Speaking with the State’s Voice

About Speaking with the State’s Voice: The Decade-Long Growth of Government-Authored News Media in China under Xi Jinping

Autocratic governments around the world use clandestine propaganda campaigns to influence the media. We document a decade-long trend in China towards the planting of government-authored articles in party and commercial newspapers. To examine this phenomenon, we develop a new approach to identifying scripted propaganda—the coerced reprinting of lightly-adapted government-authored articles in newspapers—that leverages the footprints left by the government when making media interventions. We show that in China, scripted propaganda is a daily phenomenon: on 90% of days from 2012-2022, the vast majority of party newspapers included at least some scripted propaganda at the direction of a central directive. On particular sensitive days, the amount of scripted propaganda spiked to 30% of the articles appearing in major newspapers. We show that scripted propaganda has strengthened under President Xi Jinping. In the last decade, the front page of party newspapers has evolved from 5% scripted articles to nearly 20% scripted. This government-authored content throughout the paper is increasingly homogeneous—fewer and fewer adaptations are done by individual newspapers. In contrast to popular speculation, we show that scripted content is not only on ideological topics (although it is increasingly ideological) and is also very prevalent in commercial papers. Using a case study of domestic coverage of COVID-19, we demonstrate how the regime uses scripting to shape, constrain, and delay information during crises. Our findings reveal the wide-ranging influence of government-authored propaganda in the Chinese media ecosystem.

About The Speaker

Margaret Roberts is a professor in the department of political science at UC San Diego, where she holds a Chancellor's Associates Chair. She studies digital politics and political methodology, with a focus on government influence on social media and using automated content analysis in the social sciences. Roberts’ recent book, "Text as Data: A New Framework for Machine Learning and the Social Sciences," provides a guide for using computational text analysis to learn about the social world. In another recent book, "Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China's Great Firewall," Roberts examines the impacts of censorship in China using large online datasets. "Censored" was listed as one of Foreign Affairs' Best Books of 2018, was honored with the Goldsmith Book Award, and received the Best Book Award in the Human Rights Section and Information Technology and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association.

About Antisocial Media: How Users, Creators & Designers Respond to an Adversarial Internet

The early days of social media were filled with optimism about its democratizing potential and ability to bring people together. But more recently the focus has shifted to problems, ranging from doom scrolling to threats to national security. What has gone wrong? How can we fix it? This lecture series will explore many controversial facets of social media, from misinformation to radicalization, along with the strategies and systems that users, creators, and designers have developed to respond to them.

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If you are experiencing any COVID-like symptoms the day of the event, please join us remotely.

Host or Publisher UC San Diego Design Lab