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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

#351

Post by mthoms »

justicezyx wrote: post #248
isoprophlex wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> there's really no excuse for what China is doing to Uyghurs atm. First make sure everyone agrees upon what happened to Uyghurs first. China is closed to foreign examination in the sense that they do not want to show all the details. But BBC and western media decide that that's a legitimate excuse to allow manipulative reporting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS8EceIa1MQ&t=101s You are not going to get people to b…

Does your evidence of manipulated reporting consist entirely of adjusting the saturation of an image or is there anything more substantial?

Just look at the skin of the human being in both photos - the less saturated one looks 100% more natural (unless the guy actually has orange skin). If anything the over-saturated image is more misleading than the other, more dull, image. But neither are particularly egregious.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#352

Post by seanmcdirmid »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #321
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But more than that, every sentence of English must apply the rules of English to every part of itself.

But it is undefined. English doesn't have strong dialects like Chinese does. Southerners are more likely not to pronounce the "w" in wu, so they might say "an wugui" (since they are more likely to say oogway like in Kungfu Panda) while a northerner will say "a wugui", since they are more familiar with saying the w sound. This is only if they are very familiar with English also, otherwise they will completely ignore the distinction between a and an.

So...dialects make the question hard to answer.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#353

Post by dools »

tablespoon wrote: post #106
dools wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Have you watched any of the interviews conducted on the street in China on the Asian Boss YouTube channel? Why should anyone care about "man on the street" interviews on some Youtube channel? I mean, it's not like someone in a repressive country is going to open up with all their complaints about their repressive government to some rando with a camera. Plus, Youtube is easy to manipulate (in some ways) if you have…

But people do open up with their criticisms of various government policies to some rando with a camera. That's my point.

Also Asian Boss is a channel run from outside China that does similar interviews in a range of different countries.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#354

Post by brobinson »

HKH2 wrote: post #347
brobinson wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are hearing something that isn't present. There's no "w" sound in that video for the number 5. This is a really common misconception/mispronunciation caused by pinyin as it needs the "w" for disambiguation purposes (see also the use of apostrophes, xian vs. xi'an). Edit: another poster has some more examples of there not being a "w" sound at all in "wu": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29657822

> There's no "w" sound in that video for the number 5. Yes there is. You can argue it's not as strong as an English 'w', but it's there. > This is a really common misconception/mispronunciation caused by pinyin as it needs the "w" for disambiguation purposes (see also the use of apostrophes, xian vs. xi'an). That may have been the case in the past, but the 'w' is definitely pronounced now, just like all the other 'w'…

I live in a Mandarin-speaking country and speak Mandarin every day. There is no W sound. lol I mean, foreigners can continue mispronouncing it they want, but native speakers are gonna continue to be confused as to why foreigners emphasize the non-existent W sound so much. Foreigners (in my experience) also get confused as to why native speakers _don't_ pronounce a W sound.

Maybe some regional accents overemphasize a W sound? I've never heard one, though.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#355

Post by freen »

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…

The most important thing a con artist must convince the mark of is this: everyone else is on the take. Once this is believed, the mark will follow the con down any corrupt rabbit hole.

Ask yourself this: who wants you to believe that everything is astroturfing? Who does that serve?

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#356

Post by freen »

fc373745 wrote: post #139
johnsolo1701 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

No post body was provided.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#357

Post by bamboozled »

forgotmyoldname wrote: post #286
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…

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…

> Then I had a flight transfer through China and decided to take a couple days there just to see how bad it was.

Right because a couple of days (I'll presume in a city) would also give you a real insight to how things really are.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#358

Post by HKH2 »

brobinson wrote: post #354
HKH2 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no "w" sound in that video for the number 5. Yes there is. You can argue it's not as strong as an English 'w', but it's there. > This is a really common misconception/mispronunciation caused by pinyin as it needs the "w" for disambiguation purposes (see also the use of apostrophes, xian vs. xi'an). That may have been the case in the past, but the 'w' is definitely pronounced now, just like all the other 'w'…

I live in a Mandarin-speaking country and speak Mandarin every day. There is no W sound. lol I mean, foreigners can continue mispronouncing it they want, but native speakers are gonna continue to be confused as to why foreigners emphasize the non-existent W sound so much. Foreigners (in my experience) also get confused as to why native speakers _don't_ pronounce a W sound. Maybe some regional accents overemphasize a…

I asked a native speaker and they said you use your lips a bit more than just saying the 'u' sound.

I think it does vary by region. At any rate, I don't think anybody is confused by it.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#359

Post by hiptobecubic »

forgotmyoldname wrote: post #286
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…

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…

If by "seventh-hand" you mean "first- and second-hand" then ok.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#360

Post by dillondoyle »

atomicity wrote: post #282
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

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…

What evidence would you present to me - an American - that the US is not a significantly better place than China?
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