China Spreads Propaganda to U.S. On Facebook, a Platform It Bans at Home
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
* China fabricates propaganda on Facebook, but bans it at home.
* Germany manufactures and exports firearms, but tightly regulates them at home.
* The US manufactures and exports cigarettes and pharmaceuticals, but tightly regulates them at home.
* Israel markets binary option trading scams to the rest of the world, but bans them at home.
* Russia produces malware, but only punishes anyone who unleashes it at home.
There's a lot to be said about the credibility of products and services that governments won't let their own people have access to but freely sell to the rest of the world.
Because the presence of regulation suggests at least some vector for the regulated thing doing harm. Wantonly exporting something tightly regulated in its place of origin implies that the government is aware of its potential to do harm, and sells it anyway without the regulatory guiderails, which is a shitty thing to do.
Did you mean Voice of America?
VOA is forbidden to broadcast within the United States by the 1948 Smith Mundt-Act, Section 501
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith%E2%80%93Mundt_Act#Excerp...
Add alcohol and gambling to the list there, and I'm not sure if pharma should be on it given the opioid rise...
You're basically personifying a collective of individuals. There is no single 'view' on alcohol and gambling. You're just cherry picking the view of the moral right and calling it hypocritical as if it's the official view of the US.
To my knowledge the US isn't in the business of foisting gambling products or services on other countries, even if it is highly regulated domestically.
I can't (yet) walk into CVS and arbitrarily buy Vicodin, Xanax, or Ambien in the US because we know how dangerous it is and regulate it. In other countries, it's shockingly easy to get.
If the French want to allow 16yr olds to drink whiskey. So be it. (not sure if thats the law, but the French like their livations)
You make a long list and each point is intellectual dishonest. Do a little research. You are on HN not facebook. We have standards of intelligence here. I dont think this list meets those standards.
Replace "US" with "US-based companies" if it makes you feel better.
When a foreign government disrupts my free elections though, I'm going to be troubled by it. What you're saying is effectively belittling the importance of hardening our own systems from this foreign influence.
The 2nd highest comment is "honestly curious" whether the US participates in propaganda campaigns.
Anyone who reads the article, and thinks "this is outrageous!" instead of treating it as a chess move by an opponent.
Radio Free Europe was at least just using the airwaves. These efforts are using US corporations against the US.
Having the hyper-free-speech internet that we created turned against us in ways that more authoritarian countries are immune to is a huge slap in the face. We need to figure out a way to handle this.
I really only see the outcome of this outrage over foreign interference in our democracy resulting in a spectrum of terrible to shameful. In the terrible case, we are hyping up defensive nationalism and disregarding our own actions and history, which may very well lead to all kinds of barbaric, jingoistic policies moving forward. In the shameful case, we are taking advantage of these stories on foreign manipulation as a means to ignore what is wrong with our society, passing the blame solely onto a non american third party.
In neither case are we reviewing our history as a nation. I fear we will ignore all the possible lessons we might learn from honestly reviewing the times where we have disenfranchised our own people, overthrew foreign governments for adhering to a different socio-economic ideology, or were so blinded by our own propaganda and fear that we were convinced of conveniently simple narratives about who was bad and who was good and who we had to kill and who had to do the killing.
I feel like there is a common aphorism about how you need to fail 10 times to have a decent chance to succeed once. It seems like we have an opportunity to review our history at this moment. We didn't do any such examination after the fall of the USSR in the 90s. Nope, we were vindicated and there was no longer a reason to pen-test neoliberal-capitalism as either an economic system or a larger ideology.
It took 2 inane wars, a massive recession, and the election of idiot-nationalist reality tv show star / shitty condo developer to provide us with an opportunity to introspect, and I'll be damned if I dont make the strongest appeal my young perspective can muster for us to do that introspection.
All countries also need to defend themselves against this. Sovereignty isn’t just about borders.
Y'know, like if you're a nation who is always going on about democracy and freedom (who even starts wars that kills 100,000s of people for these ideals), maybe don't subjugate the majority and centralize socio-economic power into the hands of a tiny minority.
I think it is generally improper, or not preferable, to use coercive or manipulative force to alter the autonomous decision making process of a population you yourself (or your cadre) have lite or no direct stake in, accountability to, or reliance on. When the US interferes in foreign politics in a duplicitous way, we betray most of the principles of democracy. When any government or corporation or religion does this, they stomp on the idea that people should be able to make decisions for themselves. And when you live in a world dominated by the influence of immaterial third-parties, you become deeply frustrated, and this is one of the reasons things are so volatile right now.
I dunno, all you did was link to a logical fallacy article on wikipedia, so like maybe you didnt ask for me to write a missive on this notion of mine, but if I am being honest, I am honestly so frustrated by the prevalence of people thinking that pointing out a logical fallacy (aka rhetorical technique) functions as anything other than tepid dismissal.
And aren’t you just exercising a black or white binary fallacy when we are really comparing a light shade of grey to a much darker one?
And which are you saying is which?
https://www.npr.org/2016/12/22/506625913/database-tracks-his...
In the world of international jockeying and competition it would be naive to assume they would use a tool like facebook against their economic rivals.
