This report explores how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), fringe media and pro-CCP online actors seek—sometimes in unison—to shape and influence international perceptions of the Chinese Government's human rights abuses in Xinjiang, including through the amplification of disinformation. United States (US) based social media networks, including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, along with Chinese-owned TikTok (owned by Chinese company ByteDance), are centre stage for this global effort.
Poll-based election forecasts were widely maligned after the 2016 election, and with some justification: Trump won the election when the bulk of the polling said he would not. Forecasts based on polls performed well in 2008 and 2012, with several analysts (including one of us) correctly picking the winner in all fifty states in 2012. And yet the same methodology — using statistical models to combine poll results — did not fare nearly so well just four years later in 2016. The accurate performance of these methods in 2008 and 2012 led many analysts of 2016 polling data to incorrectly predict Trump would lose.