We kinda knew that already but it's nice to see it quantified:

China's government fabricates and posts several hundred million social media posts a year to influence public opinion about the country, according to a new paper by U.S. researchers examining one of the most opaque aspects of the Communist Party's rule.

The academic study led by Harvard political scientist Gary King claims to be one of the first in-depth looks into the inner workings of China's push to influence public opinion by flooding social media with posts portrayed as if they were coming from ordinary people.

The research project, which took advantage of a trove of government emails, spreadsheets and work reports from a propaganda office in central China leaked online in 2014, concludes that an estimated 488 million fake posts a year “enables the government to actively control opinion without having to censor as much as they might otherwise.”

They do not step up to defend the government, its leaders, and their policies from criticism, no matter how vitriolic; indeed, they seem to avoid controversial issues entirely,” the paper's authors write. “Letting an argument die, or changing the subject, usually works much better than picking an argument and getting someone's back up.”