Bluesky Should Outsmart China's Public Opinion Monitoring Tools to Safeguard Public Discourse
The Chinese government has leveraged public opinion analysis systems to target U.S. social media platforms to tamper with public discourse in the past. Will Bluesky be included? most likely yes.
This post is authored by guest contributor Eugenio Benincasa, a senior researcher at the Center for Security Studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich).In a November 26 post on the microblogging social networking service Bluesky, Alex Stamos, the Chief Information Security Officer for the cybersecurity company SentinelOne, highlighted several key points about how People’s Republic of China (PRC) leverages US social media platforms, such as X, for influence operations. Stamos made the following points:
Many underestimate the extent of the PRC's efforts at influencing the U.S. social media landscape;
The erosion of Trust and Safety at X has turned the platform into a “playground for PRC actors”;
Although PRC-affiliated actors complain about users moving from X to Bluesky, that platform too could also prove fertile ground for Chinese influence operations.
China has long used X to drive influence campaigns, leveraging its user base and algorithms to amplify narratives and interfere with the public debate in target countries. The Chinese government has adapted public opinion analysis systems (舆情管控系统) – which it initially developed to monitor domestic content – to target foreign entities, according to a Washington Post review (December 2021) of Chinese government contract bidding documents. Such systems mine data from platforms like Meta’s Facebook and X to aid government agencies, including the military and police. The bidding documents also showed state media, propaganda departments, and cyber regulators acquiring increasingly advanced systems not only for analysis but also for data collection.
Chinese government and private sector actors can use public opinion monitoring systems to analyze public sentiment and fine-tune their messaging for maximum impact. They can take advantage of target audiences’ emotions—such as moral outrage, defined as a combination of disgust and anger—in driving the spread of harmful yet engaging content, as highlighted in a recent Science study by McLoughlin et al. This effect is especially pronounced on X, whose algorithm is designed in a way that often promotes extremist material. Public opinion monitoring systems help identify which narratives gain traction and enable real-time adjustments to influence public opinion. In some cases, these systems support the creation and management of bots to directly manipulate and contaminate the information environment.
As users migrate to platforms like Bluesky, the question arises: What are China’s main public opinion monitoring systems, and how do they leverage American social media platforms to reach their objectives? How long will it take for these tools to start mining data from Bluesky? This article explores how Chinese threat actors have taken advantage of the diminishing safeguards on X to interfere with the information environment. It then examines key systems used by the Chinese government and private companies to monitor public opinion on both domestic and U.S.-based social media. These systems serve both government and commercial purposes, helping to expand the global presence of Chinese companies, amplifying state-driven narratives, and sowing confusion in public discourse.
Chinese Influence Actors Have Increasingly Exploited X Amid Weakening Safeguards
Since 2019, Chinese influence networks have intensified their operations on American social media platforms, such as Twitter (now X) and Facebook, exploiting political polarization, the COVID-19 pandemic, and other global events to promote China's strategic objectives. Despite substantial financial backing from local government authorities and propaganda offices at multiple levels within China, these influence campaigns have largely been characterized by their lack of sophistication, limiting their overall effectiveness. This has not deterred efforts to improve and refine strategies as Twitter’s own policies evolved.
In response to initial Chinese efforts, in 2020 Twitter’s former owners removed hundreds of thousands of accounts tied to Chinese influence campaigns and implemented additional safeguards, such as labeling state-affiliated media accounts and restricting their ability to monetize content.
In 2022, an article published on www.81[.]cn, the official portal of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA), openly discussed objectives centered on the strategic use of bots (社交机器人) in public opinion operations, emphasizing the necessity of multidisciplinary expertise to leverage the advantages bots can provide. While professionals in this field often come from the humanities and social sciences, the author, a member of the PLA National Defense University, argued that effective solutions require leveraging resources such as universities, expert databases, and cloud-based think tanks to build a specialized "computing propaganda team."
