Does Social Media Propaganda Increase Legitimacy of Single-Party States?

• In Event: The Soft Sell: Alternate Propaganda Strategies

Abstract

How do party states use social media-facilitated propaganda to strengthen the party rule, and is it effective? Although previous studies find its effectiveness in stimulating nationalism (Mattingly & Yao, 2020), we know little about whether it increases the exposure to state propaganda, influences affectual attitudes, which eventually leads to regime stability. We approach these questions from the perspective of affective politics. We propose a theoretical framework that conceptualize how soft propaganda may translate into affective legitimacy of the ruling Party, namely, by signaling popularity, strengthening affective bonding between the Party and netizens, and fostering a halo effect.

We examine the hypotheses with three studies deploying multiple methodologies. Study 1 identifies the rise of soft propaganda – an updated form of propaganda that is characterized of the depoliticization of content and the personalization of style – over the past decade by analyzing over four million posts from 109 Chinese state-owned media and governmental departments’ social media account of from 2009-2019. To estimate the causal mechanisms of soft propaganda on affective legitimacy, we conducted Studies 2 and 3, i.e., two randomized experiments with novel designs surveyed on over 7000 Chinese respondents. Taking together computational and experimental evidence, we find a strikingly prevalent, yet unproductive effect of exposure to soft propaganda. Despite of ten times of increase to a proportion of 51% posts featuring entertaining content, slangs, hashtags and click baits over ten years, soft propaganda consistently generates null causal effect in terms of viewership, affectual attitudes, and knowledge across several policy domains. Moreover, the depoliticization of propaganda has disengaged those who would have self-selected into the consumption of serious news. Our analyses suggest that the depoliticization of propaganda may not be the most effective strategy for achieving affective goals.

Answers to these questions are critical for understanding social media-facilitated propaganda, adaptive single-party politics, and methodological issues for estimating media effect in a fragmented information environment. First, the affective perspective for understanding propaganda in party-states complements existing studies focusing on cognitive and attitudinal persuasion. Based on the Weberian charismatic authority, affective legitimacy serves a key to understand how party-states use social media as a stabilizer. The affective framework that consists attracting popularity, strengthening bonding, and soliciting a halo effect may also inform party politics in the digital age. Second, the mixed-methodological approach combining computational and experimental methods provide the first systematic examination of China’s soft propaganda over nearly a decade and reveal the causal effect simultaneously. The finding expands the predominant dichotomous perceptions of information control in party states either as indoctrination that signals state capacity or, repressive measures. Third, the striking finding of null causal effect of soft propaganda urges rethinking the measurement of media effect in the digital age. The sheer overabundance of information poses challenges for the detection of media effect. Contemporary studies of media effect must consider the context where political messages spread. Studies that rely on a single methodology may risk exaggerating persuasion effect since one read certain news item can be an unwarranted assumption in an era of information overload or, bear significant bias of self-selection into personalized echo chambers.

Authors

• Kaiping Zhang, Tsinghua University

• Shiyao Liu, Peking University

• Zhongbin Huang, Tsinghua University