China watchChina's Internet Trolls Go Global

By Ryan Fedasiuk

Published 9 June 2021

Chinese trolls are beginning to pose serious threats to economic security, political stability, and personal safety worldwide. The CCP-backed trolls have become more than a nuisance, and the magnitude and frequency of their attacks will likely continue to increase. Formulating an effective response will require understanding their size, tactics, and mission as the CCP widens the scope of its public opinion war to include foreign audiences.

Some sling personal insults; others come bearing GIFs. With eclectic names like “truth_seeker456” and “mariele01757186,” and typically zero Twitter followers, they aren’t exactly hard to spot. But for all their obvious tells, China’s internet trolls are a more potent force than most analysts give them credit for—and remain a core part of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) strategy to seize international discourse power.

Today, most onlookers regard the “Fifty Cent Army” as an oddity of the Chinese internet, more warranting mockery than demanding action. But as the CCP pivots to more aggressively pushing propaganda on foreign social media networks, its trolls are beginning to pose serious threats to economic security, political stability, and personal safety worldwide.

The fact is that Party-backed trolls have become more than a nuisance, and the magnitude and frequency of their attacks will likely continue to increase. Formulating an effective response will require understanding their size, tactics, and mission as the CCP widens the scope of its public opinion war to include foreign audiences.

First, the scale of the CCP’s effort to manage online public opinion within China is much larger than previously reported. The most detailed study of China’s internet trolls to date estimates that they number two million people and fabricate 450 million pieces of content each year. But as I recently noted in a study for the Jamestown Foundation, in addition to two million paid commentators, the CCP has raised an army of more than twenty million part-time “network civilization volunteers” to amplify content favorable to its rule. The plurality of volunteers are university students, trained by censorship bureaus and asked to combat “negative” information in their spare time, to include reporting on feminist activism, the COVID-19 outbreak, and human rights abuses in Xinjiang. Averaging just nineteen years old, they are young but well-educated, and willing to defend the Party’s worldview against those who would speak against it.