The Indirect Effect: How Hidden “Relay Stations” Aid Chinese & Russian Messaging

• In Event: Understanding Misinformation and Conspiracy Theories

Abstract

Why do revisionist states invest so much in outlets consumed by so few? A growing literature on Chinese and Russian info ops highlights the effects of content from their state-sponsored media outlets, such as Global Times and RT (e.g. Foster and Chan 2022; Kao 2021). Yet these outlets also exaggerate their audience size and suffer from negative reputations in their target states (Foster 2021). If the target audiences do not consume content from these outlets, how do they influence their target audiences?

We argue for the indirect effect of “relay stations” on target audiences. Building on extensive fieldwork in the cases of Chinese and Russian info ops in Taiwan and Estonia, respectively, we find that local, more trusted news outlets are the channel through which revisionists spread their messaging, acting through two distinct mechanisms: direct citations of revisionist state media content and content appropriation.

We demonstrate the existence of these two mechanisms using an original multilingual dictionary of terms for detecting direct citations and supervised natural language processing models to measure argument similarity across a comprehensive registry of major media outlets in China, Estonia, Russia and Taiwan, addressing the challenge of finding the needle(s) in the haystack(s) of manipulative content.

Authors

• Noel Foster, U.S. Naval War College

• Zenobia Chan, Princeton University