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From Our Own Correspondent

Uncovering China's Internet Trolls

From Our Own Correspondent

BBC

News, News Commentary

4.41.3K Ratings

🗓️ 8 January 2022

⏱️ 29 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Plenty of journalists have had the experience of being “trolled” – attacked on social media for what they have written or said, often in terms which can be both offensive and sometimes frightening. Tessa Wong was trolled after reporting on China, but rather than simply accepting the abuse, she tried to find out why so many people had launched these attacks. What she found was that some of them were not the spontaneous outbursts of outraged citizens which they might have appeared. Rather it seems that key social media political influencers are being encouraged in their work by the Chinese authorities. It should have been a fairly straight-forward task for our reporter in the Seychelles, Patrick Muirhead. A financial scandal has hit the island nation, and various high profile people have been accused of taking money intended for its citizens. Patrick was in court to cover the proceedings, and was also offered the chance to interview the Seychelles’ President about the affair. However, this is a small country, and he was on first name terms with both the President, and with some of those in the dock. He admits, it was quite a challenge to report on the story with detachment. 2022 has started with some speculating that this could be the year in which Covid is beaten – not that the virus will disappear completely, but that it might become endemic, and certainly not killing people on anything like the scale seen so far. Yet even if by some miracle the Coronavirus were to vanish altogether, the effects of these past two years will be with us for a long time. In Peru, for example, tens of thousands of children have lost parents to Covid, and this in a country which already suffers from widespread poverty. As Jane Chambers explains, the death of a family breadwinner can leave children facing terrible hardship, along with the grief. Meeting a rebel leader can be difficult at the best of times, but particularly so if that leader is under arrest. Joshua Craze, was on the trail of General Simon Gatwich, from one of the factions which has been fighting in South Sudan. The country broke away from Sudan following a long battle for independence, but then itself split into different factions. Although a peace agreement has been reached, it’s considered a fragile one. General Gatwich headed north, to Sudan itself, so Joshua Craze tried to find out what exactly he was up to there. History has seen many symbolic acts of resistance: banging saucepans, for example, was an expression of rebellion in revolutionary France, and was more recently taken up by protestors in Latin America. Pro-democracy campaigners in Thailand and Myanmar, meanwhile, have taken to given a three finger salute, taken from the film, The Hunger Games. But there is another historical act of rebellion which might have passed you by: eating cake. That is what people in Denmark did for more than a century, as Amy Guttman explains.

Transcript

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0:00.0

BBC sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

0:05.3

Good morning.

0:06.8

News journalists in democratic countries are generally expected to be neutral and unbiased

0:13.0

observers. Today we hear of a challenge our correspondents in the Seychelles faced

0:19.2

when he was sent to cover a court case and found that several of the defendants were

0:24.4

old acquaintances. We're in Peru where so many children have lost parents to Covid that

0:31.2

some predict a trauma which will echo down the generations. On the trail of the rebel

0:37.1

general, a correspondent recounts what happened when he set off to interview a key civil

0:42.4

war figure from South Sudan who turned out to be in custody. And with the last of the

0:48.8

left over Christmas cake polished off, we hear how eating cake in Denmark was once a bold

0:56.1

and radical gesture. First, plenty of journalists have had the experience of being trolled, attacked

1:03.8

on social media for what they've written or said, often in terms which can be both

1:09.0

offensive and sometimes frightening. Tessa Wong certainly knows how that feels. The

1:15.7

reporting she's done on China has earned her furious denunciation from the country's

1:21.1

online defenders. But rather than simply accept this abuse as part of the job, she tried

1:27.4

to find out why so many people had launched these attacks. What she found was that some

1:33.7

of them were not the spontaneous outbursts of outrage citizens which they might have appeared.

1:40.2

Rather, it seems that key social media political influences are being encouraged in their

1:46.2

work by the Chinese authorities. The comments came in fast and they were furious. Last month,

1:54.0

I had written a piece about a unique group of Chinese internet users known as the Zigang

1:59.2

Wu. For some time, I had noticed that more and more Chinese people were getting attacked

2:04.8

online for being quote unquote unpatriotic. The targets range from human rights activists

...

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