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I'm glad to see this well-researched piece covering *paid* and organic Chinese state media propaganda on social media by @bobmcmillan and @BetsyMorris2. They cite excellent work by my SIO colleague @vanessa_molter. https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-pushes-viral-messages-to-shape-coronavirus-narrative-11586516402
Vanessa's research shows that there has been a huge COVID-related paid push by Chinese state-media on Facebook over the last three months, eclipsing the reach of *years* of Internet Research Agency ads from Russia.
https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/chinese-state-media-shapes-coronavirus-convo
https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/chinese-state-media-shapes-coronavirus-convo
Note: The FB ad API is woefully deficient when trying to calculate real reach, so we did our best to compare. Even if off by a bit, the Chinese effort is massive and unfortunately, not labeled on Facebook yet. Twitter had banned these ads.
I would go further: I don't believe countries that block US social media sites should be allowed to run official propaganda on those sites, and that organic posts must be labeled. If they can't take criticism locally, they shouldn't get paid reach globally. Working on an OpEd.
In any case, we should be aware of the huge effort China is putting into controlling the narrative around COVID and building soft-power in Africa and South East Asia. The battle for what popular history will reflect about COVID is being fought today. https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/china-covid19-origin-narrative
One issue this raises: a great deal of focus inside of tech platforms has been *inauthentic* identities spreading propaganda. This is a natural outcome of a focus on the 2016 Russian campaign. It isn't a sufficient standard for 2020, with overt propaganda becoming the norm.
In a free society, we generally allow voice for our adversaries, but we don't need to allow access to paid amplification. We also need a way to distinguish the BBC (which should be labeled) and CCTV (which should be banned from ads). To me, an easy proxy is online blocking.
This would apply to many more countries than the PRC. It would be reasonable, for example, to block outlets of the Indian government from advertising as long as they are restricting the online freedoms of those in Kashmir. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/indias-internet-shutdown-in-kashmir-is-now-the-longest-ever-in-a-democracy/2019/12/15/bb0693ea-1dfc-11ea-977a-15a6710ed6da_story.html
