Translation – He Guoping: Establishing a Scene Shift in International Public Opinion Guidance
"The main battlefront for China's guidance of international public opinion must shift to the domain of international social media."
This is my translation of a piece on guiding public opinion in an age of information disorder by professor He Guoping (何国平) at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies School of Journalism and Communication. You can find the original piece here: 何国平:建立国际舆论引导的转场思维.
I was excited when I came across this piece originally. Many of our current national and global problems relate to or are worsened by information disorder; the U.S. urgently needs to enact effective new policies to fix our broken information space before the damage becomes irreparable.
If we don’t regulate our information space, our country will continue to destabilize. Meanwhile, Beijing will presumably continue to closely regulate and censor China’s internet, with CCP authority and national stability as the primary drivers. This means two things:
The U.S. information space will remain porous and vulnerable to external influence and interference, while China’s information space will become more impregnable to outside influence.
Beijing will continue strengthening its ability to shape international opinion on largely unregulated American social media platforms, as this article describes.
Establishing a Scene Shift in International Public Opinion Guidance
He Guoping
Strengthening our country's international information dissemination abilities is both 1. a practical necessity for effectively developing guidance of and struggle for global public opinion, as well as 2. a new age national strategy for “constructing a strategic communication system with distinctive Chinese characteristics.”
By collecting and analyzing unexpected incidents from the last 10 years (2012-2021) that either occurred in China or were highly related to China, one discovers that with regard to these incidents, the appeals of international opinion are without exception full of bias, denunciation, and even enmity toward China.
The use of social media to establish emotional resonance (情绪共振) via rumors and false information in the online opinion space has become an important tactic of the West for guiding international opinion and launching narrative offensives and manipulating public opinion on China. The West is thereby able to smear China and strengthen negative stereotypes toward China. In view of the deterrent effect and danger of sudden incidents resulting from online information disorder, China urgently needs to establish an international public opinion guiding mechanism premised on emotion-driven communication (情绪传播). This mechanism should address online information disorder (信息失序) in accordance with the communication ecology and focus of international public opinion.
Types and Manifestations of Information Disorder
Since the beginning of 2020, the COVID-19 outbreak has become a global public health emergency. Parallel to the spread of the virus, numerous rumors and hate speech have chaotically spread through international digital media platforms and even traditional media. In February 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) referred to the rampant spread of fake news during the COVID-19 crisis as an "infodemic." United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres noted that the COVID-19 pandemic not only plunged the world into political and economic crises but also into an information crisis. The pervasiveness of the infodemic has diminished global "ontological security" and become a serious source of global "existential anxiety."
The false information currently being spread in international public discourse is far more complex than can be encapsulated in conventional terms like "fake news." It also includes misleading information (误导信息), malicious information (恶意信息), hate speech (仇恨言论), malicious posts by bots (机制人账户的恶意帖), extremist statements (极端言论), rumors (谣言), alternative facts (另类事实), fabricated news (虚构新闻), and algorithmically generated junk news (基于算法的垃圾新闻). These are all modes and manifestations of online information disorder.
Based on dimensions of falseness and intent to harm, researchers like Claire Wardle (Information Futures Lab at Brown University) categorize information disorder into three types: "misinformation," (错误信息) which is composed of false content + mistaken understanding (with good intentions); "disinformation," (虚假信息) made up of false content + malicious intent; and "malinformation," (恶意信息) which consists of true content + malicious intent. These types of information intensify conflicts through means such as stigmatization, labeling, provocation, or historical nihilism. They induce hatred and antagonism between nations, erode the basis for friendship between nations, and lead to an international public opinion environment that is unfavorable to us.
Social Mechanisms of the Production and Dissemination of Online Information Disorder
Emotional communication refers to the strong preference of individuals or groups towards novel information or viewpoints during the process of expressing and sharing information. In recent years global public opinion has entered a post-truth era where social media serves as the main conduit for communication and emotion drives trends in public opinion.
As a testament to this post-truth era, Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential victory exemplifies the strong emergence of emotionally charged communication in the public opinion sphere. Trump, who has been called the “Twitter President,” used the characteristics of post-truth emotional communication to mobilize the emotions of online users and drive public discourse.
In 2018, three researchers from MIT published a study in the journal Science titled "Fake News Spreads Faster and Wider than the Truth." [sic] (The original study was actually titled “The spread of true and false news online.”)
They tracked news spread by over three million people on Twitter, encompassing around 126,000 news stories. They found that the reach of true stories rarely exceeded 1,000 Twitter users, while that of false stories ranged from 1,500 to 100,000 users. The reason for people's choice to share and focus on false news was because it felt "novel" and could "trigger magnified emotional reactions."
The spread of emotions paves the way for the fluid production and dissemination of information disorder. From a communication perspective, this disorder represents a process of collective emotional contagion, leading to phenomena such as filter bubbles and echo chambers. The "infodemic" that spread globally during the COVID-19 outbreak reflected international concerns and uncertainties about the virus. This vulnerable and fearful psychological state provided rumors and disinformation with a receptive audience primed to propagate these messages. This is not only because false information is more novel than true information, but also because users derive some form of emotional solace in the process of reading and disseminating rumors.
