The Economist January 23rd-29th 2021
Social media accounts linked with China’s state media have been busy this month, however the audience for their stories might be diminishing, at least on Twitter. They have floated theories online, bashing the West while promoting and boasting of thier own achievements.
Chinese media have spread rumors about the pandamic having started somewhere other than China: In March 2020, Zhao Lijian’s (often called the Wolf Warrior) tweet went viral, claiming that American military visitors may have seeded covid-19 in China. They have questioned the saftey of Western-made covid-19 vaccines, while promoting their own: Recently on January 17th, the Wolf Warrior retweeted the tweets of Liu Xin, a CGTN reporter, calling upon Western media to focus on the deaths in Germany and Norway of old people who had taken the Pfizer and BioNtech vaccines; an attempt to sap faith in non-Chinese vaccines. A video tweeted by China Daily called BBC the “Biased Broadcasting Corporation”.
A recent study conducted by the China Media Project (research organization based in Hong Kong) suggests that Twitter itself has limited the influence and reach of accounts linked to China’s state-managed news services. The three most popular accounts, with 33m followers combined, CGTN, a global broadcaster, Xinhua, main news offical agency and newspaper People’s Daily, have all experienced a decrease in likes and shares by 20%. Twitter also attatched the label, “China state-affiliated media” to accounts run by offical mouthpieces. A nationalist tabloid in Beijing, Global Times, experienced a drop in liked tweets by 30%.
These findings by the China Media Project raise questions about the role Twitter and other Western social-media platforms play in helping China “tell its story well”. The tweets by the Wolf Warriors, Mr. Zhao and Ms. Liu, are comparable to Donald Trump’s recent tweets about election fraud. Both instances have raised similar concerns about the harm caused by disinformation rapidly spread on these social-media platforms.
Unlike the past, tension between nations can rise much faster through social media. Will Twitter’s recent changes put stress on China’s propagandists from fulfilling their duty to obey Mr. Xi’s wishes? Or perhaps the nation will see its recent decline in media as a western driven strategy to reduce China’s rising supremacy. Nevertheless, tensions between the U.S and China, two superpowers, are high, and recent efforts made by Twitter and other western social media platforms, cannot be good for the relations between the two nations.