Infodemic: Disinformation Campaign, Decentralized Propaganda and Reactive Authoritarianism
Ruanzhenghao “Shiruan” SHI
My final project is a research proposal with my preliminary findings and analyses. I plan to probe into the disinformation campaign mobilized by the propaganda machinery of the Chinese government during the COVID-19 pandemic. I particularly intend to discuss how authoritarian regimes utilize both news media and social media to spread disinformation and misinformation and thus to facilitate their political and ideological agenda, so as to unfold the relationship between the state legitimacy and the state responses in the cyberspace. The research project involves two existential threat topics: #pandemic and #cyber.
I would like to specifically discuss following questions:
(a) How did the disinformation campaign start? Who were behind the action in the first place?
(b) How did the content of state-sponsored disinformation evolve? How did it get resembled and modified? What were the nuances of tones and conspiracy contents of the state media and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA)? How was it adapted for official propaganda narratives and diplomatic stances? How did the propaganda machinery react to international pressure for investigation and responsibility? What was the rationale of disinformation manufacture and evolution during the campaign?
(c) How did the propaganda machinery interact with pro-government netizens? How did the latter contribute to the disinformation manufacture and spread?
(d) Why did the party-state choose to mobilize an all-out disinformation campaign since the pandemic, which damaged the international reputation of the party-state permanently and did not alleviate, if not enhanced, the criticism that it encountered?
(e) What was the difference between the routine propaganda practice of the party-state and this disinformation campaign? What was the difference between the COVID-19 disinformation campaign and other similar campaigns by Beijing (such as the one target Hong Kong protesters in 2019)? What was the difference between the COVID-19 disinformation campaign by Beijing and the one by Kremlin at the same time? What was the difference between the Beijing-sponsored/operated conspiracy practice and the COVID-19 disinformation spreaders in the US (such as Trump, QAnon groups and leading right-wing media)? Why did these differences exist?
I don’t have answers to these questions so far. In fact, I don’t have a clear “why”-driven, mechanism-oriented question yet. I intend to work inductively based on new evidence that I can acquire. For the research proposal, I would like to present my theoretical foundations – which bolster the project but may not be directly related to it – and my preliminary findings in terms of the birth and early evolution of Fort Detrick leaking/manufacturing conspiracy, the core narrative of Beijing-sponsored disinformation campaign.
Theoretical background: informational democratization and authoritarian responses
The development of human society from pre-modern to modern has been largely facilitated by informational democratization. The emergence of Gutenberg’s printing press and print-capitalism democratized the spread and acquisition of knowledge and information. The right to read and write was no longer monopolized by classes of clergies and nobles. The invention of radio, loudspeaker, newspaper and television expanded the scale and accessibility of information democratization. However, the production of information and knowledge was still monopolized by “a few centralized choke points” (Tufecki, 2017:29) – newspaper editors, cable-network owners and intellectuals in academia. Such production process was hierarchized and professionalized, and the audience, namely average people, were differentiated from the providers of the mass-media world. Although the audience had the right to choose their favorable providers who had obligations to respond to their demands and tastes, they were excluded from the manufacture of information and knowledge.
The rise of the Internet, especially the incomparable prevalence of social media, is the most significant phenomenon since Gutenberg Bibles. The digitally networked public sphere has democratized the production of information. Every average individual can become the node that produces information and communicates with one another. The overflow of information and the lack of gatekeepers, which are determined by the very nature of the digitally networked public sphere, make it a challenge to tell “false or fake reports from real ones” and to compose “a narrative from a seemingly chaotic splash-drip-splash supply of news” (39-42). Hence, citizens in the cyberspace are more vulnerable to manipulation, deception and private information leakage.
Modern states are informational states (Lin 2019). Free and democratic societies are particularly vulnerable to cyber-enabled information warfare and influence operations (IWIO) which are enabled and facilitated by the cyber (Lin 2018). The IWIO, along with everyday informational contamination and emotional overload constitute existential threats to electoral politics as well as Enlightenment values. In the meantime, authoritarian regimes can utilize the phenomena by indulging, encouraging or even creating misinformation that amplifies viewpoints and emotions in their favor while suppressing information contradicting their narratives. Such practice leads to a massive political mobilization among pro-government subjects and reinforces the state legitimacy and capacity for control. The state can devolute its power to individuals in a populist way yet may not make dictatorship more vulnerable.