This team would be equipped, among other things, to enhance bot-driven tactics such as “destroying enemy opinion leaders, accelerat[ing] the dissemination of redundant content to the enemy, submerg[ing] its effective information, comprehensively interfer[ing] with the enemy's information order, intensify[ing] its internal contradictions, and creat[ing] a strong scale effect, thereby taking the lead in the struggle for public opinion, reversing the direction of dissemination.”
A few months later, in December 2022, Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, disbanded the platform’s Trust and Safety Council, an advisory group of approximately 100 independent organizations that Twitter assembled in 2016 to tackle issues like hate speech, child exploitation, and self-harm. By April 2023, X had removed labels identifying global media organizations as government-funded or state-affiliated; such labels had been used to highlight outlets under significant influence from authoritarian governments like Russia and China. It also eliminated blue verification checks for public figures and deprioritized posts containing external links, reducing access to verified or external information sources. In February 2024, The Washington Post reported that X had ceased participating in efforts to counter foreign interference, including skipping biweekly meetings with other researchers from platforms like Meta and Google's YouTube.
As Twitter dismantled these safeguards, Meta reported an increase in Chinese influence campaigns, leading to a substantial number of account removals on Facebook. In September 2023, NewsGuard, a company that evaluates the credibility of news websites to help users identify reliable sources, reported that engagement with disinformation-spreading accounts linked to Russian, Chinese, and Iranian sources on X soared by 70% after the platform removed labels identifying state-run accounts. In February 2024, researchers noted that out of 123 accounts flagged by Meta in 2023 for participating in deceptive China-based influence operations, 115 remained active on X. These activities persisted during the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign.
With few safeguards in place, X has deepened its collaboration with Chinese organizations aiding Chinese companies in expanding internationally. In March 2024, X launched the X Reseller project in collaboration with Feishu Shennuo (飞书深诺) (Meetsocial Group), a leading digital marketing provider in China. Promoted on Feishu Shennuo’s website as “a high-level cooperation model between the X platform and domestic agents,” it seeks to accelerate the expansion of Chinese brands into global markets. This approach is not unique to X, as other platforms like YouTube, Snapchat, and Facebook have similar partnerships with Feishu Shennuo. While it is difficult to assess the extent to which influence actors, including state-affiliated media, benefit from each of these partnerships, X's reduced oversight mechanisms likely create significant opportunities for such actors to exploit the X-Feishu Shennuo initiative.
Companies Actively Distorting the Information Landscape
This section takes a closer look at the company ELEX (博智安全), its role in influence operations and ties with government security agencies. Initially identified by Natto Thoughts during an examination of cyber ranges—where ELEX is a leading company—the company's website features a product category labeled "Innovative Products," which includes offerings related to both domestic and foreign intelligence and the handling of classified information. ELEX's slogan, "Forging Spears and Shields for National Security" (为国家安全锻矛铸盾), combined with its product focus, strongly suggests that China's Ministry of Public Security (MPS) and Ministry of State Security (MSS) are among its key clients, and potentially the PLA.
ELEX’s Innovative Products line includes the Bozhi Public Opinion Control System (博智舆情阵地管控系统), built to support global influence efforts. The system claims to generate a “large number of anthropomorphic social accounts,” which are strategically organized to establish an “online public opinion force” and “independent control of voice channels.” Likely referring to a network of fake social media accounts, these are deployed across platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok, with tools to efficiently manage these accounts (activation, deactivation, and maintenance). These features also enable monitoring public sentiment (identifying positive or negative opinions) by analyzing users' social connections and shared content, allowing for precise adjustments to influence campaigns. The description of this tool’s functionalities thus extends beyond mere public opinion monitoring capabilities to the active facilitation of influence operations. Notably, the system’s capabilities align closely with several stages of the RICHDATA framework—such as reconnaissance, infrastructure, dissemination, and amplification— that are commonly used in disinformation campaigns, as Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) outlined in a 2021 report.
