> It's just lots of filler to try to make the site look, from the scammer's perspective, legit.
And they just happen to have mostly political propaganda from CGTN, a CCP mouthpiece? If the intent was only to scam, there are thousands of ways of doing that with better results, without involving propaganda.
> What you see as propaganda, is what somebody else would just see as the equivalent as a stream from e.g. Reuters.
C'mon. If you search for "china" on any of these sites you'll only see pro-China narratives, promoting the One China policy, etc. Western media has its own agenda, sure, but this type of blatant propaganda is only found on fringe publications.
> If you want to see this as some sort of a state influence operation, you run into a million issues.
State run psyops don't need to be sophisticated. Their only goal is to flood the web with their narratives, and lower the signal to noise ratio, so that when people search for specific topics, theirs will hopefully come up. For every attempt that does this right, there are millions more that do a half-assed job at it.
> Especially for things like this, I think Occam's Razor is quite sharp.
Precisely. The CCP runs a well-oiled machine built to pump out disinformation via every public channel available. It takes them no effort to create sites like these, and all steps of the process are likely fully automated. I find the simplest explanation to be that this is just another variant of this, rather than a scam operation that builds dozens of sites with pages upon pages of content just to get people to click on some links, or whatever type of scam this might be. If it quacks like a duck...
I don't think we'll know for sure either way, or convince each other, but cheers for the discussion.