Tufecki (2017:234) points out that the Chinese government’s strategy for managing the Internet reveals its deep understanding of the importance of attention and capacity to movements. It not only establishes a cyber-enabled surveillance apparatus (Xu 2020; King et al. 2013; 2014), but also a comprehensive propaganda machinery adapted for the digital era to manipulate citizens’ attention and public opinion (236-237). Moreover, the party-state has been devoted to isolating the Chinese cyberspace from the rest of the world for two generations, since the very beginning of the digital era, which has created an online ecology extremely different from societies with less controlled informational democratization. The fullness and effectiveness of this institution is incomparable in the world.
On the other hand, the emergence of social media makes it easier for citizens to evaluate – subjectively, not factually – the performance of the authoritarian regime. Zhao (2001) constructs three ideal types of state legitimacy – legal-electoral, ideological or performance. The sources of performance legitimacy include economic development, moral performance and military defense. The survival of the party-state of China since the reform and opening-up heavily depend on its performance given the fact that it has lacked other sources of legitimacy. Therefore, it comprehends its vulnerability to such evaluation in the digital era and consequentially has more willingness to utilize the informational infrastructures to manifest its (good) performance, even such manifestation may not be in its long-term interest.
Why the COVID-19 disinformation campaign by Beijing is an intriguing research topic?
The Beijing-sponsored COVID-19 disinformation campaign is mobilized both domestically and globally, which has yet led to distinctive effects. It has damaged the global reputation of the party-state permanently and has not alleviated the international criticism of Beijing’s initial response to the outbreak nor weakened the call for probe into the virus origins. In the meantime, the conspiracy has achieved great results on the Chinese Internet, particularly among pro-government, chauvinist netizens (also known as “the 50 Cent Party” and “Little Pinks”) who has longed for more hawkish action by the MFA and state media amid international criticism. According to a YouGov survey result released on Aug 24, 2020, three in ten people in China think that COVID was first detected in the US and only half of the Chinese respondents think that the epidemic was first detected in their country – which was vastly different from other sample nations. An alternative history of the pandemic has thus been constructed. Therefore, I argue that the state-sponsored disinformation campaign must be understood from the perspective of the intersectionality of the party-state – regarding it as a dual actor with domestic and international functionality, instead of merely focusing on its international role as a disinformation super-spreader.
The Beijing-sponsored disinformation mainly targets the US. Anti-US sentiment has been prevalent in Chinese society since the Communist Party took power. However, it may not be a strong explanation for it is something constant. It is not convincing to use something constant to explain the variation/emergence. The conspiracy theories that framed the COVID-19 as US biochemical warfare did exist before the state-conducted disinformation campaign, but they were on the fringes of the public opinion. In fact, at the beginning of the pandemic (February 2020), the state media and fact-checking platforms suppressed and/or clarified the US-related misinformation in a similar way as they coped with other information not in the party-state’s favor. On Feb 8, 2020, a man in Inner Mongolia was fined and given a 10-day detainment by local police for claiming that “the COVID-19 pneumonia was caused by the US-produced genetic weapon”. On Feb 23, the president of the Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital (the major hospital specialized in infectious diseases) openly clarified that the five hospitalized American athletes during the Wuhan Military World Games were diagnosed with malaria, not COVID-19. Around Mar 1, several fact-checking platforms refuted the conspiracy that the cases of the vaping-associated lung injury (EVALI) in the US were the unidentified COVID-19 cases. However, things changed dramatically in March, 2020. Few fact-checking attempts have been made since then while the state-sponsored disinformation has prevailed.
It was the trolling game between the US and China, particularly between the MFA spokespersons and the Trump administration, that caught people’s eyes at that time, while not many of them probed into the birth and evolution of the conspiracy. The disinformation campaign of the COVID-19’s origins was mobilized by the MFA and state media precisely after the pandemic spread across countries, one day after the WHO designated the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic (Mar 11). It occurred pretty much at the same time as the Mask Diplomacy began. Meanwhile, for the party-state, although the domestic legitimate crisis due to the pandemic had been under control by March, the international criticism of Beijing’s early responses to the epidemic intensified. The state media reported the external criticism and stirred anti-Western sentiment among jingoist netizens who in return became increasingly discontented with Beijing’s lack of “power of international discourse”, especially after its “triumph” over other nations in terms of dealing with the pandemic. In this case, I hypothesize that the politicization of social media will lead to more radical, sometimes dramatic responses from the party-state because it over-perceived the voices from chauvinist netizens in a controlled cyberspace.
