CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 130Misinformation and Its ImpactsMedia Influence and PoliticsSocial Media and Politics

Capturing Clicks: How the Chinese Government Uses Clickbait to Compete for Visibility

Lu, Yingdan, Pan, Jennifer·2021·Political Communication
DOI 10.1080/10584609.2020.1765914
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

The proliferation of social media and digital technologies has made it necessary for governments to expand their focus beyond propaganda content in order to disseminate propaganda effectively. We identify a strategy of using clickbait to increase the visibility of political propaganda. We show that such a strategy is used across China by combining ethnography with a computational analysis of a novel dataset of the titles of 197,303 propaganda posts made by 213 Chinese city-level governments on WeChat. We find that Chinese propagandists face intense pressures to demonstrate their effectiveness on social media because their work is heavily quantified–measured, analyzed, and ranked–with metrics such as views and likes. Propagandists use both clickbait and non-propaganda content (e.g., lifestyle tips) to capture clicks, but rely more heavily on clickbait because it does not decrease space available for political propaganda. Government propagandists use clickbait at a rate commensurate with commercial and celebrity social media accounts. The use of clickbait is associated with more views and likes, as well as greater reach of government propaganda outlets and messages. These results reveal how the advertising-based business model and affordances of social media influence political propaganda and how government strategies to control information are moving beyond censorship, propaganda, and disinformation.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1080/10584609.2020.1765914

Cites

156 of 156 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

2 of the 158 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Lu, Y., & Pan, J.
Affiliations
Stanford University (US)
Corresponding author
Pan, Jennifer
ORCID
Venue
Political Communication
Publisher
Informa UK Limited
Published
2020-07-20
Volume
38
Issue
1-2
Pages
23-54
ISSN
  • 1058-4609 (ISSN-L)
  • 1091-7675
DOI
10.1080/10584609.2020.1765914
OpenAlex
W3045397880
Cited by
130
References
158
Citations by year
2026: 18 · 2025: 26 · 2024: 22 · 2023: 40 · 2022: 14 · 2021: 9 · 2017: 1
FWCI
21.02
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
Political Communication (publishedVersion)
Funders
National Science Foundation (1831481)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Media Influence and Politics
  • Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
Keywords
clickbait, political propaganda, state propaganda, WeChat, social media visibility, information control, censorship, disinformation

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review