Decentralized propaganda in the era of digital media
The massive presence of the Chinese state on Douyin
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6231078 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Yingdan Lu (0000-0002-9955-6070, Assistant Professor, Department of Communication Studies Northwestern University Evanston Illinois USA), Jennifer Pan (0000-0002-4818-0122, Professor, Department of Communication Stanford University Stanford California USA), Xu Xu (0000-0002-3934-9096, Assistant Professor, Department of Politics & School of Public and International Affairs Princeton University Princeton New Jersey USA), Yiqing Xu (0000-0003-2041-6671, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, and W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo‐Campbell National Fellow at the Hoover Institution Stanford University Stanford California USA) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Publication date | 2025-05-23 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Journal of Political Science (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0092-5853 • E-ISSN: 1540-5907 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/ajps.12990 |
| OpenAlex | W4410634269 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 13 |
| References cited | 60 |
The rise of social media in the digital era poses unprecedented challenges to authoritarian regimes that aim to influence public attitudes and behaviors. To address these challenges, we argue that authoritarian regimes have adopted a decentralized approach to produce and disseminate propaganda on social media. In this model, tens of thousands of government workers and insiders are mobilized to produce and disseminate propaganda, and content flows in a multidirectional, rather than a top‐down manner. We empirically demonstrate the existence of this new model in China by creating a novel data set of over five million videos from over 18,000 regime‐affiliated accounts on Douyin, a popular social media platform in China. This paper supplements prevailing understandings of propaganda by showing theoretically and empirically how digital technologies are transforming not only the content of propaganda, but also how propaganda materials are produced and disseminated
Algorithm · Digital era · Media studies · Political science · Sociology · State (computer science · The Internet · World Wide Web · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance · Chinese history and philosophy · Computer Science · History · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics
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| Unique citing works | 13 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 13 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 10 |