Abstract  The Chinese government has long been suspected of hiring as many as 2,000,000people to surreptitiously insert huge numbers of pseudonymous and other deceptivewritings into the stream of real social media posts, as if they were the genuine opinionsof ordinary people. Almost all scholars, activists, journalists, and participantsin social media claim these so-called “Fifty Cent Party” posts argue vociferously forthe government’s side in political and policy debates. Yet, almost no systematic empiricalevidence exists for this claim, or, more importantly, for the Chinese regime’sstrategic objective in pursuing this activity. In the first large scale empirical analysisof this operation, we show how to identify the secretive authors of these posts,the posts written by them, and their content. We estimate that the government fabricatesand posts about 488 million social media comments a year. In contrast to priorclaims, we show that the Chinese regime’s strategy is to avoid arguing with skepticsof the party and the government, and to not even discuss controversial issues. Weinfer that the goal of this massive secretive operation is instead to regularly distractthe public and change the subject, as most of the these posts involve cheerleadingfor China, the revolutionary history of the Communist Party, or other symbols ofthe regime. We discuss how these results fit with what is known about the Chinesecensorship program, and suggest how they may change our broader theoretical understandingof “common knowledge” and information control in authoritarian regimes Il paper qui: http://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/50c.pdf  f.