On Mar 12, Zhao Lijian, a spokesperson of the MFA, tweeted that the US army brought the epidemic to Wuhan and retweeted an article from a Russia-funded conspiracy theory website. But this conspiracy was quickly replaced with other less specific theories. The core of them has been Fort Detrick (the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, the USAMRIID). All state media coverage of Fort Detrick can be traced back to one suspicious petition, written by B.Z. on “We the People” website. The petition including grammar mistakes, wrong wording, and a particularly interesting non-native usage – using “research unit” to refer to research institute, which is a conspicuous Chinglish translation of “研究单位” (Yan’Jiu’Dan’Wei). It is even more extraordinary that Huanqiu.com (the Chinese-language website of the state-run nationalist tabloid Global Times) was able to find and report this petition with only 88 signatures (among all conspiracies on that petition website) exactly on the same day when it was posted (Mar 10).
As far as I can detect, the first disinformation post combining Fort Detrick, the EVALI, and the seasonal influenza in the US was written by a bitcoin miner on Zhihu (a Quora-like platform) on Feb 29, named as “The COVID-19 pneumonia can be from the US: the EVALI with doubling cases in the US can be the COVID-19 pneumonia”. Although the post was tagged with “with no reliable sources” by the platform, it has received 9966 thumb-ups and can be regarded as the prototypical version of the conspiracy theory. Compared to the Feb 29 post, the B.Z. petition was added with the Event 201 simulation organized by the Johns Hopkins University – this piece of information was mentioned in the comment section of the Zhihu post. It also excluded the “evidence” disadvantageous to the party-state in the former post, including a US-funded bat-virus cultivation study, participated by the WIV, which was published in Nature Medicine (Menachery et al. 2015) and an epidemic prevention drill in Wuhan on Sept 18, 2019.
The original four elements of the Fort Detrick conspiracy were resembled to construct a misleading timeline to imply causality: (a) the shutdown of Fort Detrick (USAMRIID) in July, 2019; (b) the vaping-associated lung injury (EVALI) since August, 2019; (c) the seasonal influenza since September, 2019; and (d) the JHU Event 201 simulation in October, 2019. There were elements used to modify the conspiracy but then dropped, including the authorization of the avian influenza virus modification experiment by a HHS committee in February, 2019, the quick development of Moderna vaccine in March, 2020 and the hunting habit of Americans. A new “evidence” has been added to the timeline – (e) the respiratory illnesses in Northern Virginia in July, 2019.
There has been an all-out disinformation warfare since then. Versions of the conspiracy theory has appeared hundreds of times so far. As long as faced with international pressure for inquiry and responsibility, the state media and the MFA would repeat the very set of disinformation.
I would like to emphasize that my initial probe into the online disinformation is centered on the birth and evolution of the Fort Detrick conspiracy sponsored by the Chinese propaganda machinery. I have not yet discussed other online anti-US COVID-19 conspiracies which are not sponsored by the party-state. I don’t unpack the interaction between the party-state and pro-government netizens during the disinformation campaign in the proposal either. The research proposal is still very preliminary, particularly given the fact that the infodemic is still going on.
References:
Clark, D., Berson, T., & Lin, H. S. (2014). At the nexus of cybersecurity and public policy: Some basic concepts and issues.
Lin, H. (2019). The existential threat from cyber-enabled information warfare. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 75(4), 187-196.
Lin, H., & Kerr, J. (2019). On cyber-enabled information warfare and information operations. Oxford Handbook of Cybersecurity.
King, G., Pan, J., & Roberts, M. E. (2013). How censorship in China allows government criticism but silences collective expression. American political science Review, 326-343.
King, G., Pan, J., & Roberts, M. E. (2014). Reverse-engineering censorship in China: Randomized experimentation and participant observation. Science, 345(6199).
Tufekci, Z. (2017). Twitter and tear gas: The power and fragility of networked protest. Yale University Press.
Xu, X. (2020). To Repress or to Co‐opt? Authoritarian Control in the Age of Digital Surveillance. American Journal of Political Science. (Early review)
Zhao, Dingxin. (2001). The power of Tiananmen: State-society relations and the 1989 Beijing student movement. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.