Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction

Whether you are correct or not about the re-education camps post, accusing the government of sending groups of real (let's define real as regular HN contributors with at least 10 karma pts) people to deflect/defend on a HN post is a technically a conspiracy theory.

>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 responses to them.

I saw that thread and I agree with your take, but unfortunately that's just a normal product of online discourse, not special to China-related topics. My guess is that people who live in the US saw an opportunity to call attention to prison reform rather than Chinese who wanted to deflect attention from the original article.

No, the topic is "How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, not Engaged Argument" which is the topic of the paper published.

It's not "A paper on country propaganda".

Xi is a very smart fellow, and he seems to sincerely want what is best for his country. That said, I think he is making some terrible mistakes. Instead of helping the population become smarter, better-informed thinkers, he is trying to turn them into robots.

Xi is creating an illusion of unity, which means if things start to go seriously wrong, there will be an explosion, as happened so many times in China's past. Citizens will lack the sort of intelligence and ability to work together that would be needed to resolve problems, and the country likely will either fall into chaos or under the rule of a malevolent emperor.

Let me add that Xi claims to be following Confucian principles, but that is not at all true. Confucianism is a set of principles that everyone from the top down was required to follow. Xi, in contrast, answers to no one, and is simply making up his own rules.

To the Chinese out there, let me say that what you need to do is get your hands on all the information you can from independent sources, and study political philosophy, so that you will be in a better position to make intelligent decisions in the future.

Okay, so I understand how you feel. The thing is I clicked on that post and the top comments are critical of indoctrination camps. There's one top-level comment you replied to that pointed out an irony given the imprisoned population here in the US.

The article details, AFAICT, the CCP's attempts to spread propaganda to its own people, not to the west, although I have no doubts it does try to spread it elsewhere. So given that, what is the likelihood that most of the critical, anti-US comments are in fact CCP propaganda hires? I don't know, but it seems a little bit much to assume everything is a plot to subvert people's opinions.

I'm not a propagandist. I agree with the sentiment in the comment on that article (I missed) about the US imprisoned population. People can disagree with you and point out opinions you disagree with.

I said earlier, somewhat sarcastically, it sucks that people are pushing things in this comment thread and voting down and flagging comments that point out other countries do the same. I am always somewhat paranoid, and anyone would given Snowden leaks and having read history about things like COINTELPRO, etc., but it was somewhat tongue in cheek (yes, I'm not perfect, I say mean things online like most people). Do I really believe all of you are US gov't plants trying to sway people to be belligerent to China? I don't think so.

I get we should keep our eyes open, but we should be willing to accept that there are people who disagree with us, and not everyone who disagrees with us is a Russian/Chinese/etc bot. I'm actually really bothered by the attitude online these days that calls everyone who disagrees with us as being an astroturf. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but it really helps to further strengthen the echo chambers we've created for ourselves.

I agree with your starting premise about Xi and your concluding advice about independent (or at least, non-Party filtered) information.

But I don't think it's wise or diplomatic to phrase it as a growing "intelligence" deficit in Chinese people. That word is tricky enough to define as it is, but people can hold deeply one-sided views about a lot of things and still be highly intelligent.

As a counterpoint, browsing social media in open information societies and liberal democracies these days gives a sense that people can be extremely biased and polarized even without living in a closed propaganda information ecosystem.

With that criticism lodged, I agree with the spirit of your argument that a more filtered public discourse very likely makes it monotonically incrementally harder to patch any present or future social discord.