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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

#121

Post by aerosmile »

88840-8855 wrote: post #97
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.

You would be handing over full political and military control to a group of individuals, with no way of taking it back. If those individuals turn out to perform as well as the current Chinese leaders, you would be ahead. If they turn out to perform more like the past Chinese leaders, you would be behind. Over the past 5,000 years, China got it more wrong than right, which is the only reason that they haven't been the undisputed world leader with the highest GDP, which is where they belong given their vast human and natural resources.

Democracy was never meant to be as efficient as a dictatorship. In fact, inefficiency is baked in by design to hedge against bad leadership (at the cost of good leaders having their potential impact massively reduced). Think of democracy as a political system with an expensive but effective insurance policy.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#122

Post by tehjoker »

cyb_ wrote: post #7
tehjoker wrote: post #5

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

> Whataboutism or whataboutery (as in "what about…?") is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy, which attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving the argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

The American media is attempting to frame China as worth of fighting over Taiwan by demarcating it as exceptionally evil by demonstrating that it does things that no acceptable country would do. Unfortunately for that argument, usually the US is doing something more exceptional and extreme than the demonstrated behavior.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#124

Post by johnsolo1701 »

fc373745 wrote: post #90
isoprophlex wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

This might be hard for you to believe, but there are a lot of people who have genuine and consistent empathy for needless suffering, no matter where it happens. You might not hear from us much online, because we often get crushed under the relentless cynicism your comment chillingly embodies.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#125

Post by foverzar »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #86
foverzar wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I see what you mean, but it is only evident when you actually know of RF as a political entity. It's not as evident when they operate under localised brands posing as "just small local news".

In Russia RF's news outlets were the ones who resisted the foreign funded media explicit labeling regulations the most and were the slowest to comply and start labeling their content explicitly.

What I mean is their degree of transparency is quite debatable and raises some red flags.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#126

Post by hardlianotion »

88840-8855 wrote: post #97
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.

Yes, all true. The treatment of post Soviet Russia was extremely opportunistic and shameful. It is not a great surprise that Putin's Russia regards the West as an existential threat.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#127

Post by the-dude »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #74
the-dude wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you've editted, I will use a new comment. Propaganda is among others what to say, or not to say. When to say it. What words to use. 1) Where the NYT uses manipulating western media , I would say China is engaging with world leading social networks . Basically China is buying likes . Big frickin' deal. But the NYT calls this manipulates Facebook and Twitter ( as if they are influencing the companies in itself ).…

Do you regard Tibet as an internal Chinese matter? The US has more of a track record, I'll admit. On the other hand, China keeps forever in a way that the US does not. I asked if you have any evidence. You didn't even hint that you had any, so I will assume that you do not. So we're back to "That's just your opinion."

Asking for evidence of manufacturing consent is not understanding manufacturing consent. Without being told, the media knows what is supposed to report on and what not to report on.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#128

Post by dirtyid »

foverzar wrote: post #88
andreilys wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>focusing optics on it.

Basically. Western reporting trying to overindex PRC influence campaigns as part of manufacturing consent has gotten so bad that useful idiots in the west start to reflexively accuse 50C everywhere. And brainwashed enough to genuinely believe it. Official 50C operates domestically, not abroad. Even then, 50c posting is characterized by spamming low effort platitudes instead of high effort engagement. PRC isn't wasting valuable human capita with English proficiency to argue/troll on platforms like HN or Reddit. Millions sympathetic to PRC opinions like diaspora / VPN users do that on their own free time. To date, PRC influence campaigns are limited to a hundreds / low thousands of accounts boosting discourse of official accounts on Twitter and Facebook. So far, they've been low effort campaigns with poor reach. But repetitive headlines tries to insinuate otherwise.

PRC will probably harness GPT-3 to exploit asymmetry in censorship ability. They just haven't yet.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#129

Post by tiahura »

johnsolo1701 wrote: post #57

When something negative about China is posted: "Everyone does it!" When something negative about the US is posted: "Downfall of an empire!"

Why wouldn’t you have high expectations of the US and low expectations of China?

The rise of King Xi should demonstrate that culturally China is still hundreds of years behind the West.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#130

Post by forty »

88840-8855 wrote: post #97
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.

Fast infrastructure has a cost that you might not be willing to pay in practice (especially if you happen to be the guy beaten by the police)

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20211221-human-cost-of...

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