The Grey Propaganda Discursive Frames of Pro-China Influencers

The next session at Social Media & Society 2024 starts with Leiyuan Tian, who is interested in pro-China influencers on Twitter. These practice a kind of grey propaganda, part of the overall network of Chinese public diplomacy but not formally representing the Chinese government. How do such influencers present themselves, and what persuasive frames do they employ?

The project conducted a snowball sampling to identify some 20 such Twitter accounts, and examined their profiles and a selection of 300 tweets per account between February 2022 and 2023. Key self-presentation strategies and self-images that emerged from this included authenticity (as cultural explorer), authority (as expert), and a hybrid strategy (as informed explorer) that combines aspects of both.

Discursive frames used here include western hypocrisy, claiming that the west is hostile towards and misrepresents China and encouraging audiences to do their own research about China; western threat, which positions the west and not China as an aggressor in global conflicts and endorses Chinese initiatives to restore peace; system superiority, which positions the Chinese autocratic model as more stable and morally superior to western liberal democracy; and common destiny, which emphasises a need to cooperate across countries and systems and strengthen ties with China, especially for the benefit of the Global South.