Social media trolls as faux third-party agents of image repair: China’s disinformation campaign and statecraft in the Daryl Morey affair

ABSTRACT

This study examines trolls affiliated with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that targeted conversations around former Houston Rockets’ General Manager Daryl Morey, who tweeted support for Hong Kong protests and apologized in October 2019. Researchers coded 5,800 tweets to inform a machine-learning approach examining a corpus of over 163,000 tweets. Findings suggested that a PRC disinformation campaign was organized as a faux third-party image repair effort that sought to force an apology, deprive Morey of support, discourage future image threats, and shape public understanding. This effort used provocation, bolstering, barnacle, redirection, and attack the accuser. While apologies are generally held to be restorative in image repair and statecraft literature, Morey’s apology was a turning point that rallied opposition to the PRC and support for democracy and Morey. Implications include insight into the prevalence, strategies, and efficacy of PRC trolls, as well as recommendations for social media practitioners.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• disinformation
• image repair
• social media
• statecraft

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Correction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00909882.2023.2300250)

Notes

1 After personal correspondence with Daryl Morey, the authors recognize that Mr. Morey objects to characterizing his second statement as an apology, as he intentionally sought to avoid apologizing under great pressure. He also wished to draw attention to The Wall Street Journal's retraction of a reference to his statement as an apology from a November 19 editorial entitled “On China, Women's Tennis Beats the NBA.” The authors, however, use the term apology in a manner consistent with broad understandings of apologia, image repair, and Scher and Darley's (1997) conceptualization of an apology as a communicative act that seeks to remedy a social disruption. Various additional considerations also informed our language, including (a) O'Connell's (2022) use of the term in his account of the case study and in the outlining of the sport-related statecraft process (i.e., the framework from which this study builds), (b) legacy media's coverage of the statement as an apology (New York Times, National Public Radio, CBS, NBC, BBC, and CNBC), (c) the social construction of the statement as an apology within the public discourse featured in this article, and (d) the statement's focus on acknowledging and mitigating offense that may have been incurred by Rocket fans and friends who reside in China.