Mechanism of International Public Opinion Guidance Based on Emotional Communication
Mechanism of Emotional Mobilization in International Public Opinion Guidance: Emotional mobilization is a prominent action mechanism in emotion-driven communication in the post-truth era. Depending on how emotions are invoked, emotional mobilization is categorized into three modes:
Focus-driven emotional mobilization: This involves molding core issues or events to elicit a sense of novelty, noteworthiness, and shock, in order to guide international public opinion.
Induced emotional mobilization: This refers to events or issues that initially were little known or inconsequential, but which ultimately generated a much greater impact, exemplifying the so-called "butterfly effect."
Cathartic emotional mobilization: This involves targeting negative objects of public opinion and directing extreme emotions like fury or sorrow towards them.
Mechanism of Empathetic Communication in International Public Opinion Guidance: The mechanism of guiding international public opinion during sudden events based on empathy refers to deploying content and methods with a close or personal association that convey a sense of relatability and warmth in order to achieve emotional resonance with a broad audience. This helps to effectively soften rigid and cold stereotypes present in existing international public opinion. Empathetic communication shapes the mutual empathy of both sender and receiver through universally shared emotional experiences and emotional identification. General Secretary Xi Jinping mentioned in the report of the 20th Party Congress that efforts should be made to "forge a credible, lovable, and respectable image of China," where "credible" and "lovable" offer a vivid description and direction for empathetic communication.
To be specific, we can focus on 3 elements for accomplishing international information dissemination.
A Mechanism for Disseminating "Lovability" could address the opposition and hostility generated towards China by movements like The Great Translation Movement (TGTM) in the public opinion space of target countries. On one hand, we can spread a lovable image of Chinese civilization and the Chinese people to effectively guide international public opinion. Chinese civilization is full of lovable genes and has an abundance of lovable cultural elements. Tangible images like adorable giant pandas have long been the peaceful and friendly ambassadors of many Sino-foreign bilateral relations. Traditional cultural depictions like Mulan, Nezha, the Monkey King, and the like have deeply planted a lovable image of traditional Chinese culture. Through cartoons, movies, TV shows, and other means, these images have been exported and received general welcome. Mascots created for festivals and expos, like the mascots for the Beijing Winter Olympics and Winter Paralympics – Bing Dwen Dwen and Xue Rong Rong – have won over countless new fans across the world, using cartoons to establish connections between winter sports, specific/physical animals, and Chinese culture, creating a 3-dimensional, vivacious, and lovable image of China.
A Mechanism for Disseminating Credibility: At the core of empathetic communication is credibility, meaning the communication is trustworthy. Trust-based communication is a crucial component of the international public opinion guidance mechanism. The current trust deficit, brought about by various unforeseen incidents, has emerged as a global governance challenge. Effectively managing information disorder could be the key to breaking the cycle of mistrust and would be a significant step toward rebuilding trust.
A Mechanism for Comprehensive Platform Management for International Public Opinion Guidance, in addition to fact-checking and rumor debunking mechanisms, are closely related strategies for comprehensive governance online. These aim to puncture filter bubbles, sever emotion-driven communication chains, and divert attention from false information. Fact-checking has become a widely used and mature mechanism for guiding international public opinion across new media platforms. As for rumor debunking mechanisms, by integrating various strategies on online platforms such as “rumor + disproof,” “disproof only,” “evoking emotion,” and “affirming the truth,” fragmented debunking strategies can be consolidated into five steps: selection of debunking sources, introducing the rumor, dispelling the rumor, presentation of the factual truth, and evoking emotions. Through these steps, the true story can be restored and international public opinion can be effectively guided.
In summary, from traditional media to mobile and new media sources, the underlying logic of public opinion has undergone a significant transformation. Emotion-driven communication and algorithms have become the new means of generating visibility and attention, with novelty-seeking becoming the common psychology of users. Hence, during unexpected events, there should be a well-established mechanism for guiding international public opinion operating along a "shift of scene" line of thinking. On one hand, it should be recognized that new media platforms have become the primary hubs for disseminating disordered information. Computational communication, driven by algorithms, has a structural impact on the control of the international public opinion ecosystem and the pattern of international communication. The main battlefront for China's guidance of international public opinion must shift to the domain of international social media. Effective guidance of international public opinion can be achieved through rumor debunking and fact-checking mechanisms.
On the other hand, the socio-psychological mechanisms behind the spread of online information disorder should be accurately grasped. China's main task force for guiding international public opinion should shift to leverage emotion-driven communication mechanisms online and thereby develop effective guidance of international public opinion.
(This article is an intermediate result of a major project funded by the National Social Science Fund, titled "Research on Establishing a Robust Mechanism for Guiding Public Opinion During Major Unexpected Events & Enhancing China's Influence on International Discourse" (20&ZD320).)
(Author's affiliation: School of Journalism and Communication, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies)