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False Pro-China Accounts Invade Twitter in the UK

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Re: False Pro-China Accounts Invade Twitter in the UK

#101

Post by teknologist »

denton-scratch wrote: post #96
NVHacker wrote: post #66

That's hillarious - like there are any real supporters of China in the UK :).

UK universities are full of Chinese students. In Oxford, there are entire student accomodation blocks that seem to contain only Chinese students. It's possible, but unlikely, that these students are opponents of the PRC government. They will mostly be privately funded; which means they will be from families that have done well from the PRC.

Oxford has its own Confucius Institute of course (known as a China Centre) of which they are likely to be members of. The PRC uses these organisations to keep tabs on the overseas PRC students and make sure they're not stepping out of line. ;)

Re: False Pro-China Accounts Invade Twitter in the UK

#103

Post by JTbane »

yodelshady wrote: post #59
marcus_holmes wrote: post #32

I stopped using Twitter a few years ago. Haven't regretted it. I see nothing useful or good there. And it's amazing how it just doesn't matter if you don't pay any attention to it.

Supposedly, it's good for security discussions. I've tried and in reality whilst some signal is there the noise is just overwhelming. Even with curation, almost 100% of the traffic was unrelated personal conflicts. Hopefully in a few years' we'll rediscover the personal/professional separation.

> Supposedly, it's good for security discussion

Can you really discuss anything useful with only 280 characters?

Re: False Pro-China Accounts Invade Twitter in the UK

#104

Post by marcus_holmes »

onethought wrote: post #95
marcus_holmes wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent a couple of years in SE Asia, and worked in Cambodia, and my comment is based on that experience. I had a fascinating conversation with one of my staff where she explained that to criticise one's boss was absolutely taboo. Roughly equivalent to taking a dump on your boss's desk in Western culture. There's this whole concept of "social harmony" that we don't have in the West. And partly it revolves around resp…

I think there are crossovers. There are party elites. There are also a huge number of private enterprise that are not politically involved at all. They are there to make money, or impact. You are right about the social harmony aspect, but the younger generations interpret that as “don’t interfere with gov” … they won’t publically criticise or do any kind of political activism. But that still leaves a whole lot of thi…

yeah, same in Cambodia. Most people I talked to didn't really seem to care about the politics, and are much more interested in making money. As long as the government let them do that relatively unrestricted, then they observed social harmony and kept out of politics.

Re: False Pro-China Accounts Invade Twitter in the UK

#105

Post by VLM »

agd wrote: post #69

Is it possible to prove that one is human on platforms via some kind of zero knowledge proof? i.e. Guaranteed human, while preserving pseudonymity?

No because as long as two sites exist, a malicious actor can cross them over.

Alice thinks she's posting to a Mongolian basket weaving forum, and as such she solves a captcha-type proof, and her post appears, so all seems well to her.

Actually that captcha-type proof came from Mal-the-Malicious-One who is trying to influence opinion by posting political stuff on a Japanese Anime forum. His political masters fund both Mal and the Mongolian basket weaving forum. Given modern tech it doesn't cost much of anything to fund a small.. or even large.. forum.

Alice incorrectly thought she was performing a proof to post on a Mongolian basket weaving forum but she was actually performing a proof to post someone else's political content on someone else's Japanese Anime forum.

Interesting meta question: Who wins and who loses? Clearly, the people ignoring political content win because they got someone else to pay for their Mongolian basket weaving forum. Mal-the-Malicious wins because he's got a job. The owners of the Japanese Anime forum win because they "got more clicks" so the ad revenue pours in. The people paying for this win because their political spam got posted. The only losers in this are the general public whom are getting political spam cluttering up their Japanese Anime forum. But they've got nowhere to turn because everywhere is clogged with spam, and they're paying $0 for the service and the forum, being more wealthy, can afford better features. People who are not gullible are not hurt by the political spam. Only dumb/gullible people are hurt by the political spam.

So its one of those eugenic slash tragedy of the commons type of scenarios, at least WRT who loses.

Eventually in the long run there is systemic collapse. Certainly, "reviews" on the internet are now useless and I generally ignore them, and once everyone does that, "reviews" as a system will go away. Comments on propaganda outlets were turned off a long time ago, plenty of publishers who don't allow comments anymore... Eventually if all the comments on the internet are either spam or hyper censored, nobody will bother to read comments on the internet, so it'll go away.

