Mystery of the Chinese zombie Yalies

US universities have responded to China’s exploding demand for American higher education with branch campuses and aggressive recruiting. Now, some are trying to boost their brands by casting photos and other snippets of campus life out into the confounding sea of Chinese social media.

How confounding? Consider the mystery of the Chinese Yale zombies.

That’s “zombies” as in “zombie followers” on Sina Weibo — the hugely popular “weibo,” or microblogging, site that’s roughly akin to Twitter and has attracted more than 500 million followers since debuting in 2009. A common feature on Chinese social media, these zombie accounts could represent actual users who lurk inactively online. But often they’re fake, mass-produced accounts that mindlessly follow (hence the name “zombie”) and artificially boost another account’s follower numbers — and thus prestige.

While other prominent universities have patiently accumulated at most a few thousand followers in more than a year of operation, Yale’s been adding nearly that many daily, and has passed 140,000. The only other foreign university even remotely close to that figure is, oddly, Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia. Yale’s Weibo account is ranked 30th in popularity among educational institutions overall, better even than several well-known domestic institutions like Nanjing and Zhejiang universities.

Whence these zombie Yalies? After inquiries from The Associated Press, a Yale spokesman acknowledged some of the followers could be fake, but says that’s not Yale’s doing. He says the university isn’t buying followers, which can be purchased for a few cents each online.