During President Xi Jinping's tour of state media outlets in February 2016, he emphasized that they must “speak for the Party,” and, further, that they must expand their influence abroad in order to “tell China’s story to the world.” The Guardian's Louisa Lim and Julia Bergin wrote that while the "[China] Communist Party has always maintained a tight grip over domestic media, their strategy has shifted in recent years to spread that control globally", by "exerting their influence on media abroad, through a multifaceted approach that includes offering generous salary packages to recruit talented journalists away from local media in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere; buying advertising supplements in mainstream foreign publications; buying foreign media companies outright; and making deals with local broadcasters in Africa and elsewhere to spread their content in local markets". One result of the China Communist Party's international media strategy has been the elimination of the independent Chinese-language media outlets in the United States, "through a mix of co-option and aggressive expansion of its own competitors".[9] [10] Alongside their international media strategy, the Chinese Communist Party has also stepped up the use of "Pro-Beijing trolls -- the so-called 50-cent army, named for the price they are supposedly paid for each post" plus the "state-backed media and botnets [who] have been employed to pump out huge quantities of disinformation and misinformation" on social media platforms like Twitter.[11][12]