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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

#301

Post by chunghuaming »

nebula8804 wrote: post #256
chunghuaming wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a Chinese citizen right now means: - You cannot travel abroad (no passport for average citizens, except for those that study/work abroad) - You cannot go beyond China's intranet - You cannot transfer money out of country legally, pretty soon can't invest in other countries's stocks - You cannot watch Spiderman, BTS, squid games, porn and many many more things legally - You have very little rights as LGBT - You…

>You cannot travel abroad (no passport for average citizens, except for those that study/work abroad) Really? What accounts for all the Chinese tourists visiting Europe/UK/USA? I have a friend who runs a hostel in Edinburgh and the majority of her guests are Chinese so much so that they have had to print signs in Mandarin asking people to abide by certain rules. >You cannot transfer money out of country legally, pret…

There are way less Chinese tourists in Europe/US now. I think they might just be oversea Chinese students in US and western world, looking to travel.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#302

Post by amelius »

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

> Imagine living somewhere like China and not liking it

Imagine living somewhere in the West, and not liking Facebook.

> A giant human spirit grinder

Yes, you could call it that.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#303

Post by walterbell »

ska wrote: post #265
raimundjoss wrote: post #33

So much of social media pre-supposes that no entity would spend the kinda money to influence an issue. They didn't take a state with limited resources into account.

Forget state level resources, plenty of distortion is created by corporations or other much smaller interests with relatively modest resources. I wouldn't' be at all surprised if this were the source of majority of manipulation in practice. Assuming anything on social media is "untainted" is pretty naive, it seems.

A non-trivial percentage of the Fortune 500 have worked with "grassroots" PR consultants. See Edward Walker's 2014 book, https://twitter.com/evoleadership/status/761959456624082944?...

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#304

Post by walterbell »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #299
raimundjoss wrote: post #33

So much of social media pre-supposes that no entity would spend the kinda money to influence an issue. They didn't take a state with limited resources into account.

There are widespread allegation of UK conservative party using bots: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-50218615 One of the startup growth-hackers gave us a decent talk on some basic social media manipulation It is so easy to create entirely false narratives and / or manipulate online discussion, that at this point I would be surprised if any major group of people with access to half decent budget is not doing i…

EU/NATO 2018 analysis, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29610932 (takes a few seconds to load the PDF file)

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#305

Post by evilos »

akomtu wrote: post #277
kwere wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

xi wasted tens of $ billions in chip manufacturing subsidies. In that field you cant buy success

I meant Xi is going to take TSMC, so he's technically going to "enter the chipmaking business".

There's no way TSMC equipment would survive an invasion in any meaningful way. For obvious reasons.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#306

Post by shukantpal »

forgotmyoldname wrote: post #296
chunghuaming wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like a paid endorsement sponsored by CCP. No real refutes, just brush air away by hand. You visited a few times huh? I was born and lived there for 30 years.

It's really wild that people are so crazed that they think everyone is a paid shill. There's medical terminology to describe people who think everything is a grand conspiracy and make unfalsifiable claims about anyone who opposes them. But good luck with that issue, dude. Maybe you should try visiting countries sometime. Anyone can claim to have lived in a country for 30 years. :)

> But good luck with that issue, dude. Maybe you should try visiting countries sometime. Anyone can claim to have lived in a country for 30 years. :)

Maybe you should visit the country. Anyone can make a claim they stayed there for a few days and only visited the elite, rich parts of the country.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#307

Post by BrazzVuvuzela »

skavi wrote: post #261
chroem- wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we reading the same quote? He is calling reporting about the genocide propaganda.

the best propaganda is the correct truth, no?

Correct, but Chomsky wanted people to believe it was lies.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#308

Post by masterof0 »

chunghuaming wrote: post #297
masterof0 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You cannot transfer money out of country legally, pretty soon can't invest in other countries's stocks. Not true. > You should not get rich (1/3 of billionaires have died or disappeared) Also not true. FuErDais are praise on TV, movies, etc... Crazy Rich Asians , the movie , was a huge hit in China for example, etc... Money and superficiality have always being huge in China (even to get married, you need to buy a h…

> You cannot transfer money out of country legally True. It used to be 50k limit per year. Now because many bureaucratic procedures by banks, it might as well as be zero since you have go to the bank 10+ times. You're talking from a view of a foreigner. I'm talking from a view of native citizen. > Money and superficiality have always being huge in China Not so right now which is what I mentioned. China bars celebriti…

> True. It used to be 50k limit per year. Now because many bureaucratic procedures by banks, it might as well as be zero since you have go to the bank 10+ times. You're talking from a view of a foreigner. I'm talking from a view of native citizen.

Not true, I (and my wife) use our personal accounts to send money back and forth almost every week, so the thousands of chinese students, workers, etc...

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#309

Post by clove »

masterof0 wrote: post #278
star-trek-fleet wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of these can be attributed to authoritarian, or some form of CCP brutality, when moderate amount of scrutiny is applied ... > - You cannot travel abroad (no passport for average citizens, except for those that study/work abroad) This is of course because of China's CVOID policy, which is 0 tolerance. That's a rational decision of China's high-density population, and manufacturing-based economy. I do not think it…

This is an US site, most people here believe that they hear from the media, and is understandable, the same way most Chinese people believe that they see in CCTV. I get people in China asking if I'm safe, or if my house was assaulted by antifa. I think people if they are really interested of what is happening in either country should do their research, instead of parroting what they hear in Youtube. But yeah, you wil…

Well said. But the major problem is vetting the source of your research. Even academic studies are subject to bias or are simply statistical outliers (e.g., type 2 errors).

You can only go so far down the rabbit hole of research before you're wasting time. It's a lot like signal detection theory: Where do you strike the balance between effort and accuracy in research?

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#310

Post by ravel-bar-foo »

nebula8804 wrote: post #256
chunghuaming wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a Chinese citizen right now means: - You cannot travel abroad (no passport for average citizens, except for those that study/work abroad) - You cannot go beyond China's intranet - You cannot transfer money out of country legally, pretty soon can't invest in other countries's stocks - You cannot watch Spiderman, BTS, squid games, porn and many many more things legally - You have very little rights as LGBT - You…

>You cannot travel abroad (no passport for average citizens, except for those that study/work abroad) Really? What accounts for all the Chinese tourists visiting Europe/UK/USA? I have a friend who runs a hostel in Edinburgh and the majority of her guests are Chinese so much so that they have had to print signs in Mandarin asking people to abide by certain rules. >You cannot transfer money out of country legally, pret…

The "cannot travel abroad" claim might refer to one of two things:

1. China requires extremely long quarantines when entering the country. 14 days in a quarantine hotel + 7 days at home is standard. Some jurisdictions go as high as 28 + 28.

2. China has recently restricted issuances of new and renewed passports. This is being done locally, so enforcement is inconsistent, but generally one needs a strong reason ("studying abroad", "international business") to get a passport issued now.

China allows transfer out of the country for the purpose of buying homes, but cash transfers are restricted to a certain annual limit. The restrictions on transferring currency out of China and on exchanging currency are a huge problem for expats leaving the country. Until this year, the recommendation for expats leaving the country was to use bitcoin.

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