Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction

https://gking.harvard.edu/50c

by Lionsion • 8 years ago

293 130 8 years ago

gking.harvard.edu

malshe2• 8 years ago

I can't access it on Harvard website any more. Luckily the paper is already published so if you have access to the journal, download it here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-s...

Lionsion12• 8 years ago

This link doesn't work for you?

https://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/how_the_chinese_...

It's the "article" link on the page, and it works for me right now.

malshe2• 8 years ago

Now it is working!

pteredactyl2• 8 years ago

This is great.

Please, please let this concept enter the general public's mind.

genericone• 8 years ago

Do you mean the concept that:

"Any/all organizations can/do seed a particular narrative to serve their strategic purposes" ?

Lionsion12• 8 years ago

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 posts involve cheerleading for China, the revolutionary history of the Communist Party, or other symbols of the regime.

Lionsion12• 8 years ago

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 responses to them. I'm pretty sure the story got quickly buried because the flame-war detector got tripped. I'm sure the Chinese censors' hearts would flutter a little if they learned about that.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17091072

Sangermaine5• 8 years ago

When I read that thread, I wondered at those comments. They always come up in these discussions. I always wonder how many are genuine and how many are actual government FUD.

creaghpatr• 8 years ago

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.

Barrin92• 8 years ago

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.

DmenshunlAnlsis• 8 years ago

Oh Dear!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8moePxHpvok

Information/Tragedy buffer overflow attacks basically.

ss248• 8 years ago

Information overflow and deflection through a sheer barrage of garbage and misinformation seems to be the new

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".

chiefalchemist• 8 years ago

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.

hungryhobo• 8 years ago

please, just look at things like cambridge analytica, the west is way ahead, not just in its own countries, but others as well.

xster4• 8 years ago

I definitely hope so. I also hope this awareness doesn't stop at our borders since this type of astroturfing is exactly the official playbook in various ShareBlue/Media Matters type PACs https://i.redd.it/oij2wau47fdy.jpg (though with better use of euphemisms, a game at which China is still in an infantile stage).

It is as deeply ingrained as it can get in American public online discourse https://www.fec.gov/data/disbursements/?two_year_transaction...

JumpCrisscross• 8 years ago

"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 posts involve cheerleading for China, the revolutionary history of the Communist Party, or other symbols of the regime."

Sensible. Cuts, however, against my mental caricature of an astroturfing shill.

reaperducer3• 8 years ago

Kind of makes you wonder how many of these operatives on here on HN.

There are certainly blocs of people who downvote certain topics en masse.

rdlecler14• 8 years ago

The more influential HN is perceived the greater the problem will be.

alexandercrohde4• 8 years ago

Sensible. Cuts, however, against my mental caricature of an astroturfing shill.

Interesting. The confirmed astroturfer Monsanto[1] is a fairly active one, and though I can't prove some of the people I saw were Monsanto shills, I've never met a person in real life advocate on behalf of that company.

Anyways, their tactics were incredibly distraction-centric and ad-hominem. As soon as anybody brought up the scientific research on pesticides, they'd start comparing this position to anti-vaccine, even completely out-of-context.

It's not hard to debase a conversation so much it falls apart entirely online, which is why the technique seemed effective.

[1] https://usrtk.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/MDLLetNothingGo...

kolpa4• 8 years ago

Cutting through the rhetoric, that means simply that CCP does bog-standard PR rhetoric. No professional in PR would deign to acknowledge the existence of critics, unless those critics are too loud to ignore.

aj7• 8 years ago

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.

MrLeap• 8 years ago

What corpus did you train off?

saagarjha• 8 years ago

Sounds very Markov-chain like, doesn’t it? But I think it’s just written in an annoying way: sentences that seem short, choppy, and cut off, with very little context to string them together.

JohnJamesRambo• 8 years ago

Very interesting. I always get that uncanny valley feeling even on Hacker News, especially when the comments concern China. This would explain a lot.

noobermin6• 8 years ago

Or something like a comment thread where half the comments pointing out other governments do propaganda are flagged to hell, like this section.

notahacker• 8 years ago

Counter point: lots of people are just very, very passionate about their country and have even less sense of perspective on social media.

