Diversionary Media: Autocrat's Political Stabilization Tool During Political Unrest

Abstract

In face of negative political events that undermine political stability, does the government strategically ignore, distort, or distract? By examining the posting activity of the top 18 Chinese state-run media accounts on Weibo on days following unrest events, we find evidence for the third possibility: Chinese state-run media engage in strategic diversion to deflect public attention away from negative domestic political news. Specifically, it achieves so not through diversion with entertainment, but rather through diversion with political neutrality; namely, instead of catching the public eye with engaging or sensational nonpolitical content, the state-run media instead injects neutral and mundane political information that effectively dilutes the negativity without the need for factual distortion. For theory, we present a model of information manipulation and media management that relates the individual's news consumption and protest decisions with the government's media distortion and diversion. For empirics, we construct and perform topic classification on a novel dataset of all historical Weibo posts by top Chinese state-run media, and leverage political unrest data to empirically test various mechanisms of information manipulation and find that state-run media decrease the proportion of negative domestic news and increase the proportion of neutral domestic news, while roughly holding positive news constant. We also present a set of stylized facts that explore the heterogeneity of state-run media response to various types of unrest events, separated by actor, action, topic, and target type, as well as the heterogeneous responses between different types of media content.