All year we’ve been tracking what Chinese influence campaigns look like on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. A new remarkable document gives us an inside look at how it works: local governments buy global internet manipulation as a subscription service. nytimes.com/interactive/20…
The bidding document from Shanghai police lays out with remarkable clarity what they want. The first order of business is fake accounts. They need a company that that can provide 100’s of accounts on Twitter, Facebook and other platforms. Sometimes they need it quick. 
Then they want a special set of accounts that are camouflaged as real people and have their own following. Aware of the bot purges on sites like Twitter, they demand the contractor be able to keep the account up for long periods of time.
This speaks to a new level of sophistication. China’s bot nets fail in part because they are hordes of unfollowed accounts that repost official state media. Now that is changing. The goal is to create credible, well-followed accounts to astroturf. nytimes.com/interactive/20…
They then get into some specifics about platform manipulation. They spell out how they need the fake accounts to juice the likes and retweets of specific posts, with the goal of tricking recommendation algorithms to make government posts appear “at the top of the forum.”
Not content to deceptively propagandize, China police also go on the offensive, identifying critics living overseas and tracking their connections in China. In a growing number of cases, family members are held to intimidate Chinese living abroad into deleting accounts.
When it comes to China content, it’s increasingly difficult to discern real accounts from paid boosters. This shows why. A price list for internet manipulation as a service. A constellation of contractors now provide this for local governments across China.
And we’re likely just getting started. On China’s internet government-sponsored trolling and astroturfing has gone on for years. The tools will get better. The efforts bigger. The results more sophisticated and deceptive. We’ll see if it will be effective: nytimes.com/interactive/20…
On a personal note, this was a struggle to Tweet. It was my final piece working with @CRTejada For a decade he patiently fixed my copy, offered guidance and wry jokes, and, for me, made journalism the greatest job in the world. He was the absolute best. Miss you Carlos.
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