Fake news, rumour and censorship in the Middle Kingdom
Fake news is everywhere. But the form it takes, how it spreads, and to what effect, is determined by technology, culture and a host of other factors. Guest writer Mossy Wittenberg introduces fake news with Chinese characteristics.
A few months ago, an executive at a popular Chinese social media platform told me confidently that “there’s no fake news in China”. I wasn’t fully sure what he meant. At face value, the assertion is plain wrong: the presence of misinformation and rumour (propaganda aside) across all media channels in mainland China, from traditional state-backed outlets to digital platforms, is well documented. Search giant Baidu claims to investigate three billion reports of fake news every year. A report from The School of Communication and Design at Sun Yat-sen University, written with WeChat’s security team, analyses 2,175 fake news stories spread on the platform in 2015–16; while executives at Tencent, at Sina Corp (owners of microblogging site Sina Weibo), and at Bytedance (parent company of Douyin and news aggregator Jinri Toutiao), have all spoken publicly about their efforts to contain fake news.
Concerns have also been raised by the Chinese government, which in 2013 introduced harsh penalties for propagating misinformation, and late last year launched a site for vigilante citizens to report fake news about the country’s military.
In short, audiences in China have encountered no shortage of news that’s untrue. But over the last eighteen months, since it shot back to prominence in the aftermath of the 2016 election, the term “fake news” has acquired a richness in English that far exceeds the literal definition.
It has been polarised and politicised, used to discredit opponents and to pooh-pooh inconvenient facts. In the US, in less than two years, the conversation around the term has grown to encompass fundamental questions about First Amendment rights, the regulatory relationship between government and the private sector in the digital age, and the health of the democratic process.
This might be what the social media app executive was getting at. There is definitely fake news in China, but the country’s media landscape and political context is so different to that of the US that the implications of “fake news” (literally 假新闻 jiǎ xīnwén, though this is used interchangeably with传言 chuányán and 谣言 yáoyán, “rumour”) may bear little relation to what the term has come to signify in English.
To give an example: in March 2012, after the firing of princeling and party elite Bo Xilai from his role as party chief in Chongqing, stories began to spread about a possible connection to the death of Neil Heywood, a British businessman and fixer. Government spokespeople did their best to squash the claims, saying Heywood had died from excessive drinking and admonishing netizens for spreading “groundless rumour”.
But, as Helen Gao reported in The Atlantic (I’m leaning heavily on her excellent coverage here): overnight in early April the Weibo “rumours” became state sanctioned fact: Heywood had indeed been murdered and Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, was arrested and tried for the crime.
Faith in official media, at least among China’s younger and better educated citizens, is relatively low, and their U-turn on the Heywood story boosted trust in social media. As one Weibo user put it, “The result of rumour turning truth is that from now on all rumours will become more trustworthy.” Still, the government continued to urge netizens to be sceptical of what they read online.
A year earlier, in the wake of the revolution in Tunisia, rumours spread among Chinese social media users about a copycat movement in their own country. In reality this amounted to a paltry gathering of protesters, and a somewhat larger group of police, in central Beijing, but the government took the rumours extremely seriously. Helen Gao again:
When Chinese people realized the word “jasmine” was blocked from the Internet and from text messages … and the flower was banned at Beijing botanic markets, the news of the pseudo-revolution had reached a wide public. The government, in its effort to quell the rumor, had ballooned it into an alternate version of truth.
In both this and the Bo Xilai case, information spread online oscillated between truth and falsehood, sometimes pre-empting and sometimes subverting the government’s attempts to construct an official narrative.
In China then, as in the US, one issue linked to the fake news phenomenon is gatekeeping, the question of “who gets to decide what types of political and news media content should be amplified over online networks”. In both contexts, too, fake news has implications for political stability: in the US, via the beliefs and manipulability of the electorate; in China, in relation to the Communist Party’s ability to maintain an official version of the truth.
But while the conversation around fake news in the United States is fresh and complex — with numerous players including regulators, political campaigns, state-sponsored foreign actors, social media companies and individual citizens — the issue in China is closely linked to the much older and more binary issue of government information control, extended to a new generation of media.
Then again, social media platforms aren’t just new tools for old work. Like their American counterparts, Chinese regulators are only just beginning to appreciate the changes social media platforms are bringing to the media landscape. Fake news may be a less contested concept in China than in the US, but it’s not cut and dry either.
Last month, news aggregator Toutiao changed its slogan from “headlines that matter to you” to “information creates value.” The change is one of a number of subtle signals in recent months that parent company Bytedance is under pressure from regulators regarding the quality of content on its platforms.
In December, Toutiao’s “society” section was replaced with one called “New Era,” which mostly contains coverage from official media of government process and decisions. And in April, after a particularly aggressive regulatory action which saw one Bytedance app, Neihan Duanzi, closed down completely, CEO Zhang Yiming posted a fawning apology on WeChat for the “low-brow, violent and harmful content, and fake advertising” on the company’s products.
Zhang promises that the company will endeavour to “broadcast positive energy,” content that is “healthy and beneficial,” which “can offer positive energy to the era, and to the people.” As David Bandurski of the China Media Project notes in a brilliant analysis of the apology, China’s leadership “has been unhappy with the idea of algorithms that wall users off from official messaging if they show no interest in such content.” But Zhang’s repeated emphasis on “creating value” and “positive energy” suggests that their concerns extend beyond information control. Set against “violent and harmful content,” it implies an anxiety about the impact of low quality social media content, including fake news, on the broader wellbeing of society.
In both the US and China then, fake news is linked to a wider range of phenomena than simply misinformation: censorship, “post-truth”, the health of democracy, the intellectual health of society, the quality of public discourse. The associations aren’t the same in each country, but they do overlap.
My belated response to the social media exec, then, is this: there definitely is fake news in China. Not just the specific phenomenon, but also the concept as a metonym for discussing a wide range of unsettling changes in the country’s media landscape.
Mossy Wittenberg (mossywitt@gmail.com) is a Schwarzman Scholar based in Beijing. He has a background in digital media start-ups and recently completed a Master’s thesis on self-media, fake news and regulation in China.
