Live data from Hacker News

Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

nytimes.com

221–230 of 463 posts

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#221

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 just weird seeing how China's propaganda is so good that western nation went from positive and neutral toward China too wanting to sit on a throne of Chinese skulls.

China is good at internal propaganda (which, you know, repressing dissent makes easier), less so at external propaganda.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#223
post #142

On a relevant note, the Tiananmen Massacre monument at the University of Hong Kong was removed last night. They were careful to barricade everything to prevent any videos or images of the monument being destroyed. https://hongkongfp.com/2021/12/23/breaking-fears-for-condemn...

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5041987

Print it out again and reassemble?

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#224

[flagged]

There is a gradient from cultural assimilation -> cultural genocide -> genocide. People quickly jump from former to the later.

Are there re-education camps? Yes. Is it cultural assimilation or cultural genocide? I don't know.

Are there genocide as we understood as Armenian genocide or the Holocaust? I don't think there are many data to support that claim. If we say these two are the same, from what I can gather, it also trivializes Holocaust.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#225
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

whatboutism is whataboutism

So where exactly do you draw the line between "whataboutism" and asserting similarities?

The point is that if you disagree, counter the argument. Asserting similarities does not counter the argument. If I say: "Bob is bad because he steals apples." Saying "But you also steal apples!" does not counter the argument at all. It's changing the subject.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot the /s tag, methinks: "If i could vote for the CCP here in germany, i would." You could not vote for a system like that - if you did, you'd stop having a right to vote for a different system RIGHT after. 'nuff said. It's unfathomable someone in 2021, that is not a Xi-paid troll (precisely what this article is about) would advocate for more authoritarian control, rather than less. The people you spoke to (i…

"EVERYONE IS BRAINWASHED EXCEPT OF US BLESSED AMERICANS" F15 flyover bombing of some random civilians cool individualism that was build on exploitation of the planet and the 90% of the world KEK, sustainable, mate. China workd. I lived there for years and people were happier than here in Germany. I am just sooooooo sick and tired of those anti-China sentiment here in HN. EVERY SINGLE TIME a china article is posted, y…

Please stop "ranting and vomiting" on HN. Not only does it not help, you're reinforcing exactly the situation you're deploring. That damages this community in a deeper way.

HN is a highly international community but it is also highly Western. You can't expect attitudes on topics remote from Western understanding to be either balanced or informed—especially not when the topic is politically and nationally charged. The same would be true of any group of HN's size and regional composition. That's a baseline condition we can't do a thing to change. The question is how we should handle it.

I've expended a huge amount of effort trying to protect this place for minority voices (including about China - here's a list I put together for another user some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/chinamod). I regularly get accused of being a communist agent and all the rest of it (which expresses the stupidity-of-the-collective in a way that would be scary if it weren't so trivial), and I can tell you for sure that accounts like yours, making the opposing case in a name-calling, ranting way, are a big part of the problem on this. So please stop.

Anyone who wants to represent a minority view to a majority (especially a highly-charged majority) has a special responsibility not to "rant and vomit" in a wake-up-sheeple fashion. If you do that, all you achieve is to recharge the majority and reinforce its righteousness in precisely the places you want to see change. Should you happen to be arguing in favor of the truth (or some aspect of the truth), then you discredit the truth, which hurts everybody. I've been trying to make this point to people for years, on a wide range of topics: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....

Arguably it's not fair that the minority has an additional burden that the majority doesn't have, but it's the way these conversations work, and we can't do a thing to change that either.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#227

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 certainly looks like this, until you look at facts. What did the "50 cent army" actually achieve? Anything even close to manufacturing American consent to invade Middle East and kill million random people?

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#228
post #103

Before you use this as an excuse to accuse the commenter you disagree with as being a Wumao, note that China's propaganda strategy serves to distract rather than directly engage, as they would rather minimize engagement. It's the same principle of "don't feed the trolls." Here's a Harvard paper that covers this topic more in depth, though it's about domestic propaganda: https://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/50c…

> a Wumao For reference, the initial W doesn't represent a sound, so this would be "an wumao". (Same for Wuhan.)

The "w" sound is in the u, so unless you also write "an western movie" a wumao is correct.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#229
post #101

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

Have you watched any of the interviews conducted on the street in China on the Asian Boss YouTube channel?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zh88g_EKlqw Pedestrians Being Dumb for 10 Minutes Straight. I guess this is the finest america have to offer?

What is the largest country in South America? ... Africa

Can you name a book? ... ummmmmmm

How many stars on the American flag? ... 32

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that little by little these freedoms are being chipped away so it requires constant fighting and pushing back in an extreme fashion to hopefully slow it down. For example: You want to protest Israel? Great but now in 35 states you cannot accept any government jobs. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws#Anti-BDS_laws_in... Another example: NSA is slurping up every last detail of Americans com…

> NSA is slurping up every last detail of Americans complete being. That we know thanks to snowden. If you've actually read the Snowden papers, you'd know that they don't say anything remotely resembling this.

Well the report is circa 2013 based on years old documents from before that and it details bulk data collection of US nationals' phone related material. It is feasible that in the post smartphone world and the collapse of storage tech costs it is entirely possible that this has been expanded to any device that receives and transmits IP packets. That is enough to piece together everything needed to personally know about a specific individual. Storing this info for later use (even in encrypted form) is exactly what I was detailing and that is a foregone conclusion based on what we do know.
Post reply on HN