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Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

nytimes.com

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Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#81

Post by er4hn »

echelon wrote: post #51
gentleman11 wrote: post #21

Imagine living somewhere like China and not liking it. It would be hellish, you couldn’t even talk about it without a police visit or your boss passing trouble along to you. A giant human spirit grinder

Quoted post unavailable.

> Americans can say anything, even if it's proudly proclaiming "fuck [current politician]"

as the joke goes:

The American says: ''I can walk in front of the White House and shout 'Down with Reagan,' and nothing will happen to me.'' The Russian retorts: ''I can walk in front of the Kremlin and yell 'Down with Reagan,' too, and nothing will happen to me, either.''

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#82

Post by uniqueuid »

323 wrote: post #61
uniqueuid wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, these are legal and regulated forms of manipulation. Covert manipulation is mostly sanctioned through platform TOS and laws.

You confuse "legal and regulated" with "transparent to the public". When Ford pays money to product place one of it's cars in a movie, that might be declared and invoiced in some contract, but you as a film watcher will never know it (unless they make a point of announcing it). So please explain how movie product placement is not covert. The same with PR, think tanks, and a lot of advertising.

I am not confusing these terms.

As usual, they represent a spectrum of desirability, harm, regulation and sanctions. Complete transparency to the public is of course an utopian goal.

The key here is that political influence is handled very differently from commercial influence. Regulation of un-branded advertisements vary by country with some being more lenient and others more strict.

But political content is frequently held to higher standards, and should be.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#83

Post by seibelj »

bgroat wrote: post #73
echelon wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

I'm a Canadian, but I often watch American rallies on the news. I always laugh when some American protestors say they're being oppressed/the current regime is fascistic. I mean, you're gathered, in a crowd, often armed, with your message being broadcast, with a reasonable expectation (I know, I know, not always - especially for certain demographics) of going home/surviving. I'm not sure they really understand what fa…

I'm happy when people are motivated to protest, regardless of the issue or political affiliation. Better than just taking it on the chin, over and over, slowly boiling as politicians make things worse.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#85

Post by asxd »

endisneigh wrote: post #17

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.

Ideally, countries would just not do this. “Everybody does it” is not a convincing argument to move the conversation elsewhere and let it slide. FB/twitter is trying to mitigate this to some extent, but it’s a weird notion that companies are expected to regulate governments now. When an actor abuses a platform, the blame should be focused on the actor.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#86

Post by cscurmudgeon »

foverzar wrote: post #53
cscurmudgeon wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.rfa.org/about/info/mission.html Says right in their about page they are under a govt. mandate. The local language pages also have this information. > Radio Free Asia operates under a Congressional mandate to deliver uncensored, domestic news and information to China, Tibet, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Burma, among other places in Asia with poor media environments and few, if any, free speech…

Well one can argue that the Shanghai police was also quite transparent about it, given the following: > On May 21, a branch of the Shanghai police posted a notice online seeking bids from private contractors for what is known among Chinese officialdom as public opinion management.

Don't you see the difference between that and posting a notice on the Facebook domain visible to all?

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#87

Post by monocasa »

uniqueuid wrote: post #36
hetspookjee wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Platform reports by whom?

By platforms. Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms regularly publish (and in some countries are required by law to publish) reports on coordinated inauthentic behavior. Example: https://about.fb.com/news/2021/07/june-2021-coordinated-inau...

Here's the GCHQ unit that somehow never shows up in the coordinated inauthentic behavior reports. We know some of the specifics because of the Snowden leaks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intellig...

> Campaigns operated by JTRIG have broadly fallen into two categories; cyber attacks and propaganda efforts. The propaganda efforts (named "Online Covert Action"[3] utilize "mass messaging" and the "pushing [of] stories" via the medium of Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and YouTube.[2] Online "false flag" operations are also used by JTRIG against targets.[2]

I's pretty clear to me that every country does this, and it's only the countries without any political sway over Facebook, et al that end up in the 'inauthentic behavior' reports.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#88

Post by foverzar »

andreilys wrote: post #28
endisneigh wrote: post #17

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 lan…

> It's ultimately a gradient

It's actually not. In global politics actors rarely engage in things their peers don't. It seems to me that this is rather ultimately something more like finding the most wildly looking thing about how other culture manages information flows and PR and focusing optics on it.

> 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.

Tbh I think that we had already passed this point, with all the low-grade SEO and myriads of copy-paste clickbait internet-tabloids. The internet has already drowned in low-grade media-content and language models would hardly change anything fundamentally in that matter.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#89

Post by chroem- »

WaxProlix wrote: post #70
chroem- wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia has an entire section dedicated to his denial of the genocide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom...

I don't think that says what you're claiming it says. In fact, my reading of the content is contradictory to my reading of your comments. Am I missing something?

Are the quotes where he calls reporting on the genocide, propaganda, not good enough for you?
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