In Australia, various individuals and groups, including individual bloggers, Chinese students, conventional Chinese-language media organisations and Chinese business entities, have gravitated to the scalable functionality of WOAs and their low barrier to entry, making WeChat increasingly central to news production, circulation and consumption in Chinese diasporic communities. WOAs, news consumption and Australia’s Chinese diaspora Many WOAs work with Australian advertisers and content producers located in Australia. Editors, journalists and stringers are employed by WOAs at the local level without any direct employment relationship with WeChat or Tencent. WOAs operate somewhat independently of the WeChat platform financially, and their revenue comes principally from advertising. The function has the capacity to generate and circulate information and news stories among groups of subscribers both locally and transnationally. WOAs appear on a WeChat user’s app in the form of a subscription folder where users can click through, read and respond to the articles published by the subscribed accounts. WeChat Official Accounts (hereafter WOAs), also known as WeChat Subscription Accounts or WeChat Public Platforms, perform an important information dissemination function. In 2020, WeChat was reported to have more than 1.2 billion monthly active users. People use it for diverse purposes, ranging from daily messaging and content publication and consumption to financial transactions, e-commerce, travel, and public health promotion. It has since become the primary digital communication platform of Mandarin-speaking communities globally. WeChat (Weixin) is a social media service that was developed by Tencent Holdings Ltd. Based on qualitative content analysis of the sample that this targeted search generated, we found that the articles were largely produced by means of free (rather than formal, direct) translation from mainstream Australian media including The Australian, ABC, Financial Review, and Sydney Morning Herald, but embellished with their own editorial spin. Our sample was produced by inputting a series of key search terms in Mandarin on the platform, which included ‘Australian federal election (澳洲大选, 澳大利亚联邦大选 or 澳大利亚大选)’, ‘Liberal party of Australia (自由党or 自由党联盟)’, and ‘Australian Labor Party (工党 or 澳大利亚工党)’. To investigate the content mobilised during the Australian federal election, we collected 318 election-related articles published on WeChat from February to May in 2019 and analysed their content. In fact, the political opinions espoused in the widely read and locally influential accounts we studied tended to directly counter those published by CCP affiliated WOAs during the election campaign. Our research suggests, on the contrary, that the CCP did not demonstrate complete or direct political control over such accounts at that time. Some Australian media have mobilised erroneous assumptions that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s influence was clearly established and threaded through Australia-based news-focused WOAs, and that the ‘ interference’ of Beijing was prevalent on WeChat during the 2019 election. The focus of this article is not on the possibility that the Chinese Communist Party was trying to influence the outcome of the election through WOAs. The articles were overwhelmingly politically conservative and advocated for the interests of the Liberal Party. These striking headlines may not be fully representative of the prevailing discourse of Chinese-language news media in Australia, but they merit our attention as a window into the kind of information circulated in this ethnic mediasphere. Such articles, produced by WeChat Official Accounts and circulated on the platform, mostly originated from news-focused accounts operated by individual bloggers or small-to-medium media organisations, and are based on translations of selective Australian media coverage. Headlines like these-sensational, conspiratorial, demonstrably misleading and intentionally ambiguous-characterise the coverage of the 2019 Australian federal election on WeChat, a Chinese app used for messaging and socialising, among other things. “After the election, tens of thousands of Australians are preparing to escape! ‘We can’t stay in Australia anymore!’ Some have submitted immigration applications to other countries!” “The Australian election took a surprising turn! House prices are escalating! It will affect Chinese people’s lives in these ways…” “It’s terrible! These people committed suicide after the Australian election!”
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