I remember well over a decade ago a student wrote a comment piece about the PRC in my UK university, which had a large Chinese student population. It was a fairly bad comment piece that felt like the student in question was angling for a slot at one of the UK's very right wing tabloids (funnily enough the student journalist is now a well-respected commentator at the FT) but its fundamental point was the fairly uncontroversial observation that the Chinese government isn't democratic and has very different foreign policy priorities than the West. It's possible, of course, that some of the outrage on the threads below the article on the website from people apparently incapable of distinguishing between disparagement of government and insults to ordinary people was orchestrated by a higher power, even though English student media probably isn't top of the CCCP's list of priorities now, never mind in the early 2000s.

But a lot of the hysterical commentary about how deeply offensive and discriminatory it was towards Chinese people that ended up in the print edition came from named people who were actually overseas students at the university.

People being willing to spend their free time manufacturing the same outrage or enthusiasm others receive full time incomes for manufacturing isn't exactly a uniquely Chinese thing either...

qiqing2• 8 years ago

50c party is widely accepted as real a thing as Russian troll farms during the election, but I'd be skeptical if HN is a target. (I don't think you need an academic paper to 'prove' it's a real thing.)

The reason you read defensive comments on HN (even from me) is due to how easily anti-China criticism slides from legitimate policy discussion into raw, tribal racism. I simply feel it is my duty to call out anti-Chinese racism when it comes across my path, not just because it makes me mad.

Aunche2• 8 years ago

You get an uncanny valley feeling because the Western media always exaggerates the degree of how Orwellian or how much influence the Chinese government really has, so that they can get more clicks from people unfamiliar with China or who are mildly racist.

John_KZ• 8 years ago

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.

Sangermaine5• 8 years ago

(strategic? image-preserving?) indifference

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.

yorwba4• 8 years ago

I'm not sure what kind of articles you're looking for, but here is the English website of the China National Space Administration: http://www.cnsa.gov.cn/n6443408/index.html

As a non-government source, the South China Morning post is the closest thing to an independent newspaper and they have a collection of articles about the Yutu rover: http://www.scmp.com/topics/jade-rabbit-lunar-rover

kolpa4• 8 years ago

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/world/asia/china-lands-pr...

Lionsion12• 8 years ago

The rating was sustained by constant comments by Chinese studying in the US and burnishing their reps with the Party.

I can believe it. The Chinese government apparently paying students to wave flags when their officials come visit [1]. Since they manage to do that successfully, it wouldn't surprise me if they do similar things with internet comments.

[1] http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/07/chinas-long-arm-reaches-...

MekaiGS• 8 years ago

There is a more specific term for folks like that, they are being referred as the 50 cent party.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

kolpa4• 8 years ago

Which Social Network was this observed on?

Wasn't that landing 5 years ago? Any more recent examples?

I get nothing when I search HN for the NYT article

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=As%20Rover%20Lands,%20China%20...

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=https:%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F...

vthallam3• 8 years ago

T - 30 mins before this post gets buried. I don't understand despite the high upvote count, why do articles critical of China are not able to be in the first page for more than a couple hours.

Also, China is the new Saudi Arabia. With the economic power, they can get away with anything and actually, you can't do anything to stop that. Even Trump who was so critical wanted to help ZTE as soon as the Chinese asked for interference.

BatFastard• 8 years ago

Well Trump appears to have changed his mind very soon after they invested 500 million in a project he was involved with.

elefanten3• 8 years ago

Your comment is strictly true despite the downvotes. But, it would help to note that this is simply an observation of potentially unrelated events. Smoke but not fire.

What's more disheartening is that the latest round of (still incomplete) information indicates that he's trading back the ZTE action in exchange for the CCP walking back their own agriculture sector trade actions that were initiated during the first volleys in the trade conflict a few months ago.

That would be a deeply stupid and un-strategic trade to make. But sadly, it seems to play into the President's domestic political needs.

Edit: feel compelled to add / stress the caveat that no outcomes of the trade talks are known in full

yorwba4• 8 years ago

1 hour later and this story is #6 on the front page. I get it, complaining about perceived censorship is fun, but this submission hasn't quite gone full flame war yet, so I think it will stay for a while.

Lionsion12• 8 years ago

I think this one will stay, but mainly because the content is an inoculation against the kind of trolling that usually leads to China threads getting buried.

