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Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

nytimes.com

21–30 of 463 posts

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#22
post #13

Why would that be a bad thing? The Republicans influence FoxNews. The Democrats influence CNN. Why wouldn't China also influence some outlets? It's a free market, you don't like a media source, you are free to use one suitable to your bias.

It's more akin to a CNN guest not disclosing the fact that they're on the CCP payroll and will have their opinion influenced as a result.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#23
So I actually paid for subscriptions to a couple of these news sites and they keep forgetting my session and lack a deeplinking feature to their app which doesnt forget my session

I would rather they starve due to lack of revenue at this point so they actually do something competitive

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#25
post #10
post #5

Doesn't the US broadcast regime change propaganda into the country via Radio Free Asia / Radio Free Liberty etc?

Radio Free Asia/Liberty/etc. don't pretend to be someone else while they are broadcasting.

What exactly do you mean by "don't pretend to be somebody else"? They often operate under an umbrella of media projects that act as "local" news.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#26

Which countries don’t do this? What China is doing is bad, but is this some sort of new development? Russia, Germany, France to name a few have been caught doing the same thing. Not to mention the USA. Facebook and Twitter need to handle this issue. This type of stuff is going on meanwhile they’re banning people for the stupidest most innocuous actions.

It would be very helpful if you provide some links to your claims.

There are many platform reports on state-sponsored influence, and they routinely do not name Germany and France.

Instead, the overall picture of perpetrators is that of authoritarian regimes.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#27
post #9
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't make it less true.

Chomsky spent a good part of his career claiming the Cambodian Genocide was just US propaganda.

That would be news to me, src?

Quick search suggest, that this statement is just propaganda.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-07-01/brull---the-boring-tr...

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#28

Which countries don’t do this? What China is doing is bad, but is this some sort of new development? Russia, Germany, France to name a few have been caught doing the same thing. Not to mention the USA. Facebook and Twitter need to handle this issue. This type of stuff is going on meanwhile they’re banning people for the stupidest most innocuous actions.

It's ultimately a gradient, some countries are more aggressive with their astroturfing effort.

China's astroturfing for example has gotten so bad, that the "50 cent army" meme has become pervasive and well-known to mostly anyone that spends time online.

I honestly worry that with the development around language models like GPT-3, the internet as we know it will be completely blanketed with astro-turfed content by language models and low-paid contractors.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#29

Which countries don’t do this? What China is doing is bad, but is this some sort of new development? Russia, Germany, France to name a few have been caught doing the same thing. Not to mention the USA. Facebook and Twitter need to handle this issue. This type of stuff is going on meanwhile they’re banning people for the stupidest most innocuous actions.

It would be foolish to think that either of the companies would move an inch in tackling this. Governments need to enforce policy to lower the ridiculous amount of influence this platforms have. They can start by forcing open standards on these platforms like SMS used to be for messaging. There is barely any technological challenge to the basics of Facebook and Twitter. Here in the Netherlands the PM had a phase where he exclusively posted his messages on Facebook instead of government websites. Acts like that are ridiculous and only feed the hand. Of course the PM and his party gets helpful marketing in return which fuels the cycle.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#30
post #13

Why would that be a bad thing? The Republicans influence FoxNews. The Democrats influence CNN. Why wouldn't China also influence some outlets? It's a free market, you don't like a media source, you are free to use one suitable to your bias.

The Republicans and Democrats are the same as US gov.

> It's a free market

It is not a free market. The US govt. can't influence popular media inside China.

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