Work

Penny for Your Thoughts: Searching for the 50 Cent Party on Sina Weibo

Year: 2021

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: Evidence suggests that the Chinese government employs “Internet Commentators” to post propaganda on social media. This group is pejoratively nicknamed the “50 cent party” or Wumao. In this study, we make the first attempt to quantify the size and behavior of the Wumao. Our study leverages a large corpus of data from Sina Weibo (Twitter in China) that includes 26M tweets and comments from 2.7M users over the span of one year. Unfortunately, detecting the Wumao is difficult because there is no ground truth information about them. To overcome this challenge, we apply a series of unsupervised techniques to filter our dataset and isolate suspicious users who exhibit characteristics indicative of being Wumao.

Source: Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media

DOI: 10.1609/icwsm.v9i1.14649

Authors: Xiaofeng Yang, Qian Yang, Christo Wilson

Institution: Northeastern University

Language: English

Topic: Misinformation and Its Impacts

Subfield: Sociology and Political Science

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: diamond

Funder: National Science Foundation

Awards: CAREER: Systems for the emerging patterns of content exchange, CHS: Medium: Towards Transparency of Personalization on the Web