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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very interesting. I always get that uncanny valley feeling even on Hacker News, especially when the comments concern China. This would explain a lot.
Or something like a comment thread where half the comments pointing out other governments do propaganda are flagged to hell, like this section.
When the NY Times covered the Chinese robotic moon landing, it was in the top 10 stories for more than a week. In the most space-jaded country on the planet. The rating was sustained by constant comments by Chinese studying in the US and burnishing their reps with the Party. You can almost always make Chinese English, an AI program could be trained to do it. I wrote to their ombudsman. Down in a day.
Personally I was disappointed by the lack of coverage this landing got. Same with their space station. I'm genuinely interested in this, but the Chinese won't translate articles/sources themselves, and given the (strategic? image-preserving?) indifference by the US, I can't find any content about them in English. I find this really annoying.
Neither, it's apathy. The US media doesn't really cover the space exploits of its allies in Europe or Japan either, unless it's something really huge. I think the US views other countries doing things in space it already did decades ago as boring. When China does something that surpasses what the US has done, like building a Moon base or a manned Mars mission, there will be plenty of coverage.
Even this specific point of discussion, the Chinese "moon landing", is just landing a rover there, not a person, so it's not really very notable for Americans.
This is great. Please, please let this concept enter the general public's mind.
>Please, please let this concept enter the general public's mind. Especially salient because the idea of censorship in the form of bookburning or restricting speech is still way too dominant (especially in American culture). Information overflow and deflection through a sheer barrage of garbage and misinformation seems to be the new (and much more effective) MO.
Nothing new actually. The whole concept is pretty old.
Looks like after trying to follow "guidelines" from Orwell's "1984", we are just trying Huxley's "Brave New World".
Does anyone think this does not happen in other countries? Maybe even in your own country (but not ours, obviously)? And not just by governments, but by political parties, foreign entities, corporations, lobbying groups, interest groups, etc, any entity with an interest in distracting, muddying, defining a narrative, or swaying opinion? And once you consider that, consider the numerous potential reasons why social me…
I'm inclined not to trust an article that uses propaganda-rhetoric like 'regime'.
This is great. Please, please let this concept enter the general public's mind.
I agree. Distraction can be really disruptive to having meaningful, productive discussions. I think many people even do it reflexively even if they're not getting paid or instructed to. There was a recent HN post about terrible reeducation camps in Xinjiang [1]. Almost no one talked about the heartbreaking story or what it might mean, as most of the comments were tired derails into "the US is bad, too" territory and…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you mean the concept that: "Any/all organizations can/do seed a particular narrative to serve their strategic purposes" ?
I doubt it, since that's not at all what the paper describes. Here's a quote from the abstract: > In contrast to prior claims, we show that the Chinese regime's strategy is to avoid arguing with skeptics of the party and the government, and to not even discuss controversial issues. We show that the goal of this massive secretive operation is instead to distract the public and change the subject, as most of the these…
This is great. Please, please let this concept enter the general public's mind.
>Please, please let this concept enter the general public's mind. Especially salient because the idea of censorship in the form of bookburning or restricting speech is still way too dominant (especially in American culture). Information overflow and deflection through a sheer barrage of garbage and misinformation seems to be the new (and much more effective) MO.
It's not just information overflow, but relevance and objective importance.
Given this lens, is CNN & Co any less deceptive than the Chinese gov.? Same means, just different ends. The Chinese gov seeks control, the MSM profits. (I'll pass on the MSM being a proxy for the US gov, to keep it simple.)
The end result is that minds are mmanipulated, and urgent issues and truths are hidden in a blur of overload and further burried under a pile of pointless horse shit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lol, the US can get away with anything too like torture, illegal bombing, civilian casualties in a US wars, ... Maybe we should try introspecting too before assuming that others are not like us...
Are you joking ? How literally can you be the very essence of what this article is about? This, literally this is what that research is describing. Stop changing the bloody subject ! Gah. Edit: this account is a smoking gun. Have a look at the comment history.
> Many academics, and most journalists and activists, claim that these so-called 50c party posts vociferously argue for the government’s side in political and policy debates. As we show, this is also true of most posts openly accused on social media of being 50c. I am not a native speaker. I can't parse that sentence :/. Why is this `also` true ? In addition to what ? Wouldn't it follow that posts arguing in favour o…
The first sentence says that "journalists and activists" claim that if a post is written by a "50c party" poster, then it will strongly argue in favor of the Chinese government's side - instead of being more subtle, and maybe not _always_ arguing that China is 100% #1.
The second sentence says that "most posts open accused on social media of being 50c" will strongly argue in favor of the government's side, too.
I read this to mean that posts tagged as "50c" will argue for the Chinese government, and "50c party" posters will argue for the Chinese government, too, so the correspondence between the two is high.
My interpretation could be wrong, but I hope it helps!