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How a fake network pushes pro-China propaganda

bbc.co.uk

21–30 of 159 posts

Re: How a fake network pushes pro-China propaganda

#22
post #12

[flagged]

These are the two comments below yours: https://i.imgur.com/o8c9ZPm.png

While most efforts by the Chinese government to distort and degrade online communications have been focused domestically: https://www.propublica.org/article/leaked-documents-show-how...

There is evidence they are starting to turn their guns outward: https://www.cfr.org/blog/chinas-internet-trolls-go-global

But there is an uncomfortable truth behind all this. Regular, non-government backed Chinese citizens seem to often be so fiercely "patriotic" - they promote gov propaganda largely for free. There is no need to have a Russian-style troll farm if you can deputize a million Chinese living in the west to be active on Twitter promoting government narratives for fun.

Re: How a fake network pushes pro-China propaganda

#23
BBC is definitely not innocent here. I have personally stopped watching BBC news since 2008 when they publish a fake image in their news article. Generally I consider more news sources is better than a single news source. Main stream news media is considered as one single news source for me now, YouTube is so much better than BBC or Twitter, video contents are more trustworthy. BBC has yet to those people with evidence showing how it manipulate videos and images to have a negative tone in their this report.

If you work on ML you know algorithms do not work 100%, it is dependent on the labeled data to train. Nowadays, I won't trust any study without published dataset to be honest.

Edit: I have to say, apparently English platform is playing such an important role in modern society, the leaning of American people can decide what is going to happen in a country, Iraq or Israel, you would expect political lobbying, advertising and such behavior. It is kind of inconvenience to have when you are the head of the planet.

Re: How a fake network pushes pro-China propaganda

#24
post #18

Interesting, didnt know so many here are allergic to negative mentions of china, reacting with bbc flaming. Like cmon its just a dictatorship, accept it.

Might be more of an allergy to unbridled hypocrisy than simply negative mentions of China.

Like hearing oil companies complain about the damage to the environment being wreaked by coal companies.

Or hearing Chinese state media complain about American human rights abuses (which is an example in this article cited by the BBC).

Re: How a fake network pushes pro-China propaganda

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't used the Tor browser lately, but doesn't it automatically block some amount of JavaScript? Though it also wouldn't surprise me if the Tor associated IP addresses were so abused google did block them.

The captcha loads. You just can't seem to get a sufficient score to prove that you are human. Yes, I think that the associated IP addresses are banned for abuse.

Loading doesn't mean it loads the necessary JavaScript, I'm pretty sure I need to accept script from Google or I also get stuck in an endless failure loop.

Re: How a fake network pushes pro-China propaganda

#28

Could it be that they are also active on Hacker News?

I suspect there are several PR firms active on HN. Some topics were suddenly very popular out of nowhere and criticising it was getting you a wall of downvote. Then it stopped.

More than any other tech company, negative things about Apple will get you quickly down voted into oblivion. Hard to know if its just rabid fanboys, or PR firms. Unfortunately, HN isn't interested in naming and shaming companies caught astroturfing and they don't like us to speculate. Its too bad because I would consider that information a huge kindness to humanity.

Re: How a fake network pushes pro-China propaganda

#29
post #8

Could it be that they are also active on Hacker News?

All the evidence says no: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398725

"Counteracting abuse of this site is the #1 thing we do behind the scenes to try to prevent the value of HN from eroding." => So they are active here, but their posts are removed...

Re: How a fake network pushes pro-China propaganda

#30
Now the question is are most of the comments on this thread examples or are they the social conditioned response of Chinese citizens abroad showing the flag.

It can get pretty creepy how aggressive students - for example - get supporting their government. That flash mob behavior isn't as effective as the Russian's conflict stoking troll farms, but man does it drown out conversation, and god help you if you run into it in person.

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