Category Archives: Xinhua

Chinese state media bought Twitter ads to spread disinformation about Hong Kong protests

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Twitter was posting advertisements on behalf of Chinese state media that portrayed the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong as “increasingly violent,” according to the social media bookmarking site Pinboard. Ads originating with Xinhua News Agency, the Chinese government’s official media outlet, falsely reported that “All walks of life in Hong Kong called for a brake to be put on the blatant violence and for order to be restored,” according to Pinboard, a platform where ads and social media activity are catalogued and analyzed. Chinese officials are trying to disrupt international media coverage showing that the protests, known as the Umbrella Movement, are mostly peaceful. There have been eruptions of violence, such as when police fired bean bags at demonstrators, injuring one woman’s eye, and when authorities dispersed protesters by beating them with clubs. An estimated 1.7 million people marched Aug. 18 in a peaceful protest calling for reforms such as […]

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How China used Western social media for a late-2018 charm offensive

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More than 40,000 English-language social media posts that originated with six state-run Chinese media agencies reached millions of users on Instagram and other services over a span of four months concluding in January, according to research published Wednesday by the threat intelligence company Recorded Future. Xinhua, People’s Daily and others sought to subtly manipulate public opinion in the U.S. by promoting flattering images of Chinese culture, including tourist destinations and panda bears, rather than copying the hard-line rhetoric typically found in the Chinese-language versions of the same outlets, according to Recorded Future. Verified Instagram accounts run by both of those services posted roughly 26 times a day, reaching more than 5 million users between October 2018 and January. The effect is to overwhelm social media users in the West with positive images about China, potentially eroding their ability to think critically about a government that has been accused of committing […]

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