>My friend and I have been analyzing this trend for a long time. You can spot the 50 cent army on youtube on any video that has US and China in the title. The three go to arguments are
There's actual reputable and recent research about 50c Army abroad - they don't exist.
Beyond Hybrid War: How China Exploits Social Media to Sway American Opinion
https://www.recordedfuture.com/china-social-media-operations...
>While researchers have demonstrated that China does want to present a positive image of the state and Communist Party domestically, the techniques of censorship, filtering, astroturfing, and comment flooding are not viable abroad. We discovered no English language equivalent to the 50 Cent Party in Western social media.
50c also don't engage in political arguments like the comments you're concerned with:
How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, not Engaged Argument
https://datasociety.net/events/databite-no-94-jennifer-pan/
>In contrast to prior claims, her research shows that the Chinese regime’s strategy is to avoid arguing with skeptics of the party and the government, and to not even discuss controversial issues. Her work infers that the goal of this massive secretive operation is instead to regularly distract the public and change the subject, as most of the these posts involve cheerleading for China, the revolutionary history of the Communist Party, or other symbols of the regime
Anti Chinese bots however do - this one is particularly ironic since the researchers went out looking for pro CPC bots only the find the opposite.
Chinese computational propaganda: automation, algorithms and the manipulation of information about Chinese politics on Twitter and Weibo.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369118X.2018.14...
>In line with previous research, little evidence of automation was found on Weibo. In contrast, a large amount of automation was found on Twitter. However, contrary to expectations and previous news reports, no evidence was found of pro-Chinese-state automation on Twitter. Automation on Twitter was associated with anti-Chinese-state perspectives and published in simplified Mandarin, presumably aimed at diasporic Chinese and mainland users who ‘jump the wall’ to access blocked platforms.
The only somewhat legitimate claims of Chinese bot on western MSM was the Twitter release with zero method or attribution. Independent analysis show the scope of activity is trivial.
https://www.aspi.org.au/report/tweeting-through-great-firewa...
>The amount of content directly targeting the Hong Kong protests makes up only a relatively small fraction of the total dataset released by Twitter, comprising just 112 accounts and approximately 1600 tweets, of which the vast majority are in Chinese with a much smaller number in English.
People are too paranoid over pro-China voices, there's plenty of Chinese diaspora out there willing to call out US hypocrisy. There's also billions of people in non western aligned countries who feel the same way. US has more skeptics than just China, especially after the last few years. Instead of viewing people as Pro-China, consider many people are just not anti-China. Alternatively, people aren't so much as Pro-China as anti-US. There are non Sinophobic bubbles out there. The most parsimonious explanation is just people with different opinions.