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China increases spending 500% to influence America

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Re: China increases spending 500% to influence America

#51

Post by scarmig »

dalbasal wrote: post #43
scarmig wrote: post #10

Chinese propaganda is just so... Tone deaf. Give me a couple million dollars and a couple interns and I'm pretty sure I could do better than any of its existing organs. This isn't a particularly high bar: you could probably do better just by doing nothing.

This is similar to the common sentiment people have about advertising: It's so stupid... never works on anyone I know. I don't know why companies waste their money. Meanwhile, advertising is an industry that rivals energy, shipping and such. If that's not markt proof of efficacy, IDK what is. From the advertiser side of the advertiser-consumer relationship, there's no doubt of efficacy. You open an online business. N…

The structural kind of propaganda is one thing: make sure American cultural products have to respect Chinese sensibilities, and that's huge.

I'm speaking strictly of the hamfisted Twitter accounts and silly press releases that are meant for international consumption.

Re: China increases spending 500% to influence America

#52

Post by [deleted] »

scarmig wrote: post #35
briefcomment wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think are examples of Chinese propaganda? If it was good, I don't think we'd be able to tell.

I agree that good propaganda wouldn't be easily discernable as propaganda. I'm skeptical that the same organizations that run the shitty Twitter fake accounts can simultaneously run actually effective programs. It'd be like Apple simultaneously being Apple and also running a shitty Etsy storefront that sells amateurish coffee cozies.

[deleted]

Re: China increases spending 500% to influence America

#53

Post by Context_free »

briantakita wrote: post #44

Aside from their hard work & valuing education, how did China rise up in modern times to get all of this social, economic, & technological power? Recent history has some interesting twists & they have had many helping hands.

Marxism-Leninism

Re: China increases spending 500% to influence America

#56

Post by max_hammer »

briantakita wrote: post #44

Aside from their hard work & valuing education, how did China rise up in modern times to get all of this social, economic, & technological power? Recent history has some interesting twists & they have had many helping hands.

Authroian regime and homogenous population(Han). It's same model as Singapore, just at bigger level.

Re: China increases spending 500% to influence America

#57

Post by 2020aj »

briefcomment wrote: post #17
scarmig wrote: post #10

Chinese propaganda is just so... Tone deaf. Give me a couple million dollars and a couple interns and I'm pretty sure I could do better than any of its existing organs. This isn't a particularly high bar: you could probably do better just by doing nothing.

What do you think are examples of Chinese propaganda? If it was good, I don't think we'd be able to tell.

Here's a medium post describing how they've been recruiting Western YouTubers: https://medium.com/swlh/how-china-is-influencing-youtubers-i...

Re: China increases spending 500% to influence America

#58

Post by munk-a »

enchiridion wrote: post #28
sriram_malhar wrote: post #6

It seems to me that all a foreign power has to do has to generate enough twitter/fake news saying "OMG we are running out of toilet paper/gas", and watch America crumble. It is like the covid virus is not the one doing the damage; it is the immune system's own response, the cytokine storm.

Despite what Twitter might be saying, America is doing just fine. Seems like the image of America crumbling over toilet paper is the real propaganda.

Twitter has the ability to create sudden panics - we saw that a year ago with the toilet paper issue being referenced. I agree that a lot of what happens on Twitter never escapes the bubble of Twitter - but that toilet paper panic was swept up by mainstream news and echoed across the nation.

Being able to incite a panic can be extremely tactically valuable if you can, for instance, leverage that panic to move a whole bunch of product at a mark up or weaken a critical system at a critical time.

Re: China increases spending 500% to influence America

#60

Post by dageshi »

sct202 wrote: post #41
scarmig wrote: post #10

Chinese propaganda is just so... Tone deaf. Give me a couple million dollars and a couple interns and I'm pretty sure I could do better than any of its existing organs. This isn't a particularly high bar: you could probably do better just by doing nothing.

Honestly, they could do so much by letting some of Chinese TikTok out on to the international side. I've seen quite a few reposts on Twitter and Reddit from Douyin that are completely inaccessible directly, and if they were actually trying to get people to like them they have a giant bank of content that they could curate to show whatever they wanted.

I have been quite suspect of some chinese content that turned up on reddit at interestingly specific times...

During or around the time of the protests in HK a lot of chinese content started popping up in r/videos and similar in a way that was out of context for the usual content there. Then it disappeared again. I assumed some kind of manipulation was going on.

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