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Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

nytimes.com

321–330 of 463 posts

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Applying English rules to Chinese words is the ultimate folly. Also, it really depends on your dialect of Chinese, I always hear wu with a w (e.g. woo) if the wu is at the beginning of the word. Inside a word (like fuwuyuan), I usually don't hear or say it.

> Applying English rules to Chinese words is the ultimate folly.

The more I think about this, the less I understand what you were trying to say.

The first problem is of course that a(n) is an English word. But more than that, every sentence of English must apply the rules of English to every part of itself. If instead of "scare" we used the Chinese loanword xia, we would say things like "you xiaed me". We would not say "you xia me" with the past tense present but unmarked, nor would we say "you xiale me".

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, threatening civilian organizations isn't how you gain soft power. The has the power it does because, aside from being very rich, before the 20th century they made extremely reasonable foreign policy decisions.

I don't think modern US soft power has much to do with 19th century politics. More than enough happened since then to completely override whatever was before.

Yeah, the apex of the history of some entity happens some time after it stops doing the things that made it grow. That's almost by definition.

The US has been losing influence for some decades already.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#323

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

I've never understood why people support the escalating US-China conflict since it's so easy to just keep focusing on win-win collaborations but your comment gave me an insight. Please let me know if this is wrong, but I think this is the argument: 1. The US is a better leader than China because it is a significantly better place. Notable US problems that cause lots of suffering are significantly less severe than not…

Chinese people don't believe the US system is inferior solely based on improvements in their own country. I think this discredits them. Chinese students study English and America in school, many have come as exchange students, they consume American media - they are comparing things firsthand in a way that Americans mostly refuse to do.

Believe it or not, Western ideals used to have a good amount of traction in China. I suggest this translated firsthand account of how American values lost their luster: https://mp-weixin-qq-com.translate.goog/s/erCJHZVLEtnZ4wWbkg...

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#324

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.

It turns out you can spice things up on social media with relatively modest ad spends, the mob are so desperate to be incited that you dont even need to light the match.

I recently watched 'Jallikattu'[0] again. The statement on being desperate to be incited matches one of the main themes of the movie so well. Worth a watch.

[0] - https://youtu.be/ItcQNybOOHM

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

This is a great report, thank you.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean when you say porn is illegal in most places?

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

Fair enough, I haven’t figured out the exact breakdown from that link, although it seems fairly equally split to me.

Still, that map lends credence to my initial gut feeling, that defending China’s porn ban to someone with a seemingly Western perspective by saying it’s banned in a lot of other places too probably isn’t very effective - they most likely feel the same about these laws where they exist in the rest of Asia, Eastern Europe and in Africa, too. Presumably they’re comparing China to Western Europe and the US here.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#328

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…

I used to think China was some North Korean-style hellscape and hated the country. Then I had a flight transfer through China and decided to take a couple days there just to see how bad it was. Ended up realizing most internet comments and news articles are posted by people who are absolutely obsessed with China and only get their information through seventh-hand sources--it's that insanely distorted. Left loving the…

Everyday life is generally okay there, and it's not hard to have a great time as a tourist there. The problems are if you are unhappy with the status quo and are a dissenter.

You can flourish there, relatively, if you follow the rules. But if you get on the government's bad side you will be quashed.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#329
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Indeed, maybe my phrasing was wrong, but I feel nationalism only creates feeds xenophobia, because is never "X government", is always "the chinese", "the russians" , "insert_the_current_buggy_man_here"... I also understand that there is no chance this will ever change.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some substantial portion of Americans poll as not owning guns but being glad their neighbors do. The reasons vary, deterring criminals and/or state authority often appearing. It's not surprising that some of these people use reddit and HN.

> Some substantial portion of Americans poll as not owning guns but being glad their neighbors do. The reasons vary, deterring criminals often appearing. It's not surprising that some of these people use reddit and HN. I've heard this said often, but people who I've heard saying this have never offered up an actual poll to back this supposed sentiment up. Surely there must be at least a Rasmussen poll (that tilts hea…

Sure https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/cur...
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