Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Asian Boss planted deep blue YouTuber and pretended he was a 'man on the street'

laorencha.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 220 posts

Re: Asian Boss planted deep blue YouTuber and pretended he was a 'man on the street'

#131

Post by hk__2 »

coreyisthename wrote: post #58
nobrains wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man-on-the-street interviews should record the entire footage for transparency, without any cuts, for transparency, so that the audience can know which opinions were kept and which were removed.

And how woefully undereducated and uninformed - or willfully ignorant (maybe even dumb) - a large percentage of the population is.

> And how woefully undereducated and uninformed - or willfully ignorant (maybe even dumb) - a large percentage of the population is.

A couple of people-on-the-street interviews will never ever give you an accurate representation of "a large percentage of the population".

Edit: see also this comment- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29889236

Re: Asian Boss planted deep blue YouTuber and pretended he was a 'man on the street'

#133

Post by SergeAx »

For those who like me didn't understand the title. From paragraph 9:

> For those who don't know, "deep blue" means very pro-KMT, generally favoring Chinese identity, closer ties with China and eventual unification with China.

Search for KMT leads to Wikipedia article that says it is the same as Guomindang, the party was exciled from mainland China to Taiwan in 1949. I don't know how it evolved to "eventual unification" from "Taiwan is the only China", so I prefer to skip the article entirely as non-comprehensible.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuomintang

Re: Asian Boss planted deep blue YouTuber and pretended he was a 'man on the street'

#134

Post by lucian1900 »

gostsamo wrote: post #88
vlkr wrote: post #35

I wonder how many accounts the chinese state maintains on hackernews to upvote/downvote post and comments. It's an easy way to influence the public opinion and hard to expose.

Not many, I think. I usually look at the new section of HN and check what has been flagged unreasonably. Anti-chinese post are rarely flagged multiple times. My opinion is that there are honest pro-chinese people on HN, most likely chinese working in the US who don't plan to stay for life and feel patriotic enough to protect the fatherland on internet forums.

And also non-Chinese people that support the PRC, like myself. Many of us are communists, but not all.

The trend on HN is indeed quite clearly anti-China and anti-communist, so Chinese propaganda is definitely less successful than that of the US and Western Europe.

Re: Asian Boss planted deep blue YouTuber and pretended he was a 'man on the street'

#135

Post by gostsamo »

vlkr wrote: post #123
gostsamo wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not many, I think. I usually look at the new section of HN and check what has been flagged unreasonably. Anti-chinese post are rarely flagged multiple times. My opinion is that there are honest pro-chinese people on HN, most likely chinese working in the US who don't plan to stay for life and feel patriotic enough to protect the fatherland on internet forums.

Maybe, but i think every platform that has a lot of influence or a big audience is a valueable target for propaganda.

Agree, just I'm lacking the evidence. Plus, we might overrate the importance of HN for the CCP. Most of their thought control is for internal use. The external influence is usually based on money and access to the chinese market, not by thrall farms. Exceptions apply to social media, but I think that they concentrate on the large platforms like FB, Twitter and Youtube.

Re: Asian Boss planted deep blue YouTuber and pretended he was a 'man on the street'

#136

Post by jsodw »

vlkr wrote: post #35

I wonder how many accounts the chinese state maintains on hackernews to upvote/downvote post and comments. It's an easy way to influence the public opinion and hard to expose.

I am pro Chinese myself, I’m not getting paid by anybody, and I can assure you that posting pro Chinese comments here gets them flagged pretty quickly. But I’m not sure if it is because people don’t like those opinions or because they think it’s unlikely anybody can be pro Chinese so they automatically think you are a propaganda account. It could very well be either, based on my past experiences posting comments that go against the “allowed” politics of the site.

Re: Asian Boss planted deep blue YouTuber and pretended he was a 'man on the street'

#137

Post by platinumrad »

trompetenaccoun wrote: post #104
platinumrad wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you are a staunch traditionalist, "almost everything" is a massive exaggeration. The entire country still effectively shuts down for two weeks during the lunar new year. Sure this would be among the first things to go in an authoritarian state hell-bent on industrialization and yet it has persisted.

During which time the family gets together to watch propaganda on CCTV. I wish I was joking but that's literally what almost every single family does. It's Chinese tradition in the name only. And that isn't to say that tradition doesn't still exist here and there. But it may not be as much as someone not familiar with Chinese history may assume. Btw even authoritarian subjects need days off or they would revolt soone…

There's a difference between days off and "half the country is boarding trains to some remote village so I guess the economy is just going to halt for a couple of weeks." And oh no, lots of people just sit around watching TV when they have to spend time with their folks. We must retvrn to tradition because family relations were 100% super functional and healthy back before modernity/communism/capitalism/your-favorite-boogieman ruined everything.

> It actually helps destroy a culture faster, else there may be too much resistance.

Ah, the classic "evidence against my point is actually evidence for my point."

Re: Asian Boss planted deep blue YouTuber and pretended he was a 'man on the street'

#138

Post by ginko »

platinumrad wrote: post #82
starfallg wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Well, things like the normalization of everyday life (nothing like under Maoism where everybody was paranoid and millions died, people live regular lives, even with the authoritative rule of the party), opening up to businesses, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty, big health and education access, huge infrastructure updates and development, great technical and scientific progress, becoming the world's numbe…

Really scary that some people don't realize the parallels between Germany in the 1930s and, uh, people not starving anymore.

I wouldn't draw the parallels between China today and Germany in the 1930s, but I do see similarities to Germany before WWI.

Like China Germany just went through a break-neck pace industrialization to the point where it became a major competitor to the other great powers. It even had its own 'century of humiliation' in the 17th century starting with the Thirty Years' War. There was a lot of nationalism and ressentiment in Germany towards France and UK at the time and I do feel similar things are going on in China today.

Re: Asian Boss planted deep blue YouTuber and pretended he was a 'man on the street'

#139

Post by logotype »

vlkr wrote: post #35

I wonder how many accounts the chinese state maintains on hackernews to upvote/downvote post and comments. It's an easy way to influence the public opinion and hard to expose.

It is absolutely without any doubt happening on HN and I have previously been banned trying to point it out.

Re: Asian Boss planted deep blue YouTuber and pretended he was a 'man on the street'

#140

Post by vlkr »

platinumrad wrote: post #125
vlkr wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look what the CCP does elsewhere it's not unlikely, eg. https://www.nzz.ch/english/swiss-phd-students-dismissal-spot...

My question was about this site, not elsewhere.

I have no deeper insights into hackernes userbase. But here is another recent example:

"Wikipedia blames pro-China infiltration for bans" https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58559412

Btw. casting doubt on unwanted opinions is often used in propaganda. ;)

Post reply on HN