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【中文标题】僵尸粉和虚假转发
【原文标题】Zombie followers and fake re-tweets
【登载媒体】经济学家
【原文链接】http://www.economist.com/node/21550333
中国开始回应他们自己发起的微博和谣言。
公元15年，中国正值短命的新朝。社会上突然流传起一个谣言，说一只黄龙——这是帝王的象征——在中国中部山区不祥地坠落在一座庙上，死掉了。皇帝王莽被这些煽动性的流言激怒了，下令大举逮捕和审讯以遏制流言，但一直未找到源头在哪里。八年之后，他被杀死后权位被推翻，汉朝得以复兴。
接下来的统治者光武帝，采取了完全不同的做法。据历史学家吕宗力的新书《汉代的谣言》，他把谣言当作公众情绪的晴雨表。光武政府收集了一个“谣言报告”，分门别类地整理人民对地方官员的抱怨，并且做出评估之后呈交给皇帝。早期汉王朝的官员很少出现腐败问题，政策倾向也比较亲民。
现在，中国共产党在微博时代两手并举。目前评估在过去两年中，微博的到来在统治者和被统治者之间所造成的动态变化程度，还为时过早。2.5亿中国网民出于各种目的使用微博，其中大部分人把它当作一个娱乐工具。但其中一项娱乐就是传播新闻和谣言，无论是真是假。这对政府官员的官方信息和国家宣传机器造成了威胁。
当局采取了两种回应方式。首先是加强他们在微博领域的潜听行动，似乎是类似光武帝的统治策略。另一方面，有些效仿王莽的治国之道，与谣言做面对面的斗争，严控微博的用户，监视微博内容和制造麻烦的人。官员们要求最著名的新浪微博用户从3月16日开始用实名和身份证号码注册，试图以此来让工作走入正轨。另一个微博平台——腾讯微博——现在也要求新用户用实名注册。用户依然可以用网名来发言，但后台数据库记录着真实的个人信息。
实名制在多大程度上会影响微博上的发言，目前还不可知。实际上，我们还不能确定这条政策的执行力度如何，因为有关微博的各类花招已经层出不穷了。只需要花一点点钱，你就能买到让你看起来似乎很受欢迎的粉丝（所谓的“僵尸粉”，他们盲目地关注微博账号），你甚至还能购买让别人转发和评论的功能。在生意圈里，有些公司说，只要付钱（大约80美元），他们就能让你的微博账号得到官方认证。这显然是在鼓励用户用假身份注册，因为合法的身份认证是免费的。
不管其执行力度如何，身份认证似乎无法阻止谣言等让当局坐立不安的消息的传播。在认识到他们不能忽视这个公众意见的宣泄渠道之后，官员们也开始投身其中。据国家行政学院提供的数据，政府机构、党组织和个人官员建立了大约5万个微博账号。
这样的规模勉强可以成为当局对待公众意见的一个缓冲带。当前重庆警察局长王立军在上个月到美国大使馆寻求庇护的时候，微博上迅速传出各种版本的消息。重庆市政府微博为了回应网络上的喧嚣，说王先生正在接受“休假式治疗”。这种滑稽、虚假的措辞马上在网络上流传开。3月15日，王先生的老东家薄熙来被免去重庆市党委书记的职务，微博上第一次出现高层领导人职位变动的现场直播。
当局严密监控互联网上的捣乱分子，但还要依赖互联网公司来保护他们的领地。大型微博公司会聘请数百人检查、删除那些他们认为政府可能不喜欢的信息，但遏制谣言的扩散依然是徒劳的。谣言之所以在即使个人已经有更多生活空间的中国尤其猖獗，是因为这个国家缺少人们可以信赖的机构，比如独立的出版物和司法机关，来充当裁判的角色。官员和政府媒体只能乞求网民对自己的行为负责。
在这项工作中，官方找到了一些盟友。其中之一是“点子正”，这是一位43岁辟谣者的网名。他住在中国东北部城市沈阳，作为一位政府媒体的雇员，他夜以继日地在家中用戴尔电脑揭穿网络谎言的真相。他要求《经济学家》不要报道他的真实姓名和工作单位。点子正曾经参与揭露过的谣言包括：人体器官贩子在地铁站中寻找受害者；南方省份福建有1万人殴打警察。他还会努力寻找谣言的源头，尽管鲜有成功案例。他的对手是大量的僵尸粉和虚假转发，以及一些营销公司，他们专门为谣言寻求关注，直到一些有真正粉丝的名人也开始转发。点子正说实名制可以给辟谣者提供一些帮助，但没有实质性效果。
他用兴奋的语气说：“我们有句俗语：‘谣言动动嘴，辟谣跑断腿’。”他说，为了国家的利益，他有很强的辟谣动力。“我认为，如果谣言不经查实，会对国家造成重大伤害。”或许的确如此。历史学家吕认为，2000年前遏制谣言的皇帝王莽所面临的问题其实并不是谣言，而是背后隐藏的真实因素——害怕的民众。在微博时代，事实的一点点真相或许比大量的谣言更让政府担心。
原文：
IN THE year 15AD, during the short-lived Xin dynasty, a rumour spread that a yellow dragon, a symbol of the emperor, had inauspiciously crashed into a temple in the mountains of central China and died. Ten thousand people rushed to the site. The emperor Wang Mang, aggrieved by such seditious gossip, ordered arrests and interrogations to quash the rumour, but never found the source. He was dethroned and killed eight years later, and Han-dynasty rule was restored.