ELEX’s operations are further bolstered by its partnership with Qi An Xin, one of China’s largest cybersecurity companies, which serves over 90% of central government departments, state-owned enterprises, and major financial institutions. In 2021, Qi An Xin’s former CEO, Wu Yunkun, and his delegation visited ELEX expressing significant interest in its Innovative Products business line. This partnership appears to have deepened over time, as the ELEX website highlights a December 2023 collaboration with Qi An Xin to drive innovation in the state secret protection sector, though the specifics of this alliance remain unclear.
Further Insights into the Ecosystem of Public Opinion Monitoring Systems
In September 2024, Intelligence Online, a Paris-based independent publisher, identified Guangzhou TRS Big Data Co., Ltd. (广州拓尔思大数据有限公司) as the leading provider in China’s public opinion monitoring efforts. The company specializes in big data processing, mining and application services for government, public security, customs, and military departments. Its parent company, TRS Information Technology Co., Ltd. (拓尔思信息技术股份有限公司), counts among its clients key government entities such as provincial and municipal MPS bureaus, and over half of China's provincial cyberspace administration offices.
According to the company’s website, the TRS NetInsight Big Data Analysis Platform (网察大数据分析平台), central to TRS's offerings, provides extensive public opinion monitoring and analysis across diverse media formats, including text, images, and videos. It operates 24/7 with real-time updates, offering tools for AI-powered sentiment analysis (identifying positive or negative opinions), trend analysis (forecasting future patterns in discussions), regional distribution (analyzing the geographic spread of public opinion), and heat mapping (visualizing areas where specific topics are most active or prominent). Enhanced by capabilities like video frame extraction and optical character recognition (OCR), the platform focuses on leading domestic platforms such as Weibo and WeChat.
A TRS December 2022 report lists prominent customers, including major state-run media outlets such as People’s Daily and Xinhua News Agency, suggesting that the platform has likely been employed to reinforce and propagate state narratives (see image below). While a May 2023 TRS report on the company’s Big Data Analysis Platform does not include a list of customers, in 2022, People’s Daily launched its own system, the "People's Online Public Opinion Monitoring Platform Version 5.0" (⼈⺠在线舆情监测平台 5.0版重磅上线). According to People’s Daily website description, the platform offers a public opinion monitoring solution capable of collecting and analyzing over 100 million data points daily from diverse sources, leveraging artificial intelligence solutions for sentiment analysis (identifying positive or negative opinions), event clustering (grouping related discussions or incidents together), and noise filtering (removing irrelevant or unnecessary information to focus on key insights).
TRS Big Data’s capabilities reflect a broader ecosystem of public opinion monitoring systems, where platforms like WJMonitor by Shanghai Wujie Data Technology Co., Ltd. (上海五节数据科技有限公司, Wujie Data), Hunan Shiwei Technology Co., Ltd. (湖南识微科技有限公司, Shiwei Technology), and Beijing OneSight Technology Co., Ltd. (一网互通(北京)科技有限公司, OneSight) play key roles. While some of these platforms reference government clients, they do not explicitly disclose connections to government security agencies. They appear to be primarily marketing firms. However, they provide valuable case studies for understanding the capabilities and reach of China’s public opinion monitoring market.
According to a company description from Shanghai Data Exchange, a municipality government organization , WJMonitor uses real-time public big data and AI-powered natural language processing (NLP) to deliver customized public opinion and business intelligence services. Its capabilities include sentiment analysis (identifying positive or negative opinions), word frequency analysis (counting how often specific words appear), similarity analysis (comparing content for shared themes or ideas), and communication value analysis (likely evaluating how effectively information is shared or received), tailored for government and corporate clients. The platform boasts that it provides round-the-clock monitoring of both Chinese and Western media and social media, including text, images, videos, and platforms such as news portals, electronic newspapers, WeChat, Weibo, Facebook, and Twitter. It claims to serve 10,000 organizations, including government clients, especially following its 2019 expansion into "smart government affairs" (智能政务领域).
Shiwei Technology's public opinion monitoring system, as outlined on its website, provides tools for real-time large-scale data analysis aimed at identifying patterns in public discussions and understanding contextual factors, such as the background of events. The platform includes features for topic tracking through unlimited keyword monitoring (allowing users to track any number of specific words or phrases) while automating the generation of detailed statistical charts and reports on a daily and weekly basis.
