Reaching the People: How Online Propaganda in China Compete for Attention

• In Event: Chinese Politics Mini-Conference: Information Politics: Collection, Communication, and Processing

Abstract

There is a growing consensus that political propaganda in the age of mass media worked, shaping attitudes and behaviors in favor of governments by suppressing alternative media sources and dominating public attention. What happens to political propaganda in the age of digital media? In this paper, we use ethnographic fieldwork as well as computational analysis of the titles of 197,303 WeChat posts made by city governments in China to uncover the motives, strategies, and consequences of online propaganda. We find that although online censorship can reshape the contours of what information is available online, it does not reduce the overall volume of information. As a result, government propaganda must compete for attention, and this competition is intensified by technological advances in quantification that are used to evaluate producers of propaganda. We find that government propaganda accounts use apolitical content---e.g., entertainment and practical information-and "clickbait" strategies that generate but not fulfill curiosity to garner attention. Importantly, government WeChat accounts that contain larger proportions of apolitical content and clickbait are more likely to attract attention to their political messages than government accounts that contain smaller proportions of apolitical content and clickbait.

Authors

• Yingdan Lu, Stanford University

• Jennifer Pan, Stanford University