Chirping Diplomacy: Analyzing Chinese State Social-Cyber Maneuvers on Twitter

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.