[5][better source needed] Adam Clark Estes describes the name as, "If the term 'Internet troll' conjures up unintimidating images of angry, acne-faced computer geeks, the phrase 'Internet water army' just sounds horrifying, like a force of besuited villains from a graphic novel.
[8] Some companies hire Internet water armies to leave good reviews, and some singers or film stars also pay them to be fake followers on Sina Weibo.
The concept of 50 Cent Party is narrower since it only refers to paid posters who deflect political discussions and post any positive and supporting reviews related to the central government or CCP.
According to a Harvard University study in 2017, it was estimated that there were 448 million social media comments fabricated by the 50 Cent Party hired by the Chinese government at the time.
[13] Cheng Chen, a computer science researcher at the University of Victoria, and three colleagues performed an academic study of Internet water army activities.
[8][4] To learn how online Chinese ghostwriters operate, Cheng registered undercover with an Internet PR company that trained and paid him to make social media postings.
[14] Many celebrity agencies in the entertainment industry and their die-hard fans have been willing to spend a lot of money to hire Internet water armies to generate positive online reviews for their songs and movies.
[19] In June, a man was sentenced to five years and nine months in prison and fined 920,000 yuan ($135,000) for generating fake transactions and product reviews on Taobao;[20] it is the first judicial case that a suspect was charged with this offense in China.
[21] In August 2018, Guangzhou's latest move targeting the Internet water army was about a larger scale crackdown launched by China's public security authority, involving 77 suspects and 4 million yuan ($635,000).
Wang Chen, director of the office, announced that the Chinese government has paid constant attention to the posters and commentators, who have been found damaging social order both in the real and the virtual world.
"[27] In 2007, the cosmetics firm Doctor Bai and health-food company BiosTime both sued the consumer protection website 315ts.net for posting fake comments about their products.
[29] The Shanghai Daily reported in 2011 that the online shopping website Taobao shut down over 200 Internet Water Army companies selling microblog followers.
[30] They used DPMM to effectively analyze Internet water army user behavior and use the sequential pattern mining algorithms to determine paid posters' accounts.
"[31] Cheng Chen et al. chose a detection case study of online comments about the 360 v. Tencent conflict between two major Chinese IT companies, each of which was suspected of paying for posts.