The next ruler, Emperor Guangwu, took a different approach, studying rumours as a barometer of public sentiment, according to a recent book “Rumours in the Han Dynasty” by Lu Zongli, a historian. Guangwu’s government compiled a “Rumours Report”, cataloguing people’s complaints about local officials, and making assessments that were passed to the emperor. The early Eastern Han dynasty became known for officials who were less corrupt and more attuned to the people.
Modern China’s Communist Party rulers make use of both these methods in the era of microblogs, or weibo, the various Chinese equivalents of Twitter, which is blocked in China. It is hard to overestimate how much the arrival of weibo has changed the dynamic between rulers and ruled over the past two years. More than 250m Chinese internet users have taken to microblogs for many purposes, plenty of them purely recreational. But a popular pastime is to spread news and rumours, both true and false, that challenge the official script of government officials and state-propaganda organs.
The authorities have responded in two main ways. One has been to increase their own use of weibo as a listening post, a strain of governance in the spirit of Emperor Guangwu; the other, more in the spirit of the dethroned Wang Mang, has been to combat rumours harshly and to tighten controls over the microblogs and their users, censoring posts and closely monitoring troublemakers. Officials are attempting to make these tasks more manageable by requiring that users of the most prominent microblog service, Sina Weibo, register using their real name and identity-card number by March 16th. The other leading microblog, called Tencent Weibo, now also requires new users to register with their real name. Microbloggers can continue using nicknames as their online identities, as long as the weibo providers have their real-world identities on file.
It is unclear how much the real-name requirement will affect what microbloggers say. Indeed, it remains unclear how strictly it will be enforced, considering the booming market that already exists in microblog-related trickery. For mere pennies you can buy followers for your weibo account to make you look more popular (known as “zombie followers” because they mindlessly follow others). You can also purchase re-tweets and even comments on your posts. Inevitably amid all this enterprise, some companies say that for a fee (of around $80), they can provide official verification for weibo accounts, apparently allowing customers to register under fake identities (the microblogs verify legitimate users for nothing).
No matter how it is enforced, user verification seems unlikely to deter the spread of rumours and information that has so concerned authorities. Aware that they cannot ignore this new outlet for public opinion, officials have moved to engage with it: government agencies, party organs and individual officials have set up more than 50,000 weibo accounts, according to the Chinese Academy of Governance.
This degree of online engagement can be awkward for authorities used to a comfortable buffer from public opinion. When Wang Lijun, the former police chief of the region of Chongqing, sought shelter at an American consulate last month, the story broke fast on microblogs. Responding to the online frenzy, a Chongqing government weibo account claimed that Mr Wang was on medical leave receiving “vacation-style treatment”, a comically implausible euphemism that immediately went viral. The news on March 15th that Mr Wang’s erstwhile patron, Bo Xilai, had been sacked as party secretary of Chongqing marked the first time a high-level purge has been commented on in real time by microbloggers.
Authorities keep a close eye on online troublemakers, but rely on internet companies to fence and supervise their own playgrounds. The big microblogs employ hundreds of monitors to remove content they know will be unacceptable to the authorities. Yet the task of quashing rumours is a Sisyphean one. Rumours can run especially rampant in China because, even as citizens now have more social space in which to live, the country lacks sufficiently reliable institutions, such as an independent press and judiciary, to play the role of referee. It is left to officials and the state media to implore netizens to be responsible.
Who you gonna call ?
In this task, officialdom has some allies. One is Dianzizheng, the online alias of a 43-year-old rumour-hunter. An employee of a state media outlet by day, at night he tries to debunk viral falsehoods using a Dell computer in his apartment in Shenyang, in China’s north-east. He spoke to The Economist on the condition that his real name and his employer were not identified. Among the rumours Dianzizheng claims to have played a part in refuting are a story that organ harvesters were targeting subway stations for victims, and that 10,000 people had beaten up policemen in the southern province of Fujian. He also tries to track down the sources of rumours, though with little success. His enemies have at their disposal armies of zombie followers and fake re-tweets as well as marketing companies, which help draw attention to rumours until they are spread by a respected user with many real followers, such as a celebrity. Dianzizheng says real-name registration should help him and his fellow rumour-hunters, but accepts that it is unlikely to be decisive.
“We have a saying among us: you only need to move your lips to start a rumour, but you need to run until your legs are broken to refute one,” he says, in a tone that is cheerful and tireless. He is motivated, he says, by the national interest. “I believe there is a huge risk to the country if rumours go unchecked.” Perhaps so. Mr Lu, the historian, argues that the problem faced by the emperor Wang Mang in hunting down rumours 2,000 years ago was not the rumours themselves, but the truth that they reflected: a nervous public. In the age of weibo, it may be that the wisps of truth prove more problematic for authorities than the clouds of falsehood.
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狗仔卡
发表于 2012-4-5 10:39
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