Thread by @WilliamYang120

"While #China’s control of what its domestic viewers and readers consume is well established, the country has spread its own version of the Games beyond its borders, with an arsenal of digital tools that are giving China’s narrative greater reach ..." nytimes.com/2022/02/18/tec…

... and more subtlety than ever before."

"With bots, fake accounts, genuine influencers and other tools, #China has been able to selectively edit how the events have appeared, even outside the country, promoting everything that bolsters the official, feel-good story about the Winter Olympics ...

... and trying to smother whatever doesn’t."

“For the Chinese Communist Party, the Winter Olympics are inseparable from the broader political goal of building up the country’s national image. This is what Xi Jinping has called ‘telling China’s story well,” said David Bandurski from @cnmediaproject.

" The New York Times and ProPublica identified a network of more than 3,000 inauthentic-looking Twitter accounts that appeared to be coordinating to promote the Olympics by sharing state media posts with identical comments, for instance."

"Such accounts tended to be recently created with very few followers, tweeted mostly reposts and nothing of their own, and appeared to operate solely to amplify official Chinese voices."

"Some of their efforts have centered on an account called Spicy Panda, which has been posting cartoons and videos to push back against calls for a boycott of the Olympics."

"In one cartoon, Spicy Panda accused the United States of wielding 'its deceiving propaganda weapon to stain the Olympics.'The tweet was reposted 281 times, all by the fake-looking accounts, ...

... but received little other engagement, a strong indication that the network was mobilized to promote the message. Aside from the bursts of promotion, Spicy Panda’s posts about the Olympics received almost no attention."

"An analysis of Spicy Panda’s supporters turned up 861 accounts — 90 percent of which were created after Dec. 1. The accounts’ first wave of coordinated posts pushed Beijing’s stance that #HongKong’s legislative council elections were legitimate.

Then the accounts turned their attention to the Olympics. (By Thursday, all but one of the accounts had been suspended, shortly after The Times and ProPublica asked Twitter about them.)"

"Other botlike accounts promoted hashtags that seemed aimed at drowning out criticism of China, a hallmark of previous campaigns."

"They promoted content under hashtags like #Beijing2022 and #TogetherForASharedFuture, this year’s official Olympic motto. Some accounts repeatedly posted tweets with identical wording, such as: ...

... 'China’s hosting of the #Beijing2022 as scheduled has boosted the world’s confidence in defeating the pandemic.'"

"Twitter said in an emailed statement that it had suspended hundreds of the accounts identified by The Times and ProPublica for violations of its platform manipulation and spam policies.

It said it was continuing to investigate the accounts’ links to state-backed information operations."

"Even the Games’ official mascot, Bing Dwen Dwen, a cuddly panda in a suit of ice, has been the subject of an organized campaign on Twitter," according to @AlbertYZhang.

"Thousands of new or previously inactive accounts have helped the mascot go viral, he said — which China’s state media presented as evidence of the mascot’s popularity and, by extension, that of the Games."

“If you want to push out a lot of content on something like the Beijing Olympics, this is an easy way to do it,” Mr. Zhang said.

He added that the campaign now underway was like others sponsored by the Chinese state to push Beijing’s narrative on topics such as Covid-19 and the crackdown on Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.

“It’s absolutely critical to understand that this is not just another narrative,” Mr. Bandurski of the China Media Project said of the Olympics. “It’s a narrative that implies widespread censorship and the manipulation of public opinion, which is actually policy.”

"Jack Stubbs, vice president of intelligence at Graphika, a social media monitoring company, said his firm had observed another Chinese propaganda network using foreign social media platforms."

"The network has spread videos emphasizing the Olympics as environmentally friendly and crooning about strengthening Chinese-Russian ties, punctuated by President Vladimir V. Putin’s attendance at the opening ceremony."