Re: False Pro-China Accounts Invade Twitter in the UK

#106

Post by Shadonototra »

NVHacker wrote: post #102
Shadonototra wrote: post #65

can't be worse than anti-china media in the west? right?

Whatever things the western media say about China, they would need to get an order of magnitude "worse" to actually get close to reality.

one is institutionalized (western propaganda machine), the other is marginal (one dude running twitter bots from the UK maybe?)

Re: False Pro-China Accounts Invade Twitter in the UK

#107

Post by johnday »

heurisko wrote: post #47

A fraction of the population of the UK are on twitter, but it is used to drive media narratives. I'm skeptical, as it feels like the narratives are more to do with they are cheap to write about, rather than meaningful journalism. For example, after black players missed penalties in the Euros, there was wall-to-wall coverage on the BBC about racist comments directed at the players on twitter, provoking discussion on h…

> A fraction of the population of the UK are on twitter

This is not a very useful statistic, given that it's always going to be true (0% and 100% would both be "a fraction of the population").

For some actual numbers, there look to be around 17 million Twitter users in the UK, or around a quarter of the population.

Re: False Pro-China Accounts Invade Twitter in the UK

#108

Post by VLM »

chrisjc wrote: post #67
gibba999 wrote: post #15

Without commenting on China specifically, a few facts: - The cheapest, safest way to "invade" the US (or any Western democracy) isn't through an army, but through manipulation of news, social media, and elections - Indeed, if I'm Iran and I want Iraq attacked, it's much cheaper to manipulate the US into doing the dirty work than to attack myself. - Much of the same is true of corporations -- a million spend lobbying…

Agreed. Whether a relatively paltry (harmless compared to conventional bioweapons) virus like COVID was ever considered as a weapon hardly matters at this point. What really scares the absolute poop out of me is that the west has shown its hand, and exposed stress fractures that could easily be exploited by foreign actors. I'd say that the lines between what you have delineated as first and second cheapest attacks ar…

> Effectively destabilizing and splintering western societies.

There's a biological analogy where a predator can't move into a niche if its already populated.

In the USA we already have groups we're not allowed to criticize, we're only permitted to fight with each other about how rabidly we support them more than inferior people whom don't support them as much as we do, look at my halo, etc. Or there are countries with influence over us that we aren't allowed to name much less complain about.

China can't move in to predate us, those spots are already full. Or to put it more explicitly, the 50 cent army can't move in on the turf of the baizuo.

Likewise there is an interesting biological/ecological analogy where the vast majority of the population are pretty sick of the baizuo, but if they were marginalized then we wouldn't enter a golden era of freedom; we'd just rapidly get sick of the 50 cent army after its expansion into the vacuum.

Re: False Pro-China Accounts Invade Twitter in the UK

#109

Post by VLM »

throwaway210222 wrote: post #28

Odd that an academic paper would fail to mention the work of the UK company Bell Pottinger that conducted a deliberate, paid Twitter campaign with thousands of false account in 2018 with the intent to stoke a racial war (nevermind overturn democracy) in South Africa on behalf of the former president's faction and a family of Indian criminals. From what I understand it bloody nearly succeeded. Perhaps the Chinese lear…

Its kind of like writing a paper about sorting algorithms while somehow forgetting to mention or reference Hoare's QuickSort from 1961.

Re: False Pro-China Accounts Invade Twitter in the UK

#110

Post by rchaud »

kwertyoowiyop wrote: post #98
heurisko wrote: post #47

A fraction of the population of the UK are on twitter, but it is used to drive media narratives. I'm skeptical, as it feels like the narratives are more to do with they are cheap to write about, rather than meaningful journalism. For example, after black players missed penalties in the Euros, there was wall-to-wall coverage on the BBC about racist comments directed at the players on twitter, provoking discussion on h…

Oh, wouldn’t it be great if reporters rarely/never wrote a story about ‘what someone said on Twitter’?

It would indeed be great if reporters were somehow immune to the pressure to constantly churn out stories to compete with the algorithm's recency bias, 24 hour news networks, pseudo-news outrage channels and the like.
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