Fake news is infiltrating highly monitored and regulated Chinese social media and is gathering great attention from Chinese netizens. Fake news is being read and re-posted by the thousands daily.
Other social media outlets are using these stories as click bait and followers have been gained from the mere subscription to fake news. Many Chinese users are attracted to news from the U.S. because much of America's political news are blocked by China's Great Firewall.
Fang Kecheng, a media researcher who runs News Lab, a WeChat account promoting media awareness, said, "Conspiracy theories fit very well into Chinese readers' frames of how they understand politics overall, because they think that in the U.S., politics is very similar to politics in China, where it is about inner struggles and even murder."
The outburst of fake articles has prompted online fact-checkers to debunk fake facts on Weibo. The fact-checkers scrutinize commercials and commentaries.
A Weibo user noted that there is a big attraction to fake news because it is translated into Chinese. Many users find it difficult reading from reliable news sources which only publish articles in English.
The anonymous Weibo user said, "People really want to read foreign media and outside sources, but most people do not have the level of English needed to read primary documents."
He added, "So readers turn to these and WeChat channels which supposedly take foreign news and translate it."
Duan Lian, the founder of Stop Foreign Rumours Centre, a fact-checking group, said that fake news is even affecting the public in making the right decisions.
Duan was referring to the previous U.S. elections where the fake news on Hillary Clinton's planned capping of the American to Asian student ratio in public universities sprung.
The Chinese government launched initiatives to counter the spread of fake news. People who are caught instigating fake news will face seven years' imprisonment.
Tencent, the owner of Weibo, launched Jiaozhen, a fact-checking website which aims to debunk false health information.