Thread by @propublica

20 minutes.

That’s how long it took for China to mobilize a multifaceted propaganda campaign after tennis star Peng Shuai accused former vice premier Zhang Gaoli of sexual assault.

Officials use a tested playbook to stamp out / shift narratives. It didn’t work as planned...

STEP ONE: Remove all traces

Censors expunged Ms. Peng’s allegations from Weibo, scrubbed other posts referring to the claims and banned several hundred keywords.

For a while, they limited topics as broad as “tennis.”

Here are screenshots of her post.

This banner appeared in a Weibo tennis forum, warning: “Due to violation of community guidelines, it is temporarily prohibited to post in this Super Topic space.”

STEP TWO: Say nothing abroad, until you can’t
Beijing can control the Chinese internet, but outside the country, the propaganda apparatus has to take a different tack.

The strategy is usually to stay silent and hope international attention blows over. This time it didn’t.

The @WTA and top tennis players like @naomiosaka and @DjokerNole publicly raised concerns about her safety. Soon the hashtag #WhereIsPengShuai was ricocheting across global social media.

Here’s how state media responded...

@CGTNOfficial posted a screenshot of what it said was an email from Ms. Peng denying the allegations and asking to be left alone.

But people pointed out that the prose was stilted, and in the image of the email, a cursor was visible, raising questions about who wrote the text.

Ok, STEP THREE: Provide visual proof

@shen_shiwei, another @CGTNOfficial reporter, posted photos that he said were from the tennis star’s personal WeChat account

The setting matched images she previously posted, but it was unclear when / where they were taken, + by whom.

@HuXijin_GT, top editor of the Communist Party’s @globaltimesnews, posted video clips of Ms. Peng at dinner with a group of people.

The next morning, state media reporters posted pics and footage of Ms. Peng at a youth tennis tournament.

It came across as heavily scripted.

Pin Ho, a NY-based businessman who owns a Chinese news outlet, likened China’s propaganda campaign to fire trucks pouring gasoline on a fire.

They “buried their heads in the sand and made these theatrical scenes, one after another,”

Ok so on to the next step..

STEP FOUR: Tap a friendly foreigner

When the @iocmedia said that its president had held a video call with Ms. Peng, Chinese state media shared the committee’s tweets and statement that said Ms. Peng “appeared to be relaxed” (but made no mention of Ms. Peng’s accusations).

It did little to allay concerns. Instead, Olympic officials faced criticism about their relative silence on Ms. Peng’s allegations. They have said that they are helping with “quiet diplomacy.”

Time for STEP FIVE: Unleash an army of fake accounts

@nytimes / @ProPublica found 97 fake accounts promoting Chinese state media messaging about Ms. Peng.

Nearly all followed no other accounts and had no followers. They were among 1,700+ fake Twitter accounts we identified.

Twitter picked up on this suspicious activity. Many of the posts that shared Mr. Hu's tweet have already disappeared. The company said it removed all 97 accounts for violating policies. “I never knew that there are bot-like accounts interacting with my posts,” Hu told us.

These accounts posted most of their tweets on weekdays 8 a.m. – 7 p.m., Beijing time, with a slight lunchtime lull — a pattern seen in other campaigns attributed to China. The accounts had little posting history. More than half of them were less than 3 months old.

STEP SIX: Push a counter narrative

@Jingjing_Li, an anchor with CGTN, suggested that the West was using Ms. Peng to undermine China

Ms. Li did not respond to a request for comment about her tweet.

After the Women’s Tennis Association announced its decision to suspend its tournaments in China on Dec. 1, @HuXijin_GT accused the tennis organization of forcing Ms. Peng to help the West attack China, and said it was depriving her of freedom of expression.

FINAL STEP: Make it us versus them

Censors on Weibo keep expunging recent comments about Ms. Peng, with one notable exception: a post from the French Embassy urging China to respect its commitments to protect women.

It became a nationalist dumping ground.

Users lashed out at France, accusing the country of meddling in China’s affairs. One commenter leaned on whataboutism, pointing to recent reports of sexual abuse of minors by the clergy of France’s Roman Catholic Church.

The posts are likely highly choreographed and curated

At one point, the site’s statistics showed the embassy post had been shared 1,600 times, but only a few of the most recent re-posts appeared, and they each expressed support for the French Embassy.

Within hours, the posts disappeared.

China’s top-down strategy for controlling Peng Shaui’s narrative largely stumbled.

Its Ministry of Foreign Affairs declined to comment. The Cyberspace Administration of China did not respond to a request for comment.

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