Abstract
State-led online influence campaigns represent a major frontier in contemporary global politics. Such operations, however, do not take place unopposed and may encounter collective resistance. This study compares two competing influence campaigns during the 2021 Hong Kong Legislative Council (Legco) election: one by the Chinese state seeking to emphasize the legitimacy of local polls, versus pro-democracy activists denouncing Chinese interference in the electoral process. Critically, we discover that the two groups do not directly confront each other online. Rather, both camps appeal to international audiences by leveraging narrative strategies to negatively distort and distract from their opponents, while positively engaging and explaining their own positions regarding the elections. Furthermore, while pro-democracy activists bridge multiple connections to diverse online groups, Chinese state accounts play more specialized, hub-like roles within centralized networked communities. Taking these findings together, we discuss the importance of characterizing online influence campaigns in relation to broader diplomatic objectives. In the Chinese case, success may entail minimizing attention toward critics and an election they had effectively already won.
This work was supported in part by the Knight Foundation and the Office of Naval Research grants N000141812106 and N000141812108. Additional support was provided by the Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS) and the Center for Informed Democracy and Social Cybersecurity (IDeaS). The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Knight Foundation, Office of Naval Research or the U.S. government.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
References
Agur, C., Frisch, N.: Digital disobedience and the limits of persuasion: social media activism in Hong Kong’s 2014 umbrella movement. Soc. Media Soc. 5(1), 2056305119827002 (2019)
Arif, A., Stewart, L.G., Starbird, K.: Acting the part: examining information operations within #blacklivesmatter discourse. Proc. ACM Hum. Comput. Interact. 2, 1–27 (2018)
Badawy, A., Addawood, A., Lerman, K., Ferrara, E.: Characterizing the 2016 Russian IRA influence campaign. Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. 9(1), 1–11 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-019-0578-6
Bamman, D., O’Connor, B., Smith, N.: Censorship and deletion practices in Chinese social media. First Monday 17(3) (2012). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v17i3.3943
Beskow, D.M., Carley, K.M.: Bot-hunter: a tiered approach to detecting & characterizing automated activity on twitter. In: Conference paper. SBP-BRiMS: International conference on social computing, behavioral-cultural modeling and prediction and behavior representation in modeling and simulation, vol. 3, p. 3 (2018)
Blane, J.T., Bellutta, D., Carley, K.M.: Social-Cyber maneuvers during the COVID-19 vaccine initial rollout: content analysis of tweets. J. Med. Internet Res. 24(3), e34040 (2022)
Bradshaw, S., Howard, P.N.: The global organization of social media disinformation campaigns. J. Int. Aff. 71(1.5), 23–32 (2018)
Carley, K.M.: Social cybersecurity: an emerging science. Comput. Math. Organ. Theory 26(4), 365–381 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10588-020-09322-9
King, G., Pan, J., Roberts, M.E.: How the Chinese government fabricates social media posts for strategic distraction, not engaged argument. Am. Polit. Sci. Rev. 111(3), 484–501 (2017)
Magelinski, T., Bartulovic, M., Carley, K.M.: Measuring node contribution to community structure with modularity vitality. IEEE Trans. Netw. Sci. Eng. 8(1), 707–723 (2021)
Ng, L.H.X., Robertson, D.C., Carley, K.M.: Stabilizing a supervised bot detection algorithm: how much data is needed for consistent predictions? Online Soc. Netw. Media 28, 100198 (2022)
Schliebs, M., Bailey, H., Bright, J., Howard, P.N.: China’s public diplomacy operations: understanding engagement and inauthentic amplifications of PRC diplomats on Facebook and Twitter (2021)
Uyheng, J., Cruickshank, I.J., Carley, K.M.: Mapping state-sponsored information operations with multi-view modularity clustering. EPJ Data Sci. 11(1), 25 (2022)
Uyheng, J., Magelinski, T., Villa-Cox, R., Sowa, C., Carley, K.M.: Interoperable pipelines for social cyber-security: assessing Twitter information operations during NATO Trident Juncture 2018. Comput. Math. Organ. Theory 26(4), 465–483 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10588-019-09298-1
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Phillips, S.C., Uyheng, J., Carley, K.M. (2022). Competing State and Grassroots Opposition Influence in the 2021 Hong Kong Election. In: Thomson, R., Dancy, C., Pyke, A. (eds) Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling. SBP-BRiMS 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13558. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17114-7_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17114-7_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-17113-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-17114-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)