Social media platforms are at the forefront of the China-West narrative battle
Social media platforms are at the forefront of the China-West narrative battle
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United States: Long linked to Beijing's outlandish propaganda campaign and insisting on "telling China's story well", praise for China's achievements on Western social media platforms now shows that the West is struggling with the global conflict. I'm not opposed to playing secret opinion-sized games.

The US and UK were behind covert influence operations that used more than 200 social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other platforms to suppress voices, according to a recently released paper by social media analytics company Graphica and the Stanford Internet Observatory. had to have. The legend of nations including China as part of the war.

Deceptive accounts promoting pro-Western narratives in the Middle East and Central Asia were terminated as a result of the platform's investigation.

The accounts were removed on the grounds of "platform manipulation and spam" and "coordinated unauthenticated behaviour", according to the paper, which Twitter and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, believed that the accounts were part of pro western online. Influence operations that focused on Russia's actions but also criticized China on issues ranging from Xinjiang to trade practices.

According to the report, which was released last month, Twitter linked the origin of the accounts to the US and UK, while Meta claimed that the origin of the accounts on its platform was US.

According to the report, "unauthenticated practices for conducting online influence operations" were discovered through a "qualitative review of content samples associated with each account". These included posting memes and instant videos, impersonating independent media outlets and creating fake people with computer-generated faces.

It would be risky for the US to run a pro-Western influence campaign, according to Jessica Brandt, policy director at the Brookings Institution's Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative.

He said Washington really needs to resist the urge to combat information manipulation because doing so would harm Washington's moral authority. "Polluting that space will ultimately harm us more than our competitors because democracy depends on a healthy information space to thrive."

The analysis by Graphica and Stanford is the most recent evidence that the US and China are engaged in a narrative conflict as they struggle to increase their influence on the world stage.

During the 2019 Hong Kong protests, Twitter shut down nearly a thousand accounts it claimed were based in mainland China for spreading false information. In order to "undermine the legitimacy and political position of the protest movement on the ground", it was claimed that they were linked to a "significant state-backed information campaign".

As reported last month, Twitter and Meta shut down pro-Western accounts and groups that had been active for at least five years. Criticizing China for its treatment of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, he promoted the interests of the US and its allies.
In recent years, allegations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang have been strongly criticized and sanctioned by Washington and its allies.

A recent report from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights also focused on them. The report, which was released three months after the then High Commissioner, Michelle Bachelet, visited Xinjiang in May, noted "serious human rights violations" against Uighurs and "other predominantly Muslim communities".

The pro-Western comments and posts are part of a narrative conflict between the US and China, which are trying to use content manipulation on Western social media platforms to establish their dominance in the world and establish a friendly international order. Ever since the coronavirus pandemic began, the narrative conflict has gotten worse as both nations accuse each other of being the source of the virus.

In that effort, the merits of their respective political systems and the framework of their relations with smaller countries are also discussed.

According to Chong Jae Ian, an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the National University of Singapore, China's influence operation is larger and more effective.

China is now less cautious about the blurred reality and some distorted version of it when handling political debates, such as the Hong Kong protests and the origins of COVID-19, where speculative theory without basis is overused,” he said. "Unlike a decade ago, when Chinese officials and affiliated outlets would express their opposition on certain political matters, for example, territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

China's diplomatic strategy includes "telling China's story well" to use state media and private actors to bolster and innovate external propaganda.

An analysis of Chinese state-controlled media outlets and diplomatic accounts and how they were used to broaden China's influence operations on Twitter was published by the University of Oxford in a paper on China's public diplomacy operations last year. The paper called these "superspreader" accounts—false accounts that swiftly retweeted content backed by the state—inauthentic accounts that received a lot of engagement from diplomats and state media accounts.

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