I do have an irrational hope that the inoculation will last for more than a single thread though.

rdlecler14• 8 years ago

Which would suggest that if you wanted to bury a thread you don’t downvote it but fake a flame war and then it’ll quietly go away... may need to figure out how to deal with this problem.

pixelpp• 8 years ago

So does the US with it's media machine.

alexandercrohde4• 8 years ago

Nobody is saying it doesn't, but the two things are entirely independent from each other. It's not a competition between countries, it's a question of how people of earth can get the best lives for themselves.

xmly• 8 years ago

How do you know it is not Russia? Maybe Russia is manipulating China and USA at the same time!

notadoc• 8 years ago

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 media companies appear to do nothing about the huge numbers of obvious bots, astroturfers, sockpuppets, trollfarms, etc on their services.

Interesting times we live in!

titanix2• 8 years ago

Yes it happens all the times from the newspapers. They select topics to cover or not (first biais) then cover it the want they want to fit their narratives (second level biais). In France, one of the most renowned newspaper (Le Monde) have a dedicated team (Les Décodeurs) to make posts about every politically sensitive topics. The official raison d'être of the team is to fight fake news, but the way they wrote is so fake-newish it becomes like an art performance.

pmlnr3• 8 years ago

Hungary doesn't need it. The government simply mangled any opposition media.

foodislove3• 8 years ago

The Chinese global trollism is getting worse. From Airlines who don't label Taiwan under China to kids in primary school in Australia who paint a Taiwanese flag on a bull, the Chinese are really becoming more and more belligerent. The Chinese internet army of "hurt feelings" and stupid whataboutism and fake moral equivalence is entering HN as well.

Whenver there is any negative story about china, the downvotes happen immediately and "defends of the honor of china" pop up magically throwing dirt everywhere.

I'm sure when PG made this, having nationalistic Chinese trolls degrade the forum with their "China is always right" bs was probably not on the top of his mind.

I wonder if we can ask the mods. Is there a pattern of downvotes whenver there isa negative story about China? I wonder if a bunch of Tencent/Alibaba "patriotic chinese" simply created lots of accounts and upvoted themselves to get to the point they can downvote across their accounts to "keep the internet clean" of anything that embarasses Xi Jinping and his stupid uneducated bimbo of a wife

ericjang• 8 years ago

I think the last remark about Xi Jinping's wife was uncalled for (I'm Taiwanese American).

vthallam3• 8 years ago

I agree with a sibling comment, you put together a good observation about how the posts get down voted and eventually getting out of the first page every time, but I think you should edit the last comment about his Xi Jinping's Wife.

Lionsion12• 8 years ago

I agree as well. Maybe she's uneducated and unintelligent, I don't know anything about her, but there are more polite ways of saying that and it distracts from the overall point.

Lionsion12• 8 years ago

Whenver there is any negative story about china, the downvotes happen immediately and "defends of the honor of china" pop up magically throwing dirt everywhere.

Maybe a little, but the main thing I see in stories like that is dozens of comments that that derail the comments into a "the US is just as bad!" flame-war, and kill discussion of the negative story.

It's really effective, because Western users are often ignorant of China and/or indifferent to it, but will happily jump into a flame-war about Western countries when presented with the bait.

rdlecler14• 8 years ago

Or it’s a false flag operation: create flame wars and toxify certain subjects.

nothrabannosir2• 8 years ago

The HN moderating skew on anything regarding China is palpable. Anecdotal, but I’ve witnessed it every single time I participated (both ways). And I systematically see posts buried which otherwise would not have been.

It’s becoming a nuisance, which is fine. But I fear what will happen if the trend continues. It may very well end up suffocating thoughtful discussion about China and their policies. Which, ironically, would make it all the more important to have those :)

I find myself wondering if it’s astroturfing or blind nationalism.

(I agree the comment about his wife is in poor taste, by the way :/ I would support an amendment to your post, but I guess that’s your call.)

alexandercrohde4• 8 years ago

And I systematically see posts buried which otherwise would not have been.

I'm skeptical that mods are deliberating burying such posts. What can happen is

1 - it gets flagged then vouched, but still has a huge karma hit. This happened to all the Damore discussions.

2 - it has a much greater ratio of comments to upvotes. This is taken as a marker of bickering and leads to penalization

reaperducer3• 8 years ago

On HN it's not unique to China. Anything negative about India is downvoted into oblivion. You can almost time it to the rising of the sun in India Standard Time.

