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China sows disinformation on Hong Kong using porn accounts on Twitter

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Re: China sows disinformation on Hong Kong using porn accounts on Twitter

#51

Post by simias »

lonelappde wrote: post #22
simias wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Who subscribes to porn bots? I would have thought only other porn bots follow porn bots? Clearly if they exist they must have some marginal use. It's like saying "who falls for nigerian prince scams?" or "who is influenced by ads?". Clearly some people are, otherwise they wouldn't be quite as popular. I'm sure some real people follow porn bots in order to... see porn. As for the influence I think in isolation it's p…

PragerU isn't obvious to most people that's what's insidious about it. It's a fake "university" for people who are too ignorant or low intelligent to know what a real one looks like. Compare PragerU to "A People's History of the United States" book. Both are highly politically biased, both oppose "mainstream" education, but one is intellectually much better than the other. Discerning which requires higher level think…

I think you're wrong to assume that it only works with people who are "too ignorant or low intelligent". Confirmation bias is not limited to dumb people. It's always more pleasant and comforting to listen to people agreeing with you (even if what they're saying isn't super insightful) rather than people arguing against your values (even if what they're saying is very interesting).

Searching for contradictory viewpoints and actually managing to listen to the argument with an open mind takes effort. That's the big problem with most social media currently, they amplify this bias to the extreme. You can hold a fringe belief like "earth is flat" and still manage to find thousand of people agreeing with you, spending hours every day consuming flat earth content and avoiding any dissenting voice.

Re: China sows disinformation on Hong Kong using porn accounts on Twitter

#53

Post by throwawaywego »

totaldude87 wrote: post #4

With all that happening in Hong Kong, i wonder why UK and US are not at all involved?

It is very meta to ask this question, and to see the replies to this question, as the trope: "The US meddles in foreign revolutions" is common for (social) media propaganda (bots).

> Claim: The US is supporting and encouraging Hong Kong protests.

> Verdict: Conspiracy theory without evidence.

> For years, pro-Kremlin media has used the narrative about anti-government protests being funded by the US. Examples include colour revolutions in post-soviet states, the “Arab Spring” revolts, and Euromaidan in 2014.

> The Hong Kong protests began in June 2019 because of a controversial extradition law that would allow for the transfer of suspects to face trial on the Chinese mainland.

https://euvsdisinfo.eu/report/the-us-is-supporting-and-encou...

Re: China sows disinformation on Hong Kong using porn accounts on Twitter

#54

Post by NotSammyHagar »

Leary wrote: post #46
totaldude87 wrote: post #4

With all that happening in Hong Kong, i wonder why UK and US are not at all involved?

Mature democracies like the US and UK have what is called soft power, by demonstrate how effective their democracies are at home they can influence the people in Hong Kong without directly conducting disinformation

Great point. In a possibly strange sense, the fact that the us and the uk just carry on having basically very safe and functional democracies even with the complete lockdown in the uk from brexit, and perhaps slightly lesser lockdown in the us (polarization of dems vs republicans) is impressive. but it's really depressing to be living through it.

Re: China sows disinformation on Hong Kong using porn accounts on Twitter

#55

Post by [deleted] »

ackbar03 wrote: post #42
totaldude87 wrote: post #4

With all that happening in Hong Kong, i wonder why UK and US are not at all involved?

Maybe they realized the 'America fuck yeah' movement is over and they aren't the global police. No but jokes aside I think it has some parallels with decreasing interference in middle east and in general. I don't really follow these things so I could be wrong

[deleted]

Re: China sows disinformation on Hong Kong using porn accounts on Twitter

#56

Post by duguxu »

Just some personal observations, maybe relevant to recent misinformation topics, or maybe not.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. are all blocked in mainland China. Many people, especially those young and well-educated, use VPN to access them, have an account and follow world news and foreign celebrities sometimes.

There are popular and feature-rich counterparts in mainland, and most people prefer to have their daily sharing and discussion (including domestic politics) there instead of on social media based in US. Therefore most of the time, their accounts on Facebook or Twitter are mainly for reading rather than sharing and posting.

However, they might comment (register a new account if needed) on topics conveying a message related to China they strongly disagree (you could argue they are brainwashed), in a short period and coordinated way (they read repost from the same domestic website), through a few common IP addresses (the same VPN), with bad-written English (seldom practice writing before). But they are not bots and it's inappropriate to label these as the typical state-run misinformation campaign.

If you speak Chinese, you could find many discussions where ordinary people complain their accounts get blocked because of pro-China comments. e.g. https://weibo.com/1401527553/I32ryx2cu

Of course, these observations aren't necessarily contradictory with recent reports blaming China propaganda. I just want to show how some false positivity could happen, since there's some difference of the behaviour of China's users. Maybe a better algorithm is needed to distinguish them from government-backed activities.

Re: China sows disinformation on Hong Kong using porn accounts on Twitter

#57

Post by guerrilla »

totaldude87 wrote: post #4

With all that happening in Hong Kong, i wonder why UK and US are not at all involved?

You should not assume that they are not considering their extensive history of being involved when the general public assumed that they were not.

Re: China sows disinformation on Hong Kong using porn accounts on Twitter

#58

Post by NotSammyHagar »

karl_schlagenfu wrote: post #52

The west should have just let Japan take over China in WW2. Maybe then they'd have moved in to the 21st century properly like Japan did.

During the WW2 era, Japan had horrible atrocities against China and other countries, they were no modernizing power. One example is the Nanking or Nanjing Massacre where 50-300k people were murdered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre.

That's a pretty inflammatory suggestion.

Re: China sows disinformation on Hong Kong using porn accounts on Twitter

#59

Post by guerrilla »

throwawaywego wrote: post #53
totaldude87 wrote: post #4

With all that happening in Hong Kong, i wonder why UK and US are not at all involved?

It is very meta to ask this question, and to see the replies to this question, as the trope: "The US meddles in foreign revolutions" is common for (social) media propaganda (bots). > Claim: The US is supporting and encouraging Hong Kong protests. > Verdict: Conspiracy theory without evidence. > For years, pro-Kremlin media has used the narrative about anti-government protests being funded by the US. Examples include…

It's a matter of probability. They are so often involved [1] that they get blamed even when they appear not to be involved. That's especially true when people know that they have incentives for being involved, regardless of whether or not they are actually involved.

[1] https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/us_atrociti...

Re: China sows disinformation on Hong Kong using porn accounts on Twitter

#60

Post by usrusr »

FreeHugs wrote: post #2

I don't understand it. So there are bots that have been posting "porn" for a bunch of years. And now they post political messages. How does that influence anybody? Who subscribes to porn bots? I would have thought only other porn bots follow porn bots? Can somebody link to an example of such a bot?

They are a stepping stone, not intended to directly influence anyone: hashtags appearing en masse on "influential" (due to bulk porn subscribers) but utterly unrelated accounts will add weight to on-topic posts using the same tags elsewhere.

Not much different from the link farms of the early days of SEO which were never meant for human eyes.

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