Young Researcher Workshop: Censorship Outside the Great Firewall: Flooding X/Twitter with Pornography for Political Suppression

Censorship Outside the Great Firewall: Flooding X/Twitter with Pornography for Political Suppression

Speaker: Tongtong Zhang, Postdoctoral Research Scholar, Stanford Internet Observatory

How do authoritarian rulers suppress criticism on social media platforms which they cannot directly control? In this paper, we find that off-putting pornographic content is disproportionately inundating the X/Twitter accounts of critics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime. We assess the possibility that the regime strategically uses this explicit content to discourage people from accessing information it wishes to suppress. Using an original dataset of 142 randomly sampled Chinese-language pornography accounts on X/Twitter, we show that during fall 2023, these accounts acted in a coordinated network to post waves of explicit images and videos as tweet replies to CCP critics. Some anti-CCP media accounts (less than 1 million followers) receive over 1,000 pornographic comments within a week, whereas pro-CCP media (over 10 million followers) receive fewer than 4 such comments a week. When a tweet is opened or shared, this explicit content appears directly beneath the text, which likely discourages users from reading or sharing the targeted tweets. While previous research has established that the CCP regime crowds out criticism by flooding domestic platforms with positive and cheerleading messages, our findings suggest that on platforms that operate beyond its borders, the regime may use censorship strategies that are domestically illegal—spamming explicit content to create strategic distraction.
 

About the Workshops

The SCCEI Young Researcher Workshops are a bi-weekly series of presentations from scholars around campus who are working on issues related to China’s economy and institutions. The aim of the series is to bring together young scholars by providing a platform to present new research, get feedback, exchange ideas, and make connections. Each session features a single presenter who may present a new research plan, share results from preliminary data analyses, or do a trial run of a job talk or conference presentation. The Workshop Series is an opportunity to give and receive feedback on existing research, get to know other researchers around campus who are working on or in China, and be a testing ground for new ideas, data, and presentations.

Workshops are held every other Thursday from 1 - 2 pm. Afternoon refreshments will be provided! 

Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present.