case study approach where data were collected through documentary reviews and interviews among purposively selected employees of the Botswana government. This study revealed that the Botswana government has been actively using social media platforms to interact with its citizens since 2011 for increased access, usage and awareness of services offered by the government. Nonetheless, the study revealed that the government had no official documentation on the use of social media, and policies and strategies that dealt with the governance of liquid communication. This study recommends the governance of liquid communication to ensure timely, efficient and accurate retrieval when needed for business purposes.

COVID-19 and the politicisation of medical preprints on Twitter: Quantitative Analysis of Social Media Data (Preprint)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleksandra Urman ◽  
Stefania Ionescu ◽  
David Garcia ◽  
Anikó Hannák
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Direct Effect ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
The Public ◽  
Media Companies ◽  
Preventative Measures ◽  
Twitter Users ◽  
New Research ◽  
Sharing Patterns ◽  
Political Divide

BACKGROUND Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists have been willing to share their results quickly to speed up the development of potential treatments and/or a vaccine. At the same time, traditional peer-review-based publication systems are not always able to process new research promptly. This has contributed to a surge in the number of medical preprints published since January 2020. In the absence of a vaccine, preventative measures such as social distancing are most helpful in slowing the spread of COVID-19. Their effectiveness can be undermined if the public does not comply with them. Hence, public discourse can have a direct effect on the progression of the pandemic. Research shows that social media discussions on COVID-19 are driven mainly by the findings from preprints, not peer-reviewed papers, highlighting the need to examine the ways medical preprints are shared and discussed online. OBJECTIVE We examine the patterns of medRxiv preprint sharing on Twitter to establish (1) whether the number of tweets linking to medRxiv increased with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic; (2) which medical preprints were mentioned on Twitter most often; (3) whether medRxiv sharing patterns on Twitter exhibit political partisanship; (4) whether the discourse surrounding medical preprints among Twitter users has changed throughout the pandemic. METHODS The analysis is based on tweets (n=557,405) containing links to medRxriv preprint repository that were posted between the creation of the repository in June 2019 and June 2020. The study relies on a combination of statistical techniques and text analysis methods. RESULTS Since January 2020, the number of tweets linking to medRxiv has increased drastically, peaking in April 2020 with a subsequent cool-down. Before the pandemic, preprints were shared predominantly by users we identify as medical professionals and scientists. After January 2020, other users, including politically-engaged ones, have started increasingly tweeting about medRxiv. Our findings indicate a political divide in sharing patterns of the top-10 most-tweeted preprints. All of them were shared more frequently by users who describe themselves as Republicans than by users who describe themselves as Democrats. Finally, we observe a change in the discourse around medRxiv preprints. Pre-pandemic tweets linking to them were predominantly using the word “preprint”. In February 2020 “preprint” was taken over by the word “study”. Our analysis suggests this change is at least partially driven by politically-engaged users. Widely shared medical preprints can have a direct effect on the public discourse around COVID-19, which in turn can affect the societies’ willingness to comply with preventative measures. This calls for an increased responsibility when dealing with medical preprints from all parties involved: scientists, preprint repositories, media, politicians, and social media companies. CONCLUSIONS Widely shared medical preprints can have a direct effect on the public discourse around COVID-19, which in turn can affect the societies’ willingness to comply with preventative measures. This calls for an increased responsibility when dealing with medical preprints from all parties involved: scientists, preprint repositories, media, politicians, and social media companies.

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