Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate
marginalrevolution.com
Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate
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Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate
#2Title might want to be altered: this is a description of a specific research paper analyzing Chinese online propaganda campaigns, not as general an analysis as the title indicates. Interesting stuff!
Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate
#3Pretty fascinating stuff.
I'm not sure what Trump's arm of this kind of propaganda is, but Correct the Record was a very real thing, despite the bogeyman descriptions of it in some online communities.
https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00578997
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record
Interestingly, the original website is now gone, but it used to say essentially that it advocated for Clinton across Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of social media.
The scary thing is just how cheap it would be to pay people to sit in online communities and drive attention to and away from whatever you wanted. Even more interesting is in 10 years it'll be like it never existed. Spread some propaganda, pack up, and go home.
Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate
#4I'm not sure what's especially revealing about this story. A lot of the content we already knew, except now there's more evidence of it. The marginalrevolution author wrongly suggests that "it has long been assumed that propaganda posts would support the government with praise or criticize critics of the government" and says it's surprising this paper found it wasn't. This is no surprise, others have concluded this before this has been known probably a decade.
Kudos for the authors to write this paper though, it takes courage to do this.
For most people skimming the comment section, this interview here with a paid Chinese "online commentator" is far more revealing than submitted article is:
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2012/10/china%...
The commentator estimates 10-20% of posts on Chinese media are by "online commentators" like him, and he also talks about the methods he uses to guide and manipulate the discussion.
Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate
#5I'm not sure what's especially revealing about this story. A lot of the content we already knew, except now there's more evidence of it. The marginalrevolution author wrongly suggests that "it has long been assumed that propaganda posts would support the government with praise or criticize critics of the government" and says it's surprising this paper found it wasn't. This is no surprise, others have concluded this b…
Gary King is a pretty prominent political scientist. It's unlikely that this is unoriginal work. Yes, that's an appeal to authority, but I think the methods used are what's novel. And don't discount just having some evidence!
Here's the article:
edit: it's also in the apsr, which is one of the poli sci journals.
There are a lot less people doing this kind of analysis in an academic setting than one might expect.
Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate
#6Title might want to be altered: this is a description of a specific research paper analyzing Chinese online propaganda campaigns, not as general an analysis as the title indicates. Interesting stuff!
RAND has study says the same about Russia.
The Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model Why It Might Work and Options to Counter It http://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html
Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate
#7This is really scary, because I do read comments critically, and have seen those sections being flooded with nonsense, or convincing arguments being pushed without evidence. Heck, this even happens on HackerNews, which users are thoughtful hackers and which are secretly trying to push an agenda? Or is there even a line between those?
Now some food for thought, does online anonymity ultimately help the powerful more than the general public?
Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate
#8Its interesting to compare the behavior observations in the article to the concept of "concern trolling" which is almost the same.
Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate
#9> …find a massive government effort, where every year the 50c party writes approximately 448 million social media posts nationwide. About 52.7% of these posts appear on government sites. The remaining 212 million posts are inserted into the stream of approximately 80 billion total posts on commercial social media sites, all in real time. If these estimates are correct, a large proportion of government web site comments, and about one of every 178 social media posts on commercial sites, are fabricated by the government. The posts are not randomly distributed but, as we show in Figure 2, are highly focused and directed, all with specific intent and content.
This is massive. But I am sure Western governments are paying attention as to how to combat online opinion using similar tactics. But I doubt they can match that sort of scale with their economies. Indian freelancers aren't really going to be that convincing to the American public.
Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate
#10In China the government hires people to sway public opinion. In the US, special interests and those with money do it. Is it worse that the Chinese government does it to "keep the peace", while those in the US do it to get your money? Super PACs, political activists, pharmaceutical companies, Reddit power users, brigades and pay-for-votes services... not sure if there's any real difference.