Recently featured on Danwei, Thomas Crampton’s video interview with Oiwan Lam about the ‘fifty cent army’ of online commenters who allegedly do Party propaganda 2.0 caused some controversy in Danwei’s comments section.
Here is another article about the fifty cent army, from David Bandurski at Hong Kong University’s China Media Project:
China’s Guerrilla War for the Web
They have been called the “Fifty Cent Party,” the “red vests” and the “red vanguard.” But China’s growing armies of Web commentators—instigated, trained and financed by party organizations—have just one mission: to safeguard the interests of the Communist Party by infiltrating and policing a rapidly growing Chinese Internet. They set out to neutralize undesirable public opinion by pushing pro-Party views through chat rooms and Web forums, reporting dangerous content to authorities.
By some estimates, these commentary teams now comprise as many as 280,000 members nationwide, and they show just how serious China’s leaders are about the political challenges posed by the Web. More importantly, they offer tangible clues about China’s next generation of information controls—what President Hu Jintao last month called “a new pattern of public-opinion guidance.”
It was around 2005 that party leaders started getting more creative about how to influence public opinion on the Internet…
Note: The above article is on the Far Eastern Economic Review‘s website, in the paid subscriber section but made available for non subscribers for free. FEER’s website however appears to be blocked in the Mainland.