According to its website, OneSight provides tools for real-time public opinion trend analysis and forecasting, enabling predictions of future shifts or patterns in discussions. Key capabilities include sentiment monitoring (detecting positive or negative opinions), hashtag trend analysis (evaluating the popularity and usage of hashtags across regions and over time), and heat mapping of social media topics (visualizing where specific topics are most active geographically or thematically). The platform presents its analysis through daily, weekly, and monthly reporting cycles, with options to filter data by metrics like fan growth and interactions for more targeted insights. The platform claims to cover platforms such as X, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube, offering cross-platform content analysis with both exact keyword matching for specific terms and fuzzy keyword matching to identify related or similar terms.
Bluesky Can Stay Ahead of the Game
China’s public opinion monitoring systems play a key role in improving China’s ability to understand and navigate the information environment of American social media platforms to amplify its own narratives. The companies described above, whether they are purely marketing firms or have government ties, serve as benchmarks for China’s capabilities in public opinion monitoring and influence operations. Their tools provide critical insights into user sentiment and behavior, equipping China’s government and businesses with the means to craft and promote targeted narratives while undermining competing perspectives.
China’s public opinion monitoring systems have largely been tailored to exploiting social media platforms that have held significant influence over the past two decades, such as Meta’s Facebook and X. As Bluesky gains traction and attracts users away from X, the professionalization of international social media marketing services in China is likely to expedite the adaptation of state-backed influence operations to target Bluesky or any emerging overseas social media platform. For instance, according to a research from CTR Market Research, a joint venture of China International Television Corporation (CITVC) and Kantar Group, (https://www.ctrchina[.]cn/about?lang=en-US) the Chinese government encourages Chinese state media – ranging from the central government level to provincial and local governments – to establish “overseas communications centers” (海外传播中心), meaning setting up accounts on Facebook, X, Youtube and others, and to improve China’s “overseas communication power” (海外传播力). (see chart below).1 If Bluesky were to replace X, Bluesky would almost certainly be put on the list.
However, Bluesky can stay ahead of the game. Whipling (@seanhaines.bsky.social), a former Xinhua and China Daily employee, highlights in their Substack article "As Bluesky Takes Flight, China Has Got a Twitter Problem" that the platform's growing popularity has caused concern within Chinese state media circles due to Bluesky's predominantly liberal user base and its algorithm, which is reportedly more resistant to misuse. Whipling notes that Chinese state media efforts on Bluesky remain nascent. For example, Xinhua News failed to register its handle promptly, so a Portuguese-speaking entity grabbed it. The article underscores the lessons from Twitter’s 2019 policy changes, which hindered Chinese state media reach by banning state-sponsored ads, reducing visibility through algorithm adjustments, and applying "state media" labels. These measures led to a significant drop in engagement: China Daily, for instance, gained a million followers by 2020 but has since lost 200,000, while CGTN, despite claiming 13 million followers, saw minimal interaction with its posts. Lessons from platforms like X—such as the impact of labeling state-affiliated media and restricting their reach—along with insights into tools used to amplify influence operations, like public opinion monitoring systems, provide Bluesky with a valuable blueprint for preserving the integrity of its information environment. By proactively adopting safeguards and transparency measures, Bluesky has the opportunity to stay ahead of state-backed manipulation, promote authentic discourse, and position itself as a trusted and resilient platform for public debate.
The author could not determine how CTR calculated and scored the effectiveness of communications. The list outlines the Top 10 mainstream Chinese media with the most effective overseas communication results. The comprehensive score is based on scores from Facebook, YouTube, and X.) The top 10 include: 1. CGTN (China Global Television Network), 2. Xinhua news, 3. People’s Daily (including Global Times), 4. China Daily, 5. SMG, 6. China News Service, 7. Hunan Broadcasting System, TV, 8. Shanghai Daily, 9. The Paper, 10. Jiangsu Broadcasting Corporation
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