Latest in @Protocol | China

Recently Vicky Xu, a China-born researcher, has become the target of an elaborate online harassment campaign. A video discrediting Xu's work uploaded by a local propaganda official has played millions of times on Kuaishou. 1/7 https://www.protocol.com/china/chinese-online-hate-campaigns

In today's China, a nationalist campaign involves something far more complex than paying people to post scripted messages. The government has mastered the craft of influencing people's genuine emotions and having these ordinary users do the trolling and doxxing — for free. 2/7

Oftentimes, this means appealing to misogyny or chauvinism, something that virtually guarantees more clicks. Web users have frequently called Xu a "female Han traitor," a dog whistle that conflates concepts of chastity and national loyalty. 3/7

"The Party's propaganda apparatus has really figured out how to deftly move people on these nationalist issues," @mattinglee, Yale Univ professor, told us. "They've figured out how to write the kind of posts that go viral and people actually want to forward to their friends." 4/7

"In China, one really interesting piece of context is the large base of human capital, human patriotic users who will be very willing to message on these things on their own," said @_NickMonaco, director of China research at disinformation research company Miburo Solutions. 5/7

We also talked to Tzu-i Chuang, who has been the last victim of state-sponsored trolling before Xu. "It was not an ordinary bullying incident," Tzu-i Chuang said. She believes the scale of the harassment was too big, and its frequency too persistent, to be spontaneous. 6/7

The tremendous scale of such harassment campaigns aims to overwhelm and silence those who dare speak out against the state, thus discouraging others from doing so in the future. In this regard, at least in the case of Chuang and Xu, the state is not getting what it wanted. 7/7