As part of the strategy to ‘tell China’s story well’, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has significantly expanded its public diplomacy efforts. The PRC makes use of both state-controlled media outlets and over 270 diplomatic accounts on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to amplify the PRC’s perspective on global affairs and current events.
To understand the structure and function of the PRC’s public diplomacy operations, this report analyses every tweet and Facebook post produced by PRC diplomats and ten of the largest state-controlled media outlets between June 2020 and February 2021. The authors find that PRC diplomats and state-backed media agencies are highly active on Twitter, with large numbers of accounts and tweets. Still, on Twitter only 14% of PRC diplomat Twitter accounts are labelled as government affiliated. PRC accounts receive lots of engagement, but a substantial proportion of this engagement is generated by rapid-fire “super-spreader” accounts. A significant share of these are eventually suspended for platform violations. Taken together, these data provide extensive evidence for where and how a powerful state actor like the PRC may be able to create an illusion of inflated influence over global discourse.
DPhil Student
Marcel is a doctoral candidate in Social Data Science and Researcher at the Computational Propaganda Project. His research is at the intersection of political science, statistics and computer science, with a focus on elections and disinformation.
DPhil Student
Hannah Bailey studied for an MSc in the Social Science of the Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute. Research interests include China-US relations and China’s use of online censorship, with a focus on automated content analysis.
Associate Professor, Senior Research Fellow
Jonathan Bright is a political scientist specialising in computational and ‘big data’ approaches to the social sciences.
Professor of Internet Studies
Philip N. Howard is a professor of sociology, information and international affairs, and the author of Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives.
