In (Qin et al. 2017), we provide the first large-scale evidence on the effort and effectiveness of building an e-autocracy through social media. In particular, we examine the effectiveness of surveillance and the extent of propaganda in China’s social media. Our study is based on a dataset of 13.2 billion blog posts published on Sina Weibo – the most prominent Chinese micro blogging platform– over the period 2009-2013.
A first result is that social media are very effective for surveillance of protests and strikes. We analyze 545 large collective action events that took place in mainland China between 2009 and 2012, and find that these events can be predicted by social media content, one day in advance, with excellent accuracy. We find millions of social media posts discussing collective-action events in our data. In contrast, newspapers are completely silent about these events. We also find that social media posts are also effective for corruption surveillance, although less informative than in the case of protests.
We finally document the extensive use of Sina Weibo for government propaganda. We identify government accounts from user names and using textual analysis of the posts in our data. According to this estimation, there are 600,000 government-affiliated accounts, including government organization, mass organization, and media users. In comparison, Sina Weibo substantially under-reported Government presence, to 50,000 accounts.
In Qin et al. (forthcoming), we study the effect of Chinese social media on the spread of protests and strikes. We identify approximately 4 million tweets mentioning protests or strikes during 2009-2013. These tweets appear in bursts around the time of actual events in the real world. To measure how information diffuses between cities on Weibo, we use retweets. Our results show that roughly 28% of the retweets occur within one hour of the initial message being posted, while 75% happen within one day. Weibo thus creates an unprecedented information network in China, instantly informing distant individuals of sensitive events.
Our empirical analysis produces four main findings. First, information diffusion on Weibo creates a strong ripple effect that swiftly spreads protests and strikes across cities.
Second, information on Weibo enlarges the scope of protests and strikes. Apparently, Chinese social media helps connect protesters with diverse goals, which facilitates the formation of substantial protest waves. Third, Weibo increases the likelihood of very large protest waves. Our simulation shows that without Weibo, the share of the affected population would have increased to 6% by 2013, whereas with Weibo, it would rise to nearly 15%, only slightly below the share in reality; see Figure. This considerable effect is driven by the strong information connections that social media creates between China's large and distant cities.
In Qin et al. (2018), we study the Chinese newspaper market. We examine the political bias (measured by the amount of government mouthpiece content compared to commercial content) of the Chinese newspapers from 1981 to 2011. Although all general interest newspapers in China are owned by the state, their direct ownership is at the hand of local governments that have strong incentive to produce newspapers that sell. We demonstrate that in such a market, it is impossible to achieve “prosperity without freedom”. In particular, we find that:
- lower-level governments under-supply propaganda relative to a level desired by the central government and proliferate less politically biased newspapers;
- competition between local governments handicaps the media control strategy of aligning the dual politico-economic goal; and
- the markets for political and commercial information cannot be entirely segmented. Hence there is a trade-off between political and economic goals.
The overall findings in our study show that even in a highly controlled environment such as China, market competition plays an important role in reducing audience exposure to propaganda because it shifts the politico-economic trade-off. Consequently, the increasing competition in the Chinese newspaper market has meant that propaganda through the marketplace has become less effective. In response, the Chinese government has altered its media control strategy in recent years. One strategy is to manufacture propaganda on social media platforms, which have more concentrated markets and are directly regulated by the central government.
