Borrowing influences from social media influencers: How autocrats whitewash human rights violation through foreign propaganda
Video Social & Behavioral Sciences 2025 Graduate ExhibitionPresentation by Chi Shun Fong
Exhibition Number 503
Abstract
The recent advancement of the internet and communication technology has allowed authoritarian states to engage in digital propaganda campaigns that promote their values and defend their actions in front of foreign audiences. While state-sponsored media outlets in authoritarian states, like Russian Today and China Global Television Network, have expanded rapidly on international social media platforms, they often fail to genuinely engage with foreign audiences as they are used to a top-down mode of communication and unfamiliar with the language and cultural context of foreign audiences. More importantly, these factors make them look uncredible to foreign audiences, especially when they are non-local media outlets. To overcome these obstacles, authoritarian states could enlist social media influencers (or, online opinion leaders, hereafter OOLs) in their foreign propaganda campaigns. I argue that propaganda messages from OOLs, as compared to authoritarian states’ media outlets, are perceived by foreign audiences as more credible, by sharing the same cultural or racial ingroup identity with foreign audiences and could better adopt the proper language for online communication in foreign contexts. Thus, propaganda messages from OOLs are more persuasive in moving foreign audiences to adopt a more favorable attitude and policy position toward authoritarian states. To test the argument, this project conducts a survey experiment with U.S. citizens by treating them with real propaganda videos produced or/and endorsed by Chinese state media outlets and OOLs that defend the Chinese government on human rights violations.
Importance
While social media has once been depicted as a space for political liberalization and an engine for democratization, recent studies give a more pessimistic view after autocrats have tightened their control on social media by means like censorship and internet blackouts and proactively indoctrinated citizens and promote their values and interests on social media, both domestically and internationally. Their actions help maintain their domestic stability not only through quelling domestic opposition but also by moving foreign citizens to adopt more favorable attitudes and policy positions to autocratic regimes and even disrupting the functioning of democracies across the globe. This project is one of the few forerunners that study why and how autocrats incorporate influencers into their foreign propaganda campaigns.