The Wolf Pack and Astroturfing: China’s Social Media Influence Machine
Ms. Ohlberg will describe an influence machine that brings together the resources of agencies including the Communist Party’s propaganda department and the Communist Youth League, the foreign ministry and China’s embassies overseas, state media, government cyber-censors, and private-sector technology firms that provide the software to neutralize dissenting voices online and flood social media with more favorable content.
She will discuss her research into how media platforms in China and in the democratic world are manipulated to amplify China’s messaging. She will also offer suggestions about ways in which liberal democracies might push back, without compromising their own values.
Mareike Ohlberg is a senior fellow in the Asia Program of the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF), a non-partisan policy organization that champions trans-Atlantic cooperation to defend core principles of democracy and human rights. She is based at GMF’s Berlin Office. Before joining GMF, Mareike worked as an analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, where she focussed on China’s media and digital policies as well as the Chinese Communist Party’s influence campaigns in Europe. Prior to that, she was an An Wang postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and a postdoctoral fellow at Shih-Hsin University in Taipei. She has spent several years living and working in Greater China. She is co-author of the book Hidden Hand: How the Communist Party of China is Reshaping the World (2020). Mareike has a doctoral degree in Chinese studies from the University of Heidelberg and a master’s degree in East Asian regional studies from Columbia University.versity.