The Political Economy Outcomes of China’s IP Address De-anonymization Policy

• In Event: Crisis, Disinformation and Authoritarian Narratives in Russia and China

Abstract

Authoritarian governments have adopted a variety of strategies to shape public opinion on digital platforms. Scholars have w[ell documented strategies from hard and soft propaganda, to filtering and censorship of posts and comments in the past decade. However, little is known about how changes in the technological affordances and configurations of a platform might influence public discourse about pro and anti-regime contents. This paper takes advantage of the recent technological shift on Chinese social media platforms, especially Sina Weibo, where the Chinese government made users’ IP locations disclosed on their homepage and whenever publishing a post or comment. This IP address de-anonymization policy was implemented site by site from March to May 2022, as the declared intention for the authoritarian regime was to combat mis(dis)information. This policy happens at the same time with the broader pandemic lockdowns, where different provinces take varying approaches (big vs. small scale lockdowns). One economic consequence is the huge shift in rural-urban migration. This new policy shift on Weibo during the pandemic allows researchers to examine the political economic outcomes of the pandemic control measures that were not able to be addressed previously. And our paper focuses on two questions: 1) how have nationalist narratives changed (i.e., in terms of volume and content) before and after the IP address policy? and 2) how can we use IP addresses-based location traces to capture people’s mobility patterns before and after the lockdown to estimate the size of rural-urban migration? We collected all the posts and comments made by over 300,000 randomly sampled monthly active Weibo users from March 2022 to June 2022, when the de-anonymization policy was rolled out on Weibo. Using a difference in difference (DID) design and computational text analyses, our paper aims to reveal how this new information control strategy in China has on one hand changed public discourse toward more nationalist (pro-regime), but at the same time, poses authoritarian government at the risk of making social cues about the economic impact of COVID-19 lockdowns available to the public.

Authors

• Anfan Chen, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

• Kaiping Chen, University of Wisconsin-Madison