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Paperwall: Chinese websites posing as local news outlets target global audiences

citizenlab.ca

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Re: Paperwall: Chinese websites posing as local news outlets target global audiences

#21

Post by dash2 »

vdaea wrote: post #2

I visited one of those sites, https://sevillatimes.com/ , and absolutely none of the articles posted there talk about the city, not even about the country where the city is in. So nobody would think that website is a local news website. Also this article offers little to no proof that the Chinese government is behind these sites. They look more like a network of crypto spam. https://sevillatimes.com/category/presione…

I doubt if lots of websites all saying "[Chinese scientist who made allegations about Covid] is a complete rumor maker" are crypto spam. The Chinese government seems like a plausible patron.

Re: Paperwall: Chinese websites posing as local news outlets target global audiences

#22

Post by netsharc »

Seeing the screenshot of the headlines, "mimic" (HN title) is a different to "posing as" (article title). If I can extrapolate from 3 headlines screenshot there, the sites have generic boring looks (maybe they're Wordpress sites), but they pose to be a news site for Sevilla, Rome, or Milan. Whereas when "mimicking", I would expect them to be copying the design of well-known news sites (I've seen fake CNN-looking sites).

It's always amusing/depressing when people claim something, usually something fake-news-ey or propaganda) and link to one of these random Wordpress-looking sites as their "news source". I remember someone linking to a page that claimed that a map of the March 2011 Japanese tsunami effects measured throughout the Pacific[1] was a map of the radiation from the nuclear accident, so people do fall for it, because not everyone is as discerning as us super-clever HN readers. ;)

[1] The map from https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/news-story/new-study-shows-some-co..., but the original caption was under the map and not superimposed on the map, and was cropped by the fake-news peddler.

Re: Paperwall: Chinese websites posing as local news outlets target global audiences

#23

Post by Workaccount2 »

atlantic wrote: post #11
krapht wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) whataboutism 2) citation needed 3) Even if both sides utilize propaganda, historically the scale of agitprop coming from authoritarian countries has been much greater. This is still newsworthy. You can't even read most Western propaganda in China because the government goes to great lengths to censor narratives counter to offical views.

Depends how narrowly you define agitprop. If you consider everything that comes out of the American media/news conglomerates as propaganda, then it's orders of magnitude greater than the efforts of China or Russia.

The difference is that American media isn't owned by the government. Chinese media can't tell the government to "fuck off" if they don't want to report something. In the US they can.

Re: Paperwall: Chinese websites posing as local news outlets target global audiences

#24

Post by boomboomsubban »

So Chinese people are running some of the low quality spam content farms that have been plaguing the internet for years, seemingly primarily for financial reasons like the rest of them. The only real difference is their Reuters is linked to China rather than the West.

Re: Paperwall: Chinese websites posing as local news outlets target global audiences

#26

Post by [deleted] »

vdaea wrote: post #2

I visited one of those sites, https://sevillatimes.com/ , and absolutely none of the articles posted there talk about the city, not even about the country where the city is in. So nobody would think that website is a local news website. Also this article offers little to no proof that the Chinese government is behind these sites. They look more like a network of crypto spam. https://sevillatimes.com/category/presione…

[deleted]

Re: Paperwall: Chinese websites posing as local news outlets target global audiences

#27

Post by andsoitis »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #24

So Chinese people are running some of the low quality spam content farms that have been plaguing the internet for years, seemingly primarily for financial reasons like the rest of them. The only real difference is their Reuters is linked to China rather than the West.

> their Reuters is linked to China rather than the West.

Reuters is a company in a regulatory and political framework with high degree is freedom of the press and expression, rather than an instrument controlled by a government for the purpose of propaganda.

Re: Paperwall: Chinese websites posing as local news outlets target global audiences

#28

Post by drewg123 »

netsharc wrote: post #22

Seeing the screenshot of the headlines, "mimic" (HN title) is a different to "posing as" (article title). If I can extrapolate from 3 headlines screenshot there, the sites have generic boring looks (maybe they're Wordpress sites), but they pose to be a news site for Sevilla, Rome, or Milan. Whereas when "mimicking", I would expect them to be copying the design of well-known news sites (I've seen fake CNN-looking site…

I'm not the submitter, but there is a length limit on post titles. I've run into this before with articles whose titles exceed that limit, and I've had to "edit" the titles to fit. I imagine the submitter had the same issue, and didn't catch the different connotation of "mimic" vs "posing as", which does seem to change the meaning some.

Dang: Do you think you could raise the length limit by 50 characters or so? Most of the problems I've had with title length limits seem to have been just a few words that I had to squeeze down..

Re: Paperwall: Chinese websites posing as local news outlets target global audiences

#29

Post by mschuster91 »

Nothing new, sadly. Before the 2016 and 2020 election, fake news farms in Macedonia made the rounds [1] - these were in it for the money, and in 2015 there were reports about Russian propaganda farms targeting Serbia and the rest of Europe [2].

[1] https://money.cnn.com/interactive/media/the-macedonia-story/

[2] https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/russische-trollf...

Re: Paperwall: Chinese websites posing as local news outlets target global audiences

#30

Post by dmonitor »

vdaea wrote: post #2

I visited one of those sites, https://sevillatimes.com/ , and absolutely none of the articles posted there talk about the city, not even about the country where the city is in. So nobody would think that website is a local news website. Also this article offers little to no proof that the Chinese government is behind these sites. They look more like a network of crypto spam. https://sevillatimes.com/category/presione…

The strategy would be to post the articles to facebook. Nobody goes to a specific website to see the news anyway. The website just exists to be linked to by facebook and look “legit enough”
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