Chinese trolls write 488 million fake social media posts a year and don't even earn 50 cents for it [View all]

[yuiyoshida]

While China's Communist Party has more than 87 million members, it turns out that the most productive party in China may just be the infamous "50 Cent Party" (五毛党, wǔmáodǎng).

"50-centers" or wumao are popularly imagined to be feckless netizens who earn 0.5 kuai per pro-China post that they make online at the behest of government censors. If this were true, then they have likely amassed quite a fortune by this time, with the CCP giving them 244 million yuan yearly by our count.

That's based on a recent study led by Gary King, a political scientist at Harvard University, which found that the Chinese government fabricates about 488 million social media comments a year. Half on government sites, and the other half on Chinese social media, where one of every 178 posts is authored at the behest of the government (seems a little low).

Utilizing leaked documents from an internet propaganda county office in Jiangxi, this first-ever systematic study of China's "50 Cent Party," found out that apart from their obvious productivity, pretty much everything we thought we knew about the wumao is wrong.

"The content of [50-center] posts was completely different than what had been assumed by academics, journalists, activists, and participants in social media,” Jennifer Pan, an assistant professor at Stanford and one of the report’s authors, told Foreign Policy. “They — and we before we did this study — turned out to be utterly wrong”

more...http://shanghaiist.com/2016/05/20/china_fakes_488_million_posts_yearly.php