Meet China's answer to the internet
China's censors have a favorite new tactic: If you don't like what people are saying online, shout louder.
Faced with the unprecedented explosion of information available to citizens over social media - some of it exposing corruption - officials have realized that simply deleting posts is not enough. They need to push positive propaganda as well.
At a closed-door meeting this week, Beijing's propaganda chiefs rolled out a new plan to have 2 million propaganda workers spread the Party line on microblogs, according to the Beijing News.
The instructions issue orders for all workers to "read Weibo, open a Weibo account, write Weibo posts, and study Weibo." (Weibo is the Chinese term for Twitter-like social media.)
Beijing propaganda boss Lu Wei told attendees that all government offices should open an account, with the goal of inundating the Chinese internet with positive tweets about anything the Communist Party deems sensitive: inequality, food prices, economic hardship, unemployment, the runaway real-estate market.
"The strategy has always been to make sure that the voices that are approved by the government are the loudest and clearest and easiest to hear - on all platforms," says Jeremy Goldkorn, a Chinese media expert in Beijing. "That's Leninist media strategy adapted to the modern age."
In its ceaseless campaign to control dissent in China, officials have made clear they are no longer content with simply trying to censor and police online writings; they want to guide the debate as well.
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