Chinese computational propaganda: automation, algorithms and the manipulation of information about Chinese politics on Twitter and Weibo

A 2016 review of literature about automation, algorithms and politics identified China as the foremost area in which further research was needed because of the size of its population, the potential for Chinese algorithmic manipulation in the politics of other countries, and the frequency of exportation of Chinese software and hardware. This paper contributes to the small body of knowledge on the first point (domestic automation and opinion manipulation) and presents the first piece of research into the second (international automation and opinion manipulation). Findings are based on an analysis of 1.5 million comments on official political information posts on Weibo and 1.1 million posts using hashtags associated with China and Chinese politics on Twitter. In line with previous research, little evidence of automation was found on Weibo. In contrast, a large amount of automation was found on Twitter. However, contrary to expectations and previous news reports, no evidence was found of pro-Chinese-state automation on Twitter. Automation on Twitter was associated with anti-Chinese-state perspectives and published in simplified Mandarin, presumably aimed at diasporic Chinese and mainland users who ‘jump the wall’ to access blocked platforms. These users come to Twitter seeking more diverse information and an online public sphere but instead they find an information environment in which a small number of anti-Chinese-state voices are attempting to use automation to dominate discourse. Our understanding of public conversation on Twitter in Mandarin is extremely limited and, thus, this paper advances the understanding of political communication on social media

Indian Democracy Under Threat: The BJP’s Online Authoritarian Populism as a Means to Advance an Ethnoreligious Nationalist Agenda in the 2019 General Election

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under Narendra Modi has been a pioneer of technologically enabled authoritarian populism, elected by a landslide in 2014 and reelected in 2019. However, India’s online authoritarian populism is relatively understudied with important questions remaining about the prevalence of authoritarian populist and ethnoreligious nationalist messages and mobilization around these ideologies. This research examines a representative sample of pro-BJP discourse on Twitter in the final week of the 2019 campaign. It finds the BJP used authoritarian populist strategies to advance an ethnoreligious nationalist agenda. Traditional media were excluded. Social media allowed direct leader-to-people connection, facilitating a personality cult around Modi. Online opinion leaders, often overlooked in studies of political campaigns, advanced the most extreme ethnoreligious nationalism, including religiously polarizing misinformation. These ideologies and strategies are dangerous to Indian democracy

Locomotion Guidance by Extracellular Matrix Is Adaptive and Can be Restored by a Transient Change in Ca2+ Level

Navigation of cell locomotion by gradients of soluble factors can be desensitized if the concentration of the chemo-attractant stays unchanged. It remains obscure if the guidance by immobilized extracellular matrix (ECM) as the substrate is also adaptive and if so, how can the desensitized ECM guidance be resensitized. When first interacting with a substrate containing micron-scale fibronectin (FBN) trails, highly motile fish keratocytes selectively adhere and migrate along the FBN paths. However, such guided motion become adaptive after about 10 min and the cells start to migrate out of the ECM trails. We found that a burst increase of intracellular calcium created by an uncaging technique immediately halts the undirected migration by disrupting the ECM-cytoskeleton coupling, as evidenced by the appearance of retrograde F-actin flow. When the motility later resumes, the activated integrin receptors render the cell selectively binding to the FBN path and reinitiates signaling events, including tyrosine phosphorylation of paxillin, that couple retrograde F-actin flow to the substrate. Thus, the calcium-resensitized cell can undergo a period of ECM-navigated movement, which later becomes desensitized. Our results also suggest that endogenous calcium transients as occur during spontaneous calcium oscillations may exert a cycling resensitization-desensitization control over cell's sensing of substrate guiding cues

New Strategies for Research in Clinical Practice: A focus on self–harm.

This article suggests new ways of approaching clinical-based research in an era of evidence-based practice. Using the example of self-harm, we identify three distinct problems with current dominant approaches to research in this area. These include insufficient clarity about target issues, an overreliance on predetermined outcomes which prioritise behavioural measures (such as self-harm cessation) and an undue focus on treatment techniques. We argue that clinical research requires flexible, user-centred and practice-based methods, informed by a focus on principles instead of techniques. Therefore, we outline key practice-based principles that we argue need to be embedded within clinical research strategies. We then demonstrate how traditional behavioural approaches to research can be enriched with more qualitative cognitive and emotionally based data. We conclude that such strategies provide thickened, meaningful and context-specific research which is more relevant for service commissioners, clinicians and service users

Functional Characterization of the Dendritically Localized mRNA Neuronatin in Hippocampal Neurons

Local translation of dendritic mRNAs plays an important role in neuronal development and synaptic plasticity. Although several hundred putative dendritic transcripts have been identified in the hippocampus, relatively few have been verified by in situ hybridization and thus remain uncharacterized. One such transcript encodes the protein neuronatin. Neuronatin has been shown to regulate calcium levels in non-neuronal cells such as pancreatic or embryonic stem cells, but its function in mature neurons remains unclear. Here we report that neuronatin is translated in hippocampal dendrites in response to blockade of action potentials and NMDA-receptor dependent synaptic transmission by TTX and APV. Our study also reveals that neuronatin can adjust dendritic calcium levels by regulating intracellular calcium storage. We propose that neuronatin may impact synaptic plasticity by modulating dendritic calcium levels during homeostatic plasticity, thereby potentially regulating neuronal excitability, receptor trafficking, and calcium dependent signaling

Slacktivist USA and Authoritarian China? Comparing Two Political Public Spheres with a Random Sample of Social Media Users

The rise of social media has put back on the agenda questions about the Internet’s potential as an online public sphere, particularly in authoritarian states. However, random samples have never been employed to investigate political speech on social media, necessarily limiting knowledge. This article presents an analysis of political speech based on a random sample of more than 1,000 active US Twitter users and Chinese Weibo users collected in late 2014. Political speech by ordinary users was found to be more frequent on both platforms than expected – 9.4% on Weibo and 6.8% on Twitter - lending support to hopes of an online public sphere. However, existing powerholders make up around a fifth of US Twitter accounts, and political speech acts by ordinary US Twitter users are largely “slacktivist” in nature. In contrast, 98% of active accounts on Weibo belong to ordinary users, with active political speech making up more than one in fifty posts by these users. Although they largely fall within the bounds of what is permitted by the Chinese state, these findings point to the potential of the Internet as a (limited) public sphere in China, while raising questions about its contribution to political processes in the United States

Computational Propaganda In China: An Alternative Model of a Widespread Practice

Computational propaganda is a growing issue in Western democracies, with evidence of online opinion manipulation orchestrated by robots, fake accounts and misinformation in many recent political events. China, the country with the most sophisticated regime of Internet censorship and control in the world, presents an interesting and understudied example of how computational propaganda is used. This working paper summarizes the landscape of current knowledge in relation to public opinion manipulation in China. It addressees the questions of whether and how computational propaganda being used in and about China, whose interests are furthered by this computational propaganda and what is the effect of this computational propaganda on the landscape of online information in and about China. It also addresses the issue of how the case of computational propaganda in China can inform the current efforts of Western democracies to tackle fake news, online bots and computational propaganda. This paper presents four case studies of computational propaganda in and about China: the Great Firewall and the Golden Shield project; positive propaganda on Twitter aimed at foreign audiences; the anti-Chinese state bots on Twitter; and domestic public opinion manipulation on Weibo. Surprisingly, I find that there is little evidence of automation Weibo and little evidence of automation associated with state interests on Twitter. However, I find that issues associated with anti-state perspectives, such as the pro-democracy movement, contain a large amount of automation, dominating Chinese language information in certain hashtags associated with China and Chinese politics on Twitter

News in China’s new information environment: Dissemination patterns, opinion leaders and news commentary on Weibo

The contemporary Internet is a rapidly changing, terse and media-rich environment based on a multitude of individual social connections, characterized by social networking sites, such a Facebook, and microblogging sites, such as Twitter. While there has been a significant amount of research on Twitter, very little has been conducted on Weibo, which dominates the Chinese market. In this paper, networks of news dissemination and commentary are analyzed for randomly selected news stories from Weibo’s top news providers. The extent and type of dissemination network, the length of retweet chains, the identity of influential opinion leaders, the relationship between retweeting and commenting, and the nature of audience comments are examined for the 50 stories. These results are compared to similar research on Twitter. It was found that retweeting and commentary on news stories is more prevalent on Weibo, with news stories traveling further from their source than has been previously seen in Twitter research. An analysis of influential users highlighted the importance of Weibo as both an information provider and a distribution platform, and of robot accounts in news forwarding. It was found that individual opinion leaders tend to be most influential when they forward information that matches their area of expertise. Finally, levels and type of news commentary were analyzed, exhibiting large scale discussions at the site of the original post that act as a forum for discussion in a way that Twitter does not

What are Appropriate Normative Frameworks to Analyze The Political Effects of the Internet in China?

The political effects of the Internet in China are one of the most important and oft studied topics in both communications and Asian studies. However, these efforts suffer from a lack of appropriate theoretical frameworks, due to a lack of geocentric theories and the dominance of theories generated in a Western context. This paper argues that normative frameworks should be grounded in their context of application and take into account how individuals participate in and think about politics. Based on these principles and drawing from relevant data and literature, this article puts forward three suggestions about how the currently dominant normative frameworks could be improved: welfare and economic progress should be recognized as important normative goals, facilitating the watchdog function of citizens under existing structures is a worthy objective, and building community, rather than striving for rationality, may result in more productive political speech in currently individualized online spaces