China has been doing this for a while, not only on social media, but traditional media / institutions too. It's about time to get serious about this problem.
https://www.hoover.org/news/china-exerting-sharp-power-influ...
Information operations directed at Hong Kong
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Re: Information operations directed at Hong Kong
#32Was in China when the first protest happened and the news coverage was mostly saying things like that the people are clueless in Hong Kong and don’t understand the law about extradition. They had various experts all saying similar things and they would also point to random weibo posts about totally not on the payroll “people” saying they want their city back from the protesters.. I mean it’s one thing if China’S central government wants Hong Kong to be a certain way but dressing it up as “lots of ordinary folks agree with them” is pretty disingenuous and it seems very fair for any platform to call the government out on it—-especially non-Chinese owned platforms.
Re: Information operations directed at Hong Kong
#33This doesn't really explain the money they took from Xinhua News to promote certain tweets that lied about the protests being violent or unwanted by the majority of HK residents. https://twitter.com/pinboard/status/1162711159000055808 https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-is-running-paid-ads-...
It's just a little further down: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/advertisi...
Thanks. That's pretty clearly motivated by recent disinformation campaigns, but doesn't mention them at all. Kinda lets them off the hook in my opinion, not to mention keeping the money.
Edit: Facebook, for example, calls them out directly. https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/08/removing-cib-china/
Re: Information operations directed at Hong Kong
#34The elephant left standing in the room is not the spam and bot accounts, but the official, state-actor accounts such as Xinhua News that pay for promoted tweets carrying the same message. Granted this is likely beyond the scope of Twitter’s safety team, but this completely sidesteps the issues raised here: https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/19/twitter-is-blocked-in-chin...
Yes basically this is a state sponsored misinformation campaign.
Re: Information operations directed at Hong Kong
#35So this has become the norm now. Social media products who’s primary utility is to share information between people are now being used by governments to sow discord.
Nothing new except the medium.
The speed and reach makes it different. You wouldn't say that flying is like walking faster - it's fundamentally different.
Re: Information operations directed at Hong Kong
#36So this has become the norm now. Social media products who’s primary utility is to share information between people are now being used by governments to sow discord.
They're just yet another business selling user's attention. That's not new. The utility was never users sharing with each other, it was always users providing minable information.
All of that information sharing just makes the sold attention more valuable to the buyers.
Re: Information operations directed at Hong Kong
#37Facebook made a similar announcement today: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/08/removing-cib-china/
Wow, those posts. They are so unsubtle.
with 200k accounts on Twitter alone, the press teams on Twitter and facebook had plenty to choose from... or china adapter the content to facebook audience?
would be interesting to dig the data they released to create a profile of the profile china have for those audiences
Re: Information operations directed at Hong Kong
#38This seems like a very slippery slope.
Recently Jackie Chan and Liu Yifei are a couple of higher profile individuals have expressed support for the mainland or condemnation of the protesters' riotous behavior. Jackie Chan is a Hong Kong national - Lieu Yifei is Chinese American. The reason that this is relevant is because we live in the day and age where holding the wrong opinion is increasingly frequently grounds for getting black listed or worse. They feel strongly enough that they're willing to risk an immense amount, just to share their views and values.
They they feel so strongly about this issue is reasonable evidence that many others also likely feel strongly about this issue, and not necessarily in support of the protesters. Consequently, there are undoubtedly large numbers of people expressing genuine negative views against the protesters. How many of these individuals ended up getting banned? It's twitter. A huge chunk of the userbase posts like bots. There's not exactly a whole lot of insightful discussion going on with 140 characters + memes. When you get into political talking points where real people are simply repeating the same talking points at one another, this gets even more extreme.
Re: Information operations directed at Hong Kong
#39HongKonger here. I have some friends in China posting similar anti-protest posts on WeChat social media. It's like the news they read has a completely different story than what it's being told in legitimate new sources. The problem of fake news does become very apparent, and I hope people in China can eventually gain awareness or at least start to question the validity of their news sources.
same in brazil and crimea and before that arabspring.
the obvious fake content on youtube and facebook was reported and removed, but all it did was hide the traces of the content that flooded private whatsapp groups.
Re: Information operations directed at Hong Kong
#40The elephant left standing in the room is not the spam and bot accounts, but the official, state-actor accounts such as Xinhua News that pay for promoted tweets carrying the same message. Granted this is likely beyond the scope of Twitter’s safety team, but this completely sidesteps the issues raised here: https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/19/twitter-is-blocked-in-chin...
See https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/advertisi... , which was posted to the Twitter blog at approximately the same time as this post.
Very curious which entities get blocked by this policy.
Fox News? The Telegraph?