The Social Media Logics of Domestic Chinese Propaganda

Up next at IAMCR 2023 is Zheyu Shang, whose interest is in online propaganda in the Chinese Internet. This now works and looks quite differently from the historical forms of Chinese party propaganda that western observers may be familiar with; the Website of the Chinese Communist Party’s Youth League (CYL) looks more like a social media Website, for instance, and a Chinese army recruitment account on social media uses cartoonish imagery.

In addition, social media platforms are interactive, and ordinary users can create their own content online; they engage in many-to-many communication, also with state media accounts. State propaganda is therefore also mediated by the logics and affordances of commercial digital platforms, and requires platform-native strategies.

This gives rise to the idea of participatory propaganda, then, which co-opts social media participants in the dissemination of party propaganda, and must therefore also follow the logics of platformisation. The present study explores how this works, through interviews with CYL staff at provincial and local levels, with media practitioners, and with platform staff from Bilibili, one of the most popular video-sharing platforms.

What emerged from this is the existence of platform-adaptive content production strategies that are designed to meet the affordances and cultures of the various social media platforms; these bespoke strategies increase interactions with Internet users and content and account visibility, and do so especially by employing subcultural elements and Internet memes that are popular with young audiences.

Further, state organs are backed by state power and can draw on greater human resources and traffic resources, co-opting platforms for their work; this enables them to utilise platforms’ recommender systems more effectively, and to collaborate with top influencers at low cost. But this is not always entirely effective; platform providers themselves sometimes work against this cooptation, and may shadow-ban state accounts or use opaque platform mechanisms and unbalanced resource allocations to reduce the visibility of state-aligned content. (For instance, state media content is under a ‘news’ tab on Bilibili, but that tab is deliberately not available on the platform’s mobile app.) The state is not omnipotent when it comes to controlling commercial social media platforms, then.