China's Hopeless Twitter Influence Operations

https://chinatalk.substack.com/p/chinas-hopeless-twitter-influence

by undefined1 • 6 years ago

47 8 6 years ago

chinatalk.substack.com

Corinthian• 6 years ago

I'm afraid I don't have anything insightful to add, but I can say that was a strikingly good read!

ermir• 6 years ago

It works the other way around as well, American lack of cultural understanding of China also makes American influence operations seem very stiff and ineffective. I remember seeing a pro-democracy speech given by some Sinologist at an American University, the audience of which was mainland Chinese people. It was full of Americanisms and cultural elements which I assume would be very offputting and ineffective.

As for the Russian operations, the writer in the article briefly touches an aspect which I believe has the essence of why some of their operations work so well: it seems like the employees at the Internet Research Agency are having lots of fun subverting America. A few weeks ago I saw that one of the front organizations that claimed to be from somewhere in the US had an acronym that translated into something like "fuck" in Russian. I can't imagine the Chinese bureaucracy would allow such childish pranks to be part of a state influence operation, but paradoxically allowing your employees to mess around like this has a strong effect on the efficacy of your operations.

This actually mirrors a lot of what Paul Graham says about procrastination, and Jordan Peterson about play being an essential human activity. Simply put, if you don't feel like you're playing, you'll never get into a flow state where you can do your best work.

pmachinery• 6 years ago

What Russia does is nothing new; they're just applying abroad - simply, via the internet, and with the witting or unwitting help of useful idiots in target countries - what they did at home.

"...what Surkov has done, is to import ideas from conceptual art into the very heart of politics."

"His aim is to undermine peoples' perceptions of the world, so they never know what is really happening."

"Surkov turned Russian politics into a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theater. He sponsored all kinds of groups, from neo-Nazi skinheads to liberal human rights groups. He even backed parties that were opposed to President Putin."

"But the key thing was, that Surkov then let it be known that this was what he was doing, which meant that no one was sure what was real or fake."

Sound familiar? It was written two years before Trump became president, about a policy originating 20 years ago in Russia.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/12/31/bbcs_adam...

chillacy• 6 years ago

I noticed this happens within the US too in mainstream politics. You can sometimes just tell who is writing a piece based on their word choice, let alone any deep framing of the world.

yrlihuan• 6 years ago

Blocking contents you don't like and call them govt-backed operations. That's genius!

pixelpanic360• 6 years ago

I bet you must be the 50cents. Please, CCP, stop making your dictation mindset worldwide, there's karma.

OR you must be a person from parallel universe.

dang• 6 years ago

You can't post like this here. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and specifically this:

"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."

Here's plenty of past explanation about why we have this rule:

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

powerapple• 6 years ago

This guy is helpless. It would be very hard to understand the Twitter usage for Chinese in China are mostly for porns. They migrated form tumblr after tumblr changed its policy. They mostly don't post and don't speak English. What else would you use your freedom for? Think about it :) Some of those people will have multiple accounts (or operates scam/spam accounts as well), to scam people for donation or money. And surprisingly to westerners, they are loyal to their country as well. As they have shown when their country is under attack. I was following some youtuber, I was surprise to learn that a youtuber got ig account blocked (from what I can see, all contents were everyday life). If you ask me, I think Twitter fake account are mostly normal accounts, and yes, that's that twitter is for.

China's Hopeless Twitter Influence Operations

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