Information operations directed at Hong Kong • Hacker News Board

Re: Information operations directed at Hong Kong

#51

Post by threeseed » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 7:27 PM UTC

rjf72 wrote: post #38

This seems like a very slippery slope. Recently Jackie Chan and Liu Yifei are a couple of higher profile individuals have expressed support for the mainland or condemnation of the protesters' riotous behavior. Jackie Chan is a Hong Kong national - Lieu Yifei is Chinese American. The reason that this is relevant is because we live in the day and age where holding the wrong opinion is increasingly frequently grounds fo…

Sure some people may support the Chinese government position. That has nothing to do with Twitter banning coordinated propaganda campaigns.

And China has the concept of ambassadors which are paid influencers there to assist in these campaigns. So I wouldn't blindly assume every famous actor has an authentic position.

Re: Information operations directed at Hong Kong

#52

Post by rjf72 » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 7:27 PM UTC

ryanchankh wrote: post #22

HongKonger here. I have some friends in China posting similar anti-protest posts on WeChat social media. It's like the news they read has a completely different story than what it's being told in legitimate new sources. The problem of fake news does become very apparent, and I hope people in China can eventually gain awareness or at least start to question the validity of their news sources.

Interesting. Are the images shared from this article suggesting that protesters are destroying property and engaging in other such behavior fake or somehow being taken out of context?

Re: Information operations directed at Hong Kong

#53

Post by CobrastanJorji » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 7:27 PM UTC

martey wrote: post #20

mortenjorck wrote: post #14

The elephant left standing in the room is not the spam and bot accounts, but the official, state-actor accounts such as Xinhua News that pay for promoted tweets carrying the same message. Granted this is likely beyond the scope of Twitter’s safety team, but this completely sidesteps the issues raised here: https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/19/twitter-is-blocked-in-chin...

See https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/advertisi... , which was posted to the Twitter blog at approximately the same time as this post.

So, wait...is the BBC no longer allowed to advertise upcoming shows on Twitter?

Re: Information operations directed at Hong Kong

#54

Post by guerrilla » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 7:28 PM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #24

groundlogic wrote: post #12

I don't think HN is immune to these kinds of CCP ops.

I doubt HN is even on the CCP's radar. Not only are we a low-value target, we're much harder to subvert.

Propaganda casts a wide net. It isn't micromanaged.

Re: Information operations directed at Hong Kong

#55

Post by guruz » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 7:29 PM UTC

This makes total sense.

It's in Twitter's business interest to have open unfiltered internet as much as possible. By keeping Hong Kong open (and possibly getting China to open at some point), they'll help their bottom line.

Re: Information operations directed at Hong Kong

#56

Post by groundlogic » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 7:29 PM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #24

groundlogic wrote: post #12

I don't think HN is immune to these kinds of CCP ops.

I doubt HN is even on the CCP's radar. Not only are we a low-value target, we're much harder to subvert.

Right. This part of the work is left to the foreign-living chinese nationalistic diaspora. They get their directions from the CCP nonetheless.

Again, for casual readers: Chinese people in the US who don't support squashing democracy fighters in HK (I think/hope that's the vast majority of them - maybe more hope now that I'm being downvoted) are awesome.

Re: Information operations directed at Hong Kong

#57

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 7:30 PM UTC

theirkf wrote: post #16

So this has become the norm now. Social media products who’s primary utility is to share information between people are now being used by governments to sow discord.

[deleted]

Re: Information operations directed at Hong Kong

#58

Post by guerrilla » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 7:30 PM UTC

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Re: Information operations directed at Hong Kong

#59

Post by the_watcher » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 7:32 PM UTC

Bhilai wrote: post #8

I am curious to know how do companies like Facebook control this kind of activity on WhatsApp where there is end-end encryption. I see a lot of propaganda on Whats App being circulated everyday and people keep forwarding such messages into various groups.

It's hard, and it's an explicit tradeoff made when deciding to prioritize secure communication. One thing Facebook did with WhatsApp was limit group size and monitoring forwarding behavior (which can be done via metadata without needing to know the content), but it's an imperfect solution at best.

Re: Information operations directed at Hong Kong

#60

Post by FabHK » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 7:32 PM UTC

Bhilai wrote: post #8

I am curious to know how do companies like Facebook control this kind of activity on WhatsApp where there is end-end encryption. I see a lot of propaganda on Whats App being circulated everyday and people keep forwarding such messages into various groups.

I don't see how you can control it.

Which makes it very worrying that lots of people get their "news" from social media now.