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China sows disinformation on Hong Kong using porn accounts on Twitter

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Re: China sows disinformation on Hong Kong using porn accounts on Twitter

#11

Post by simias »

FreeHugs wrote: post #2

I don't understand it. So there are bots that have been posting "porn" for a bunch of years. And now they post political messages. How does that influence anybody? Who subscribes to porn bots? I would have thought only other porn bots follow porn bots? Can somebody link to an example of such a bot?

>Who subscribes to porn bots? I would have thought only other porn bots follow porn bots?

Clearly if they exist they must have some marginal use. It's like saying "who falls for nigerian prince scams?" or "who is influenced by ads?". Clearly some people are, otherwise they wouldn't be quite as popular. I'm sure some real people follow porn bots in order to... see porn.

As for the influence I think in isolation it's probably negligible, but if people get flooded by propaganda on social networks it may be quite efficient. "Everybody says it, it can't be completely wrong". The echo-chamber nature of many social networks probably plays into that too. Many people would probably be more likely to follow an obvious bot spamming propaganda that aligns with their beliefs than a real person holding a different opinion. For instance an obviously biased propaganda outlet like Prager U has 2 million followers on Youtube, I doubt all of those are bots.

Re: China sows disinformation on Hong Kong using porn accounts on Twitter

#12

Post by RavlaAlvar »

totaldude87 wrote: post #4

With all that happening in Hong Kong, i wonder why UK and US are not at all involved?

Why should they? Chinese money is just too juicy to give up... until they realize what kind of influence CCP have on their country, it will be too late by then anyway.

Re: China sows disinformation on Hong Kong using porn accounts on Twitter

#13

Post by gruez »

goatinaboat wrote: post #6
FreeHugs wrote: post #2

I don't understand it. So there are bots that have been posting "porn" for a bunch of years. And now they post political messages. How does that influence anybody? Who subscribes to porn bots? I would have thought only other porn bots follow porn bots? Can somebody link to an example of such a bot?

The concept is that an account that is years old and has thousands of followers seems more plausible than one that was just created

Great idea, poor execution. It's going to be suspicious that these accounts suddenly go from NSFW posts to pro-china posts.

Re: China sows disinformation on Hong Kong using porn accounts on Twitter

#14

Post by shawnz »

gruez wrote: post #13
goatinaboat wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concept is that an account that is years old and has thousands of followers seems more plausible than one that was just created

Great idea, poor execution. It's going to be suspicious that these accounts suddenly go from NSFW posts to pro-china posts.

If you look at the tweet history and not just the numbers. What percentage of people that see the tweets will do that?

Re: China sows disinformation on Hong Kong using porn accounts on Twitter

#15

Post by lijogdfljk »

FreeHugs wrote: post #2

I don't understand it. So there are bots that have been posting "porn" for a bunch of years. And now they post political messages. How does that influence anybody? Who subscribes to porn bots? I would have thought only other porn bots follow porn bots? Can somebody link to an example of such a bot?

Google, perhaps? I've been obsessing about (creating) a federated information store recently, and this was one of my points to address.

In my view bad actors don't have to just misinform, but make it more difficult to locate. Doing that seems shockingly easy, as much of our ability to locate data online is limited to brittle keywords.

Not to deviate, but in case anyone is curious: One of my attempts at mitigating this problem is via content hashes. Building a UX where the content hashes are often the point of reference and indexed by search engines might allow us to locate data and related data based on content hashes, rather than easily flooded semantic keys. Metadata pertaining to the hashes would also have to be provided for them to be useful, eg "related:04136e24". Lots of to discuss, but I'm trying to limit my off-topic, despite it being related to [dis|mis]information.

edit: I don't understand the downvote - can someone explain? Not sure exactly if something I said is factually incorrect? To be clear I wasn't saying Google was the thing running the bots, but that Google / search engines might be the point.

Re: China sows disinformation on Hong Kong using porn accounts on Twitter

#16

Post by Numberwang »

FreeHugs wrote: post #2

I don't understand it. So there are bots that have been posting "porn" for a bunch of years. And now they post political messages. How does that influence anybody? Who subscribes to porn bots? I would have thought only other porn bots follow porn bots? Can somebody link to an example of such a bot?

China uses them to paint a picture of westerners as being decadent and animal like.

Re: China sows disinformation on Hong Kong using porn accounts on Twitter

#17

Post by tyri_kai_psomi »

totaldude87 wrote: post #4

With all that happening in Hong Kong, i wonder why UK and US are not at all involved?

The US has a military presence in 150 countries (that we know about). There isn't much that the US isn't involved in, especially when it involves a military superpower on the other side.

Re: China sows disinformation on Hong Kong using porn accounts on Twitter

#18

Post by taneq »

lallysingh wrote: post #3

Sounds like a classic lowest-bidder government contractor situation. "Sure, we have 100,000 accounts, and we'll charge 1.25 RMB per tweet per account." "Fantastic! You get the contract!" "Oh shit we need to find 100,000 accounts fast and cheap."

"I met this girl on the internet, she said she'd do anything for 1.25 RMB. Anything? Really?! ...So I got her to post tweets supporting the Chinese government."

Re: China sows disinformation on Hong Kong using porn accounts on Twitter

#19

Post by alfromspace »

s_Hogg wrote: post #9

I've seen a few of these, they appear in the replies to threads created by BBC journos saying things like (in translation): "support the central government" These accounts were pretty perplexing until this article spelled out what should have been obvious to me.

Who's being convinced by statements like that?

Re: China sows disinformation on Hong Kong using porn accounts on Twitter

#20

Post by wil421 »

totaldude87 wrote: post #4

With all that happening in Hong Kong, i wonder why UK and US are not at all involved?

CIA and other countries equivalent agencies are 100% involved. You’d not be a competent spy if your weren’t.

Just like China likely has spies abroad fueling the counter protests.

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