Suppressing the truth and spreading lies

How the CCP is influencing Solomon Islands’ information environment

What’s the problem?

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is attempting to influence public discourse in Solomon Islands through coordinated information operations that seek to spread false narratives and suppress information on a range of topics. Following the November 2021 Honiara riots and the March 2022 leaking of the China – Solomon Islands security agreement, the CCP has used its propaganda and disinformation capabilities to push false narratives in an effort to shape the Solomon Islands public’s perception of security issues and foreign partners. In alignment with the CCP’s regional security objectives, those messages have a strong focus on undermining Solomon Islands’ existing partnerships with Australia and the US.

Although some of the CCP’s messaging occurs through routine diplomatic engagement, there’s a coordinated effort to influence the population across a broad spectrum of information channels. That spectrum includes Chinese party-state media, CCP official-led statements and publications in local and social media, and the amplification of particular individual and pro-CCP content via targeted Facebook groups.

There’s now growing evidence to suggest that CCP officials are also seeking to suppress information that doesn’t align with the party-state’s narratives across the Pacific islands through the coercion of local journalists and media institutions.

What’s the solution?

The Australian Government should coordinate with other foreign partners of Solomon Islands, including the US, New Zealand, Japan and the EU, to further assist local Pacific media outlets in hiring, training and retaining high-quality professional journalists. A stronger, more resilient media industry in Solomon Islands will be less vulnerable to disinformation and the pressures exerted by local CCP officials.

Social media companies need to provide, in national Pacific languages, contextual information on misinformation and label state affiliations on messages from state-controlled entities. Social media companies could encourage civil society to report state affiliations and provide evidence to help companies enforce their policies.

Further government funding should be used to support public research into actors and activities affecting the Pacific islands’ information environment, including foreign influence, the proliferation of disinformation on topics such as climate change, and election misinformation. That research should be used to assist in building media resiliency in Pacific island countries by providing information and targeted training to media professionals to assist in identifying disinformation and aspects of coordinated information operations. Sharing that information with civil-society groups and institutions across the region, such as the Pacific Fusion Centre, can also help to improve regional media literacy and understanding of information operations as a cybersecurity issue.

Pacific island countries will need support as great-power competition intensifies in the region. The US, for example, can do more to demonstrate that the CCP’s narratives are false, such as proving Washington’s genuine interest in supporting the region by answering the call of the local Solomon Islands population to do more to clean up remaining unexploded World War II ordnance on Guadalcanal. ASPI has also previously proposed that an Indo-Pacific hybrid threats centre would help regional governments, business and civil society to understand the threat landscape, develop resilience against online harms and counter malign activity.¹ It would contribute to regional stability by promoting confidence-building measures, including information-sharing and capacity-building mechanisms.

Introduction

This report explores how the CCP is using a range of influence channels to shape, promote and suppress messages in the Solomon Islands information environment. Through an examination of CCP online influence in the aftermath of the Honiara riots in late 2021 and in response to the leaked security agreement in March 2022, this report demonstrates a previously undocumented level of coordination across a range of state activities. As part of a wider shift in ASPI’s research on foreign interference and disinformation, this report also seeks to measure the impact of those efforts in shaping public sentiment and opinion, and we welcome feedback on those methods. The data collected in this project doesn’t provide an exhaustive record of all CCP influence tactics and channels in Solomon Islands but provides a snapshot of activity in relation to the two key case studies.

In this paper, we use the term ‘China’ to refer to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as an international actor, ‘Chinese Government’ or ‘Chinese state’ to refer to the bureaucracy of the government of the PRC, and ‘Chinese Communist Party’ or ‘party-state’ to refer to the regime that monopolises state power in the PRC.

Methodology

Data collection for this case study covered two discrete periods. The first collection period was for 12 weeks from the beginning of the riots on 24 November (referred to in tables and charts as the Honiara riots case study), and the second period was for six weeks from the leaking of the China – Solomon Islands security agreement on 24 March (referred to as the security agreement case study).² The analytical methods used included quantitative analysis of publicly available data from a range of sources, including articles from Solomon Islands media outlets, articles from party-state media and Facebook posts in public groups and local media pages based in Solomon Islands. For the purpose of the analysis, any article with more than 80% of its content derived from local or foreign government official sources (direct quotes or statements from diplomatic officials, ministers or embassies, for example) was categorised as an ‘official-led’ article. Examples of such content included editorials, media releases and articles that prominently relied on direct quotes. This data was collected systematically for quantitative and qualitative analysis and was strengthened by deeper investigation into some public Facebook groups and activity. This approach drew upon a previously published framework, titled ‘information influence and interference’, used to understand strategy-driven, state-sponsored information activities.³³

We conducted a simple categorical sentiment analysis of social media posts as a measure of the effectiveness of CCP influence efforts. We analysed comments from Facebook posts published by three leading media outlets in Solomon Islands (The Solomon Star, The Island Sun and the Solomon Times) for the two events investigated for this research report. We also analysed comments from posts by the Chinese Embassy in Solomon Islands’ Facebook page, as well as posts in public Pacific island Facebook pages and groups that shared links to party-state media. Relevant comments were categorised as being positive (pro) or negative (anti) towards a particular country or group, such as ‘the West’, which had to be explicitly stated in the comment. Comments that referred to more than one grouping (China, the West, or the Solomon Islands Government) were categorised for analytical purposes based on the dominant subject of the comment. Our initial data collection also sought to analyse information relating to New Zealand, the UK and Japan, but that was prevented by the lack of reporting and online discussion focused on those countries (in this data-collection period, only one article each from New Zealand and Japan were identified).

1. Lesley Seebeck, Emily Williams, Jacob Wallis, Countering the Hydra: a proposal for an Indo-Pacific hybrid threat centre, ASPI, Canberra, 7 June 2022. ↩︎
2. Anna Powles, ‘Photos of draft security agreement between Solomon Islands and China’, Twitter, 24 March 2022. ↩︎
3. Miah Hammond-Errey, ‘Understanding and assessing information influence and foreign interference’, Journal of
   Information Warfare, Winter 2019, 18:1–22. ↩︎