Thread by @paulmozur

How do you deny genocide accusations today? An online influence campaign of course.

Our breakdown of the anatomy Chinese propaganda campaigns, which now flow fast and at large scale from China to the global internet. This is likely just the beginning. nytimes.com/interactive/20…

In recent months thousands of testimonials from inside Xinjiang purporting to show Uyghurs living happily were blasted across the global internet.

The videos look spontaneous. They are anything but. Each step of the way was the hand of China’s government.

Our analysis found major linguistic correlations between the testimonials, suggesting they were half-scripted. At times they are disturbingly like hostage videos. People saying they’re free in the same way over and over obviously points to the opposite likelihood.

In some cases Uyghurs in the videos may have been in camps and talk of their wrong thinking. In other cases there are Chinese Communist Party cadres who are part of the system. Others are more bizarre, like this one of a student stiffly describing how great things are.

As with everything in China, even the darkest top-down orders cut across society. Here we see school kids who tuned the propaganda order into a class project.

So what’s the point of it all? Together the videos may not seem convincing, but out of context floating around the internet they can be. They also represent a new more muscular approach by the CCP to beam domestic propaganda across the global internet.

Please take a few minutes to check out our interactive, which has more videos/analysis. Below I’ll lay out an anatomy of how all this content was created and pumped out to the world. It’s a new disinformation pipeline which China’s government will likely refine in coming years.

In January, days after US Sec of State Pompeo designated the mass internments in Xinjiang a genocide, officials started a new propaganda campaign in Xinjiang. Cadres fanned out to "preach" about Pompeo’s evil and collect denunciations. Here’s a pile from Kashgar telco workers:

Soon after, videos began emerging. They closely resembled the written denunciations, only they were made selfie style for social media. First they appeared on an app called Pomegranate Cloud. It’s owned by the CCP run Xinjiang Daily. They claim rights and list an editor:

Then they spread across China’s media landscape. Other state-run media picked up videos. On social media too, they were spread far and wide. Here they are on the WeChat page of the internet regulator in Xinjiang, again giving credit to CCP run Pomegranate Cloud:

What happened next was surprising and new. Within days, the videos began to appear on YouTube and Twitter. An NYT analysis found close coordination, videos would appear on YouTube, and twenty minutes later go out via a bot network on Twitter. The YouTube accounts are still up.

Before long, the videos were picked up by Chinese officials with huge Twitter followings, like Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokes people Hua Chunying and Zhao Lijian. Their tweets act as if the videos were spontaneous.

Chinese state media echoed their efforts posting videos too.

Other sites that feed the broader China nationalist social media world, like the Qiao Collective, assembled links to the content for influencers and others online to pickup. Some did.

It's one of the first times I can recall a propaganda campaign clearly designed for domestic consumption so quickly and muscularly amplified to the world. A month later, as the Chinese internet took a two-minutes hate on H&M, a new folly of videos followed the same exact path.

The H&M videos were better, but not Grade A viral content. Even so, they are a statement of intent. These are first tentative steps in a global propaganda campaign backed by huge resources. In China such campaigns have succeeded. They will likely work on the global internet too.