How China Unleashed Twitter Trolls to Discredit Hong Kong’s Protesters

"It's complicated" is a phrase to dodge facts. Here's some balance. The US has done a bunch of terrible things to other countries, they aren't a good and righteous nation, none are, and neither is China.

There are ghost cities in the US, to say there are none in China is ridiculous. You can do quick search and turn up many respected news sources reporting this.

One side of the argument has been heard for decades, we thought China was quaint and had an old quiet society that respected traditions.

The other side we are just now starting to hear (from respected news sources, other governments and yes vloggers), is that China has been hiding it's true nature. And that is the garbage.

Just go look up what is going on in Hong Kong right now. Or go look up how the current leader of China declared himself ruler for life. That is what despot does.

>phrase to dodge facts

Not so much as dodge facts as, I assume your questions are rhetorical, and it's not worth the effort to elaborate on each.

Re: Ghost Cities

I didn't claim there are none? Though if we are on the topic they are loaded propaganda characterization like "debt trap" to paint a certain image of Chinese (mis)allocations of resources which was used to support unending China inflate GDP, China collapse theories that have failed to manifest. The alternate narrative is that these are under-utilized cities that will slowly become populated as Chinese urbanization continues. Chinese urbanization targets is 50% to 80% in the next 30 years, or 400 million people and 100 million more new residential units. Building new cities ahead of time and populating them on a 15 year phase is literally part of the development strategy [1]. That's not to dismiss the wild speculation that surrounds these development, and that some will take longer than others, but many previously touted ghost cities are reaching targeted capacity. Often after transit infrastructure is finalized.

This kind of alarmist news has happened for decades. I don't know how you're drawing conclusions that reporting on China has focused on quaint Chinese interest stories, or that China somehow managed to conceal it's nature all this time. When the dominant coverage is has been over the scale of Chinese modernization and the sustainability of Chinese development model including ghost cities, previously they might have been filed under human interest. Now they're given more significance post Olympics -> global financial crisis which China percieved as failure of western systems -> China decided to be more assertive -> China 2025 / SSC makes Obama pivot to Asia -> present day trade war / great power competition with US. Non of this is new. It's just being activated opportunistically now.

As for despot / emperor / dictator Xi, this again is a profound naive social media tier hottake. Xi has to play domestic politics and is beholden to the CPC politburo standing committee. Repealing term limits required the consent of standing committee, same with his recent elevation to people's leader at BeiDaiHe this year after failing a year before. His power is not absolute. There's various analysis of his ascent and relative power in the Chinese system, but the one I subscribe to is that Xi was elected internally to shepherd China through a difficult transition (middle income trap / demographic bomb etc / reunification). The CPC is flexible enough to nominate a despot when the situation calls for.

[1] https://pic1.zhimg.com/80/5a158c5bda6b768cdebc6571663c4e84_h...

What do you think is the best approach to make sure one's opinion is independent without spending a massive amount of time on getting an expertise in the subject?

I'm glad more people are noticing this. The idea of huge bot or troll farms on Twitter is, as far as I can tell, more or less completely in the heads of people with particular political views.

You can see this at the start. The guy has to give a grovelling disclaimer in his first slide that he's leftist, hates Nazis, hates racists etc. He has to say this because he's about to destroy a conspiracy theory held exclusively by these kinds of people.

I did an analysis a few years ago of a typical claim along these lines. It turned out to be what I could only describe as academic fraud:

https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...

Of course the media ran with it and never published any corrections or critical analysis. Everyone who read the relevant stories in the Times of London/New York Times was simply misled and fell further down the rabbit hole of imagining non-existent Twitter bots.

Now the same newspaper (NYT) that's published outright fraudulent stories about Twitter bots as fact in the past, is trying to convince us that China is using the same tactics. Maybe they are. But given how much wrongness is out there on this topic, I am very skeptical.

Here's an example of just one of the absurd mis-identifications:

https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/i-m-not-a-russian-tro...

Also remember that Twitter themselves are a big part of the problem here. As the speaker in the video observes, any time you try and research this topic you can find people whose accounts were suspended and frequently find them complaining about it on other platforms (i.e. not bots). A Twitter employee himself has openly referred to (real) Trump supporters as "bots":

Just go to a random [Trump] tweet and just look at the followers. They’ll all be like, guns, God, ‘Merica, and with the American flag and the cross. Like, who says that? Who talks like that? It’s for sure a bot

The video of that can be found on Project Veritas.

I'd broaden that out. The entire MSM is now largely a low-truth information source. I can't find the exact quote now, but one of the leading media execs in the UK was just a few weeks ago openly advocating that media organisations should consider reporting the truth lower down their priorities than advancing their own agenda. Personally judging on how things have gone down in the past I don't think that have a media cleaned of inconvenient truths can end well - at all - but folk seem, depressingly, ever more intent on regurgitating what they are fed instead of questioning it, and living in a dumbed-down, disempowered fantasy world of pointless interests and meaningless pursuits. If this doesn't sound too emo.