'Look, a Bird!' Trolling by Distraction
Rather than debating critics directly, the Chinese government tries to derail conversation on social media it views as dangerous.
In April 2014, an attack at the main railway station in Urumqi, a city in the northwest Chinese province of Xinjiang, killed three people and injured dozens more. The incident—an explosion followed by a knife attack—came at the end of President Xi Jinping’s first visit to the restive region since he took office, during which he had promised to ramp up the government’s response to terrorism.
Immediately after, the Chinese government’s online-censorship apparatus sprung into action. Searches for “Urumqi blast” were blocked , the country’s largest search engine, and , a Twitter-like social network that’s very popular in China. Meanwhile, paid government trolls flooded Sina Weibo and various other Chinese social networks with more