I'm not saying that it's being orchestrated by the Indian government, but it does happen.

vthallam3• 8 years ago

This is the distraction the linked study was talking about. I'm not sure if it happens about articles related to India, but since we are on the topic about China's article getting down-voted (anecdotally I have seen multiple times), I think we should focus on that atm.

Theodores• 8 years ago

How many Indian people live in India and in the global diaspora?

How many Chinese people live in China?

How many Americans are there?

I have not counted them all myself, however this discussion has not talked the numbers and there are a fair few Chinese and Indian people and not so many American people, therefore some presence online is to be expected by people that don't go along with what Washington says.

Regarding whether it is bots or not, the guys in the China office where I work sometimes send out company wide emails that do not look like they have been written by humans. Particularly salient are the 'employee of the month' nominations that should be sent to HR and not 'cc all'. These emails definitely look like they could be written by an auto-translating bot. Reflected in these emails are different values and different ways of praising people that cause us in the UK to chuckle a bit.

foodislove3• 8 years ago

This proves the point. I added the "bimbo of a wife" comment as an example. If you look on web forums, there are unmitigated attacks of similar calibre towards Tsai (President of Taiwan) calling her a "old whore", "old maid", "japanese collaborator", and such.

The first time you see such nonsense like the "bimbo" reference, you call it out. However, after you see it 50 times, you just ignore it. For you, you ignore it, but since nobody calls it out, it is gradually asserted as fact. This is the same trend online by the organized trolls whereby nobody even bothers to call them out when they pretend Taiwan is part of China; that the South China Sea belongs to China; and that Xi Jinping is the new Kim Jong Il.

The first time you see something like this attack, you call it out. By the time you see it 200 times from 20 different people, you'll be indifferent.

I should write a better 50c algorithm that spews Peng is a stupid bimbo until everyone on the internet accepts it.

Note. I don't think she is a bimbo, but the point stands none the less

dang4• 8 years ago

It doesn't "stand", because you're not welcome to haul that kind of trash into Hacker News just because people sling it elsewhere.

dang4• 8 years ago

Your attack against Xi Jinping's wife is shameful and obviously a bannable offense. It's shameful most of all to whatever point of view or country you're representing. Who would want to be associated with something like that? If you want to continue participating on HN, please don't ever do anything like this again.

The rest of your comment is also the kind of nationalistic ranting that isn't allowed on HN. People on both sides of every strongly-felt line perceive their opponents as trolls. If you have evidence of abuse, please email us so we can take a look; we ban accounts that do that, regardless of which nations or opinions are at issue.

But please don't post insinuations without basis. By 'basis' I mean specific links or data. Simply having an opposing view is not enough; it's too subject to how one feels. The site guidelines mention this, so it would be a good idea to (re-)read them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Is there a pattern of downvotes whenver there isa negative story about China

There isn't such a pattern than I'm aware of. What you're probably seeing is users flagging stories that they feel are off-topic for HN, presumably because they lead to nationalistic flamewars.

johnchristopher2• 8 years ago

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 of the government's side are tagged as `50c` since `50c` seems to be defined by being `pro government` ?

And then:

[..] 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.

If I ignore the `also` word in the first quote it all makes sense.

yorwba4• 8 years ago

Why is this `also` true ? In addition to what ?

It is true in addition to being claimed.

dschuler• 8 years ago

"also true" is a phrase that really means "is the case as well" (as in the previous sentence).

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!

elefanten3• 8 years ago

I read those two sentences to describe an existing misconception among BOTH (sentence 1) academics/journalists/activists AND (sentence 2) people posting on social media. The misconception is that the strategy of 50c party posters is to argue loudly from the perspective of the CCP.

The following sentence in the abstract helps put it in context: "Yet, almost no systematic empirical evidence exists for this claim, or, more importantly, for the Chinese regime's strategic objective in pursuing this activity. "

This third sentence presents the paper's challenge to the supposed misconception.

Therefore, the concluding quote you highlight makes perfect sense as the paper's thesis for what strategy drives 50c party posts.

Edit: I agree those sentence are a bit awkward. To help parse them, eliminate some of the connecting words:

1: "Academics/journalists/activists claim 50c posts argue for government's side."

