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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

#371

Post by thaumasiotes »

commoner wrote: post #333
thaumasiotes wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "an" is only used in front of words that begin with a vowel sound Yes, that's what I'm saying. > For example, "womb" starts with the same sound as "wumao" No, it doesn't. "Oops" starts with the same sound as "wumao". "Womb" has a /w/ sound before that. There is no /w/ in 五毛. What did you think I meant by saying "the initial W doesn't represent a sound"?

I don't think 五 ("wu", which means "five") is pronounced the same way as the "oo" in "oops", at least in Mandarin Chinese. I hear the "w" very clearly in this counting video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eLP3FuuEVs I think there is a lot of irony in this subthread, since it is responding to a comment about derailing the discussion by distracting from the main topic as a strategy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item…

> I hear the "w" very clearly in this counting video:

I'm curious how you think a video with an edited audio track could have any value as evidence. If you're willing to truncate and splice your recorded audio, you can easily transmute some sounds into other sounds.

> I think there is a lot of irony in this subthread

Yes, we talk about the things we think are interesting, often even when there are other people whose opinions differ.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#372

Post by KerrAvon »

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…

You don’t even need to go to a foreign country for this experience. I read bullshit about how bad conditions in California are all the time from right-wingers who just want to propagandize for their own political benefit.

However: you seem to be telling a native Chinese person that they’re wrong about their impressions of their own country. Do you want to maybe add some nuance to that?

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#373

Post by justicezyx »

seibelj wrote: post #320
justicezyx wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the connection of this to the parent? High power is always corrupted. Even today we have Kennedy assassination, Eperstein, Assange. Desmond Shum is connected to Wen Jiabao. No 2 in China at its time. You think dealing with these people is not dangerous? CCP is bad in different way than any other political organizations. That does not make China unique in any significant way at all.

Quoted post unavailable.

I literally wrote: "CCP is bad in different way than any other political organizations."

When did I say they are the same as US government?

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#374

Post by xxpor »

alistairSH wrote: post #319
ska wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep. I see it locally with shill groups acting at the behest of real estate developers.

And then there's the other side of it, where people accuse people on the other side of being shills with 0 evidence. It's extremely common in NIMBY v YIMBY fights.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#375

Post by freewilly1040 »

forgotmyoldname wrote: post #362
bamboozled wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

A few hours in some towns were more than enough to make it very clear that I'd never want to go there ever again. It's weird how people come out and complain about this with only one specific country. Nobody gets angry when they say a trip to somewhere else was enough to make them enjoy a place.

The parent comment isn’t saying the food is bad or that they don’t like the buildings. They are making a human rights critique.

A few days seeing the sights is pretty irrelevant at best in this context.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#376

Post by whoevercares »

east2west wrote: post #336
justicezyx wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How can welding front gates shut be protecting human life? No this is not. But it's neither protecting human life by calling "Chiense virus" "Kunflu". Enough said. > VPN https://zh.vpnmentor.com/ > Why don't you post to your WeChat groups "佟丽娅嫁给中宣部副部长," reputed marriage of an actress to the vice minister of Propaganda Ministry and take a screenshot? You cannot even search it in Baidu, and you have the gall to say t…

> Dude, what is this thing? I have no idea what's going on with this "佟丽娅嫁给中宣部副部长,"? You say you are born in China, so presumably you can read Chinese. Then you can head over to [1] and read all about oversea Chinese making fun of CCP censoring salacious rumors about an actress and vice minister of Propaganda. The most powerful police apparatus and most sprawling internet censorship machinery working in overdrive to…

Well even as a Wumao myself, CCP screwed up at this event

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#377

Post by thaumasiotes »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #352
thaumasiotes wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> But it is undefined. English doesn't have strong dialects like Chinese does.

The second part is a more interesting claim. But broadly speaking, for any two Chinese dialects you could probably identify two languages, one being a variety of English, that stand at a similar distance from each other. The second language might or might not be called "English"; it might be called Scots, or Dutch.

Whether to pronounce a(n) with the /n/ realized is not undefined, but it is specific to the speaker. This is a case where variation within languages named "English" is more than enough to show disparities, as witness the confused Americans who copy the phrase "an historic occasion" from British usage.

I took the position, in my original comment, that I was responding to someone who didn't speak Chinese (and therefore didn't know how to pronounce "wumao") but did speak English (and therefore did know how to pronounce "an"). I didn't think I was speaking to someone who knew the pronunciation of "wumao" but wasn't sure how to use an article with it.

I don't think regional variation in pronunciation in China can explain an English speaker pronouncing wumao or Wuhan with an initial w-. The citation form of the syllable has no initial consonant, and all sources are explicit about this. Chinese broadcast media, in running speech, still doesn't produce anything an English speaker would recognize as an initial w-. (I'm having to rely, for this claim, on the television programs I found on youtube, linked elsewhere.) There just isn't a source that would provide an English speaker outside China with an example of using w-. So I assume what's happening is that people pronounce w- because they see the spelling.

(Also, I don't see many English speakers pronouncing it Taivan instead of Taiwan.)

I find it very plausible that regional variation exists, though, because I know the Shanghainese (吴 dialect) pronunciation of 勿 is -- using a pinyin-like spelling -- "ve" with an initial /v/-like sound.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#378

Post by justicezyx »

east2west wrote: post #336
justicezyx wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How can welding front gates shut be protecting human life? No this is not. But it's neither protecting human life by calling "Chiense virus" "Kunflu". Enough said. > VPN https://zh.vpnmentor.com/ > Why don't you post to your WeChat groups "佟丽娅嫁给中宣部副部长," reputed marriage of an actress to the vice minister of Propaganda Ministry and take a screenshot? You cannot even search it in Baidu, and you have the gall to say t…

> Dude, what is this thing? I have no idea what's going on with this "佟丽娅嫁给中宣部副部长,"? You say you are born in China, so presumably you can read Chinese. Then you can head over to [1] and read all about oversea Chinese making fun of CCP censoring salacious rumors about an actress and vice minister of Propaganda. The most powerful police apparatus and most sprawling internet censorship machinery working in overdrive to…

Juicy rumors. CCP officiers now become the hot target of actresses. Wow... Not sure what's going on here.

But I suppose it's OK to respect people's privacy?

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#379

Post by lokimedes »

Realizing that this game is played by many others, governments and private entities included, leaves me to conclude that the “Metaverse” has been with us for some time.

Where are those proof-of-biological-existence services to counter this? And are they lacking because the platform owners are disincentivized for some reason?

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