FAKE POPULARITY FOR REAL MONEY: COMMERCIAL ASTROTURFING AND DATA BUBBLE ON CHINESE DIGITAL PLATFORM

This on-going research delineates the constructing of an interlockingecosystem around popularity magnification on popular Chinese digital platforms, which werefer as “data bubble”. Similar to the bubble in a stock market or in real estate market indifferent economies where the price of assets substantially exceeds its intrinsic value, wepropose “data bubble” as a neologism to describe the phenomenon and ecosystem ofmanipulating data to aim for an inflated popularity on Chinese digital platforms, whichultimately pitch to higher commercial and financial values. We argue that data bubble islaced with platform company’s commercial and financial imperatives, logics of dataficationand popularity of platform as data infrastructure, and active participation from differentuser groups and complementors, and a deeply embedded mentality of “traffic is king”. It isachieved through mixed data practices including data optimization, commercial astroturfing,and counterfeit data manufacturing behind which a wide range of actors and entities areinvolved. They range from platforms, individual end users (fans in particular), influencers,multi-channel networks (MCNs) and incubators, celebrities and their agencies, click farms,and advertisers—all of them have achieved their own ends and thus actively participated infabricating data bubble in one way or another. The practices of data manipulating andoptimization by different participants in constructing data bubble, as a result, have driventhe data metrics on Chinese platforms far over—and no longer representative of—the actualpopularity.