"In a landmark study published in Science in 2014, for example, he and his colleagues reported on a remarkable, fine-grained investigation that they conducted into how the Chinese regime controls the network...
In essence, King et al suggested that almost everything we think we know about the Chinese internet is wrong. For one thing, its users do not cower nervously behind the “great firewall”. On the contrary: online debate and discourse in China is as raucous, untamed and virulent as it is here. And yet the government devotes massive resources (200,000-plus people) to watching and censoring the network. So what are they doing? Answer: censoring some predictable stuff (pornography, Falun Gong, Tiananmen, etc); but much of what we would regard as “political” discourse (criticism of local communist party officials, for example) remains apparently unrestricted. There is, however, one type of discourse that is ruthlessly and efficiently suppressed: any kind of social media post that could conceivably lead to collective mobilisation – to people on the streets...
However, the most interesting finding is that the phoney posters avoid arguing with sceptics and critics, and indeed avoid discussing controversial topics altogether. So what are they up to, then? Mostly, it seems, “cheerleading for the state, symbols of the regime, or the revolutionary history of the Communist party”. In other words, trying to swamp social media with happy-clappy stuff and thereby dilute conversations about grievances, state shortcomings and other tricky topics. Professor King calls it “strategic distraction”
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