China's public diplomacy operations: understanding engagement and inauthentic amplifications of PRC diplomats on Facebook and Twitter

As part of the strategy to “tell China’s story well”, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has significantly expanded its public diplomacy efforts. The PRC makes use of both state-controlled media outlets and over 270 diplomatic accounts on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to amplify the PRC’s perspective on global affairs and current events. To understand the structure and function of the PRC’s public diplomacy operations, we analyze every tweet and Facebook post produced by PRC diplomats and ten of the largest statecontrolled media outlets between June 2020 and February 2021. PRC diplomats and state-backed media agencies are highly active on Twitter. Altogether, PRC diplomats tweeted 201,382 times, averaging 778 times a day for a nine-month period. Their posts were liked nearly seven million times, commented on one million times, and retweeted 1.3 million times. On Facebook, diplomats produced 34,041 posts over this period. The PRC’s state-controlled media outlets managed 176 accounts on Twitter and Facebook. These accounts produced content in English and a variety of other international languages. These accounts posted seven hundred thousand times, were liked 355 million times, and received over 27 million comments and re-shares in the study period. Despite high levels of activity by PRC diplomats on social media, PRC diplomat user accounts are rarely labeled accurately. Many social networking firms have introduced transparency labelling for foreign government officials and state-controlled media organizations. Yet, we find that these labels are used inconsistently. For example, on Twitter only 14% of PRC diplomat Twitter accounts are labeled as government affiliated. The social media accounts of PRC diplomats and statebacked media agencies receive lots of engagement from other users, but a substantial proportion of this engagement is generated by rapid-fire “super-spreader” accounts. These user accounts rapidly engage with PRC content with just seconds between retweets. We find that nearly half of all PRC account retweets originate from the top 1% of the super-spreaders. On Twitter, a considerable share of the engagement with PRC accounts on Twitter come from user accounts that the company eventually suspends for platform violations. We find more than one in ten of the retweets of PRC diplomats between June 2020 and January 2021 were from accounts that were later suspended by Twitter. Many of these accounts were active for months before being disabled.