Abstract
Governments around the world leverage social media to enact public diplomacy. In this article, we examine Chinese diplomatic communication on Twitter during two highly controversial events through a social cybersecurity lens: then-Speaker Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in early August 2022 and Taiwanese President Tsai’s visit to the U.S. in early April 2023. We identify a small set of Chinese state-affiliated accounts that consistently tweet the most and are retweeted the most, demonstrating the highly centralized nature of China’s external messaging. Using the BEND framework, we quantify social-cyber maneuvers used by the Chinese state to target U.S. and Taiwanese officials. We find they target individuals and ideas they perceive as direct challengers to the One China principle, neutralizing specific Taiwanese officials who support independence, while broadly dismissing and critiquing U.S. leaders, domestic affairs, and foreign policies. Our findings have implications for the study of online influence strategies and understanding China’s broader diplomatic goals.
This work was supported in part by the Knight Foundation and the Office of Naval Research grant Minerva-Multi-Level Models of Covert Online Information Campaigns, N000142112765, N000141812106, and N000141812108. Additional support was provided by the Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS) at Carnegie Mellon University. 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.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
References
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)
Carley, K.M.: Social cybersecurity: an emerging science. Comput. Math. Organ. Theory 26(4), 365–381 (2020)
Everett, R.M., Nurse, J.R., Erola, A.: The anatomy of online deception: what makes automated text convincing? In: Proceedings of ACM SAC, pp. 1115–1120 (2016)
Ferrara, E., Chang, H., Chen, E., Muric, G., Patel, J.: Characterizing social media manipulation in the 2020 US presidential election. First Monday (2020)
Ferrara, E., Varol, O., Davis, C., Menczer, F., Flammini, A.: The rise of social bots. Commun. ACM 59(7), 96–104 (2016)
Guo, J.: Crossing the “great fire wall”: a study with grounded theory examining how China uses Twitter as a new battlefield for public diplomacy. J. Publ. Diplomacy 1(2), 49–74 (2021)
Huang, Z.A., Wang, R.: Building a network to “tell China stories well”: Chinese diplomatic communication strategies on Twitter. Int. J. Commun. 13, 2984–3007 (2019)
Jacobs, C.S., Carley, K.M.: #WhoDefinesDemocracy: analysis on a 2021 Chinese messaging campaign. In: Thomson, R., Dancy, C., Pyke, A. (eds.) SBP-BRiMS 2022. LNCS, vol. 13558, pp. 90–100. Springer, Cham (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17114-7_9
Nye, J.S., Jr.: Public diplomacy and soft power. Ann. Am. Acad. Pol. Soc. Sci. 616(1), 94–109 (2008)
Phillips, S.C., Uyheng, J., Carley, K.M.: Competing state and grassroots opposition influence in the 2021 Hong Kong Election. In: Thomson, R., Dancy, C., Pyke, A. (eds.) SBP-BRiMS 2022. LNCS, vol. 13558, pp. 111–120. Springer, Cham (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17114-7_11
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. Programme on Democracy and Technology, Oxford University, Oxford (2021)
Thunø, M., Nielbo, K.L.: The initial digitalization of Chinese diplomacy (2019–2021): establishing global communication networks on Twitter. J. Contemp. China, 1–23 (2023)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Phillips, S.C., Uyheng, J., Jacobs, C.S., Carley, K.M. (2023). Chirping Diplomacy: Analyzing Chinese State Social-Cyber Maneuvers on Twitter. In: Thomson, R., Al-khateeb, S., Burger, A., Park, P., A. Pyke, A. (eds) Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling. SBP-BRiMS 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14161. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43129-6_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43129-6_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-43128-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-43129-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)