2: "This is also true of posts accused on social media of being 50c" (this = argue for government's side)

3: "Yet, no evidence exists for this claim"

kolpa4• 8 years ago

I still don't get it. To me, they are saying that the general online public thinks "pro-CCP" and "50c" are the same thing, just as everyone says pro-HillaryClinton people are "Correct the Record" troops, and all pro-Trump people were Russian trolls, and all pro-Israel posters are AIPAC troops, and all shitposters are 4channers

ucaetano2• 8 years ago

Essentially it translates that:

* Accounts that publicly disclose as being related to group A

And

* Accounts that don't publicly mention any relationship with group A, but are frequently accused as being part of group A

Show similar behavior (always supporting the government's side).

johnchristopher2• 8 years ago

Thanks everyone :).

kevintb• 8 years ago

great food for thought that applies to any public forum, whether it's infected with these massive secret governmental operations or not.

meko• 8 years ago

I'm inclined not to trust an article that uses propaganda-rhetoric like 'regime'.

fermienrico2• 8 years ago

Right, so you're ignoring peer-reviewed article with hard data, analysis and conclusions in the favor of propaganda-rhetoric use of the word "regime". You're doing a disservice to yourself.

woodandsteel2• 8 years ago

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.

elefanten3• 8 years ago

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.

woodandsteel2• 8 years ago

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.

I think the term "intelligent" has more than one meaning, and one of them is what I was trying to get at, something like "able to act in an effective manner." But perhaps you can suggest a less ambiguous term.

smacktoward• 8 years ago

Instead of helping the population become smarter, better-informed thinkers, he is trying to turn them into robots.

Robots are the only kind of people authoritarian governments are comfortable with.

pow_pp_-1_v• 8 years ago

Interesting. The whole thing is so simple. A government wants to get their message out quickly and efficiently before negative stories get too much attention. So, how to do it cost effectively? Simple, ask normal government employees to write pro-government posts on social media when they get time. Plus their career prospects improve if they do it. Finally a reminder on certain days about their duty to spread the good news about the government.

I guess the only weakness in the whole scheme is people reporting back to an authority about their work. I am pretty sure they got rid of that after the leak. The genius of this thing is that if you ask the people who write these posts if they are doing propaganda, there's a good chance that their initial genuine response will be to say no.

rapind• 8 years ago

I briefly worked at a (US) company who upon hiring you provided you with copy to post on both LinkedIn and Glassdoor. I genuinely liked the people so I didn't object or even mention how tasteless this was. Instead I just bailed.

Same shit IMO.

yorwba4• 8 years ago

if you ask the people who write these posts if they are doing propaganda, there's a good chance that their initial genuine response will be to say no.

Actually, they'll probably say yes. Most Chinese do not think of propaganda as something negative. Every student club at my university has an unironically named "propaganda department" that manages their social media. "Propaganda" just never underwent the value shift that happened in other countries, so although there's a translation of "PR" almost nobody uses the word.

jonathanyc3• 8 years ago

We should definitely be wary of attempts by the Chinese government to distract from meaningful discussion. It’s worth remembering that leftist organizations in the US and around the world during the Cold War were sometimes funded by the Soviet Union.

At the same time, I am reminded of how organizations that in hindsight we know were definitely not funded by the Soviet Union were accused of exactly that during the 50s and 60s. For example, we now know that at one point the KGB and the FBI were concurrently running smear campaigns against MLK.

In that light, I’m skeptical of Lionsion’s motives in posting this. Yesterday he was rightfully called out by some including me for writing of Chinese internment camps in Xinjiang that

These camps appear to be the result of high-level Chinese government policy that explicitly targets this ethic group. There are no contemporary parallels in the US. If you think there are, do you think Obama was in on it? The US situation is unfortunate, but it's more the result of poverty and lower-level racism, not a policy to imprison blacks.

The whataboutism in his last statement of course goes against the consensus of US academics studying criminal justice issues, the consensus of criminal justice advocates, as well as what (again, thanks to the passage of time) we now know about the deliberate decisions of politicians leading up to the War on Drugs:

https://www.aclu.org/other/race-war-drugs https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich...

