Inquiry China devours information on foreigners’ opinions on social media: Chinese media also report on the talks to the state

The Washington Post investigated hundreds of government bids and contracts. Among them were software and agreements guarding the opinions of foreigners, for example, to the Chinese media and the Beijing police.

China guarding the climate of opinion abroad more and more. The matter is reported in the newspaper The Washington Post invitations to tender and tender documents.

China is acquiring new software to gather information about foreigners and their conversations more and more effectively. In particular, this watch is aimed at social media services used outside of China, especially Facebook and Twitter.

The Washington Post reviewed government tender documents and contracts publicly available on China’s internal Internet from the beginning of 2020. A total of more than 300 contracts were collected. They dealt with software that collects data on foreign destinations from various social media platforms.

Many software extracts information in a targeted way around the clock. One of them is the Beijing Police Project, which collects and analyzes the debate of foreign citizens about Hong Kong and Taiwan. The other is the Xinjiang Cyber ​​Center project, which monitors Uighur-language conversation abroad.

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“This will allow us to better understand the network of anti-China actors operating underground,” an employee of the central office of China’s state propaganda center, Anonymity, told The Washington Post.

As one example, the magazine cites information retrieval projects in the Chinese media. Foreign speakers were also watched by the Chinese media, such as the People’s Daily and the English-language Global Times.

Software-driven, often highly automated data mining without separate permission is prohibited by the terms of use for social media giants.

The People’s Daily has several projects. In 2019, the Global Times won a three-year contract in which the magazine will provide the Chinese Foreign Ministry with a system for monitoring foreign media and journalist opinions related to the country.

In addition to regular reporting, the contract, worth less than EUR 470,000, includes case-by-case reports in situations that require special attention.

In practice such software-driven, often highly automated data mining without separate permission is prohibited by the terms of use of social media giants.

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Twitter comments to The Washington Post that automated intelligence gathering at its interface for intelligence and surveillance purposes is prohibited.

Facebook did not comment on the matter, nor did the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

Helsingin sanomat newspaper reported in 2020 about the Chinese company Zhenhua Data, whose database had been leaked to an Australian Internet 2.0 data company.

The company specializes in “scraping” data, that is, mechanically collecting data from sources where it is not readily available, profiling based on open sources, and providing various threat assessment services.

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The Zhenhua Data database contained the personal information of 2.4 million people. There were about 800 Finns among them.

It is not known whether Zhenhua Data was among the contract documents examined by The Washington Post.

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