Information operations directed at Hong Kong • Hacker News Board

Re: Information operations directed at Hong Kong

#201

Post by robocat » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 10:45 PM UTC

yomly wrote: post #177

prewett wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that mainland people have to apply for a special permit to even cross the border into HK. I would expect it to be even harder to live there as a mainlander. So while they may be posing as HK residents on Twitter, I don't think they are in reality.

How old is your knowledge? China changes fast - my impression was that it was quite straightforward to go to HK. At least for people in SZ...

Shenzhen is a special economic zone, which had its own border with mainland China until early 2018.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/21...

Re: Information operations directed at Hong Kong

#202

Post by BubRoss » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 10:47 PM UTC

woah wrote: post #152

tmux314 wrote: post #42

Good on Twitter and Facebook. On top of blocking thousands of websites (which includes Facebook, Google, Twitter) China's government employs thousands of government employees just to purge even the most mild criticism of the CCP on Weibo [1]. They also employ tens of thousands to export their propaganda overseas, using sock puppet accounts to push their worldview[2]. And their worldview is fiercely anti-democratic. T…

Even here on Hacker News, a week or so ago I saw someone being chided for “breaking the HN guidelines” by calling out a sock puppet. When I looked at the comment history of the account doing the chiding, all of its comments were on China related articles, taking a pro-China view.

I was assured that this never happens on hacker news and that the evidence that I and others pointed out was both poisonous and imagined.

I would actually love to be wrong, but the explanation given was just that it has been looked into, not anything in depth or addressing the patterns being brought up. Similar disinformation and fast bulk downvoting against the general trend happens when talking about reddit's /r/bitcoin and the company Blockstream that runs it.

At least there is a dialog here and everyone generally wants the same thing (actual opinions and explanations from reasonable people with no astroturfing).

Re: Information operations directed at Hong Kong

#203

Post by yorwba » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 10:47 PM UTC

kmonsen wrote: post #191

dang wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two site guidelines that apply to this. First, it's not ok to use HN primarily for political, ideological, or national battle. If a commenter is posting as you describe, we ask them to stop. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20727426 . But by no means does it follow that a commenter behaving that way must be a sockpuppet, astroturfer, shill, spy, foreign agent, etc. That's where the second guide…

I think what is missing in most the the China and HN discussions is that HN is not blocked by the great firewall, so it is much easier for regular people living in China to participate. They will naturally have more pro-China views. Just like residents of every country will have more positive views of that country. And when that country is criticized they will be even more defensive and reflectively pro what is criti…

> HN is not blocked by the great firewall

Your information is 16 days out of date: https://en.greatfire.org/news.ycombinator.com There's now a partial block where it can be accessed from some locations and not from others.

That's not necessarily going to prevent "pro-China" views from appearing. People who circumvent the Great Firewall e.g. to follow celebrities on Instagram may not like the censorship, but could be on the same page with the government on other issues.

Re: Information operations directed at Hong Kong

#204

Post by lawrenceyan » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 10:47 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #198

lawrenceyan wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I think if there’s any community that can meaningfully ensure discussion from all sides can occur without irrevocably degrading the level of quality / emphasis on seeking truth within that discourse, it’s HN. I would be careful though, as the culture of thoughtful inquiry that HN has managed to cultivate in these past few years, could easily end up being destroyed and end up going the way of Reddit. The only re…

> I would be careful though The #1 way for us all to be careful is to follow the guideline against insinuating astroturfing or bad faith in comments, and to encourage other community members to follow it. I hope the users who have been reading my posts about this (see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for plenty more) will start doing more such encouragement. Because you're right: we can…

Have you considered hiring more people to work specifically on data analytics, fraud detection, etc. for HN?

This is a pretty valuable place, and I would hate to see it fall because of a lack of resources/support. I’m not sure how Paul Graham or YC in general views it, but surely there’s enough inherent value in the existence of something like Hacker News even from a purely business standpoint to support having more funds allocated or it?

Re: Information operations directed at Hong Kong

#205

Post by markdown » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 10:48 PM UTC

Gabriel_Martin wrote: post #153

I wonder what other sites are seeing this, Reddit and Instagram are pretty obvious Quora perhaps?

/r/sino has been working overtime of late, and sending their minions all over reddit to push their message.

Re: Information operations directed at Hong Kong

#206

Post by flying_sheep » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 10:56 PM UTC

mef wrote: post #165

flying_sheep wrote: post #117

I was living in HK for 30 years. What I want to say is that we all need to prepare for a new form of propaganda, which is partially based on partial fact but with twisted explanation. They are getting more logical, therefore more persuasive to middle-classes. If we do not have freedom or human rights in our minds, it will be very hard to deny those propaganda.

Historically the most effective propaganda has been based partially on fact. Outright fabrication doesn't work as well as taking an accepted fact and twisting what came before or what will come after.

True. And this is getting worse because China is now rich. In old time, only brain-washed patriots believe those propaganda. But now CCP hires well-educated writers, Weibo opinion leaders to write seemingly objective articles that credit CCP exclusively with the economy growth. The middle classes in China has already believed in those propaganda faithfully because the messages match perfectly what they have experienced.

We need to be afraid of them. Because even if the Great Firewall disappears now, they will continue to defend CCP and their authoritarian system.

Re: Information operations directed at Hong Kong

#207

Post by hker » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 10:57 PM UTC

For those who want to understand the bigger picture of this propaganda campaign, check out this allegedly leaked instruction for how China controls media (picture in Chinese [1], transcribed in Chinese [2], google translated to English [3]).

[1]: https://pincong.rocks/article/3572

[2]: https://pastebin.com/anMtU0Lz

[3]: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u...

Re: Information operations directed at Hong Kong

#208

Post by bouncycastle » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 11:03 PM UTC

One of the strangest things I seen so far was not online but on the street in Sydney, Australia. There was an "anti-democracy protest" https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/anti-hong-kong-protest-in-...

It looks people who oppose Hong Kongers really exist and truly hold on to their beliefs.

Re: Information operations directed at Hong Kong

#209

Post by diNgUrAndI » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 11:03 PM UTC

martey wrote: post #20

mortenjorck wrote: post #14

The 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.

State is a group of people. How about marketing campaign? Companies are also groups of people too. What I see here is twitter bending its rules to not work with certain groups of people based on their own definition of whether it is state sponsored.

Wonder what they do about republicans or democats launching twitter compaigns. Will they get banned as well?

I smell the inconsistencies in applying the rules to US vs. the rest of the world.

Re: Information operations directed at Hong Kong

#210

Post by zawerf » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 11:05 PM UTC

tmux314 wrote: post #42

Good on Twitter and Facebook. On top of blocking thousands of websites (which includes Facebook, Google, Twitter) China's government employs thousands of government employees just to purge even the most mild criticism of the CCP on Weibo [1]. They also employ tens of thousands to export their propaganda overseas, using sock puppet accounts to push their worldview[2]. And their worldview is fiercely anti-democratic. T…

There are pretty fun examples of how people try to dodge censorship.

For example the Hong Kong billionaire Li Kha Shing managed to post a two page newspaper ad which contains a hidden message:

https://i.imgur.com/7IJLn3g.jpg

Translation: https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/csg9yz/hong_kong_bill...