I think Hacker News should place where we can have a civil discussions about issues. Thanks to the wonders of technology, we are able to have multiple (not just one!) threads and thus to discuss multiple topics. And as I have said previously, most of us can both walk and chew gum at the same time; if someone is unable to even read comments discussing US education reform on an article by an American looking at the Swedish education system, for example, without being “distracted,” I think that’s more of an issue for the easily-distracted person than for the discussants.

But the strange trend of accusing everyone who would like to discuss the relevance of an issue to the US of being funded by the Chinese government is as intellectually demeaning as it should be rhetorically suspect.

I’d be happy to prove that I’m an American citizen not funded by the Chinese or any other government, but I think that might be relatively hard to prove in a fair and respectful way over the Internet. On the other hand, it is much easier to look at someone’s public comment history and to see the unsettling trends there.

More generally, I’m getting tired of having to battle this recent uptick in China scaremongering on what used to be a much more reasonable forum. Lionsion’s account is very new, and I wonder if they are part of the recent influx of new users who have arrived with their own bad habits. Seriously, check the account creation date for users who post things that seem to be weird pro-China or anti-China propaganda. They seem to mostly have been made around 2016.

rdlecler14• 8 years ago

Perhaps ones karma score should be displayed with the username on post flagged as political.

jonathanyc3• 8 years ago

I think it'd be neat if we could also separate karma out by the type of post, somehow. For example, although my account is relatively old, most of my karma is just from a series of comments about the Uber autonomous car crash. I'm not sure that my karma accurately reflects that I'm primarily a lurker.

Lionsion12• 8 years ago

You're literally trying to carry the same derail into a new thread where it's even less on-topic?

Here, I made a new post for you for your derail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17105121. Please take it there.

jonathanyc3• 8 years ago

Would you like to respond to my points, or are you going to use the same tactic you did last time and completely ignore what others write in order to push your own agenda?

Why is it that your account is only 67 days old and >75% of your comments are about China? Do you even comment on normal Hacker News topics that aren't related to politics?

dang4• 8 years ago

You've been getting deep into nationalistic flamewars. You've also repeatedly been uncivil. We ban accounts that do these things, regardless of which nation (or ideology or opinion) you're for or against. It needs to stop, so please stop.

You've been spreading the toxin you're deploring, which is generally how it spreads on HN. That's not ok, regardless of how wrong someone else may be. If you think you see abuse, you're welcome to email us about it so we can take a look and take action if we find it. But you're not welcome to bring the site down in flames in your own right.

rajacombinator• 8 years ago

American govt fabricates wars for social distraction, China needs to step their game up!

mindfulhack• 8 years ago

I love it when we have moments like this where truth comes out (in the form of scientific research if need be) that previously was moronically dismissed (by people including government shills I'm sure) as 'conspiracy theory'.

Snowden and NSA spying was another one. Truth is not as boring as they may make you want to believe. The world is very, VERY interesting and you just have to discover it.

xster4• 8 years ago

This is literally and exactly what Correct The Record (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record) is and is as standard as it gets in American political discourse online https://www.fec.gov/data/disbursements/?two_year_transaction....

dragonwriter2• 8 years ago

This is literally and exactly what Correct The Record [...] is

No, it's not. Propaganda by competing domestic partisan interest groups seeking to influence elections in their own country is not “literally and exactly” the same thing as state sponsored propaganda.

xster4• 8 years ago

Ah, I see where we might disagree on.

I think you would argue that from the perspective of the propaganda targets, the CCP is the establishment vying to influence public opinion and American political parties are not. They're simply political instruments in a machinery that then determines what becomes the establishment.

I'm not saying it's a binary dichotomy but I'm more leaning on the side that <oversimplification> there are no American 'political parties' in the sense that the Green Party will never be like the Canadian NDP etc </oversimplification> and the 'parties' is just an established, acceptable non-real-power-threatening Overton Window that directs shared class concerns and energy into a black hole of oxygen draining wedge issue arena.

The establishment is the establishment and money is the establishment and from that perspective, I would argue CTR is a class interest group rather than a partisan interest group.

Anyway. I think we disagree but I think it's the context we disagree on.

mike_n• 8 years ago

as if we don't have our own Wag-the-Dog-ish distractions also?

alexandercrohde4• 8 years ago

This itself is a distraction. There is no "us," "we," or "them"

equalunique• 8 years ago

Political entities linked to the US government do this too.

Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction

Related Stories