That's a good way to put it. Since China is so in-love with AI, I wonder if we could use AI with the same purpose - spreading "freedom" information in China.
Something like this actually happened recently:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-chatbots-...
Something like this actually happened recently:
https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/24/microsoft-silences-its-new...
No, they banned it because they don't know how to take down posts.
I mean, I've seen these silly promotion ads where they interview random people who say China is great. They're annoying, but not unlike random mattress ads or ebook ads I see everywhere on the timeline. Most of the time i just ignore them always.
Besides, they're no where near the level of nastiness of local political ads that denounce other sides as rapists and child molester (at least in my area, where they basically show latinos as gang members)
And there's nothing wrong with it. Sure it leaves a bad taste in your mouth, but Facebook posts filled with misinformation, sponsored by foreign agents disguised as your countrymen are vastly preferable to the alternatives which have historically included sponsored coups, astroturfed bloody protests, economically crippling sanctions, and assassinations.
[1] China, Russia, the US, the UK, Israel, KSA, India, Germany, etc. Yes, even Germany which many people on HN seem to think miraculously stopped spying in 1989 and ascended to ethical heaven. I wouldn't be surprised if Canada used it during the Keystone pipeline debate.
It isn't news. It's propaganda. NYTimes and WaPo have been spearheading a political/propaganda campaign against social media ( fb, reddit, youtube, etc ) to reign them in. The last thing the nytimes wants is competition to the propaganda arena.
Traditional media has been trying to get social media to fall in line for nearly a decade. The last election put a sense on urgency in the establishment and the media mouthpieces they control. Also it helps to scapegoat russia, china, etc for how ineffective the media was last election in shaping the narrative.
This gives these media companies way too much credit. If they had this much self-awareness and intelligence they wouldn't have been caught out by the rise of social media in the first place.
"Traditional media" has had hundreds of years to get it's business model down and comfortably integrated into society, so of course new media is having the lion's share of the problems which is being reported on. This should all be totally obvious and expected - it's not really a massive conspiracy - it's innovative business models forcing new problems into the open. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have been in the public consciousness for less than 15 years.
I'm not giving it any credit.
> If they had this much self-awareness and intelligence they wouldn't have been caught out by the rise of social media in the first place.
That would be giving it too much credit.
Traditional media is just protecting its own turf. Or it is trying to.
$1.6B figure was leaked on the state budget in 2009
I don’t feel outrageous at this at all. The US have arguably done something similar for as long as anyone can remember. It is however a reminder the world we are living in. China is a rising super power and they have been flexing their muscle in the global scale and you may be targeted more often than you think.
The next time you assure yourself you’re immune to corporate speak, informercial, propaganda from the left or the right, add foreign powers to the list.
It's also newsworthy that China is spreading propaganda via Facebook. They are afraid of its influence to their population, and use it to their advantage elsewhere.
So be glad of the existence of all the propaganda you're getting daily, because it is still up to you to filter and not the government to do it for you.
> And there's nothing wrong with it. Sure it leaves a bad taste in your mouth, but Facebook posts filled with misinformation, sponsored by foreign agents disguised as your countrymen are vastly preferable to the alternatives which have historically included sponsored coups, astroturfed bloody protests, economically crippling sanctions, and assassinations.
Do you think China (or Russia or another foreign country) have never engaged in any of the things you mentioned? And the propaganda they are spreading today aren't preluded to something more evil tomorrow?
What the hell is up with this title? "Country attacks with weapons, the same thing it bans internally". Obviously?
This is a new form of McCarthyism and its a double edged sword. Other countries can use the exact same logic to ban hollywood and western media for propaganda and you can't then lecture them on free press or accuse them of authoritarianism.
It should be taken for granted there is going to be fair share of propaganda and rumour mongering everywhere and always has been in human society.
The only way to 'control' this is to establish a 'ministry of truth'. But given the level of double speak and paranoia I won't be surprised to hear folks advocating a tightly controlled 'ministry of truth' to 'protect' our fragile democracies.
This is something above mere diversity of opinion, or even dissent. This is dishonest, covert propaganda.
You've just described the whole advertising industry.
If at all, China would have helped Clinton. An isolationist like Trump is not good for China which depends on exports to the US and other western countries to fuel its growth, which China needs in turn to prevent social unrest caused by poverty.
No one will waste resources in tracking down who helped the loser of the election.
It has never been this effective, targeted or difficult to uncover.
Debatable, unless you're taking the claims that $100K of meme-tier ads on Facebook changed the outcome of the election at face value.
> or difficult to uncover.
Is it really? Facebook certainly seemed very sure of every little ad that was purchased by a Russian party.
It's not just Facebook, or Twitter, or 4chan, or Reddit, or HN, or IRC, or email, or TV ads, or superpac ads, etc....
Ads can be targeted moreso than ever, celebrities are more easily roped in willingly or as useful idiots. Content has wider possibilities ("verified" emails). People are much more primed for disinformation than they were in the past.
> Is it really? Facebook certainly seemed very sure of every little ad that was purchased by a Russian party.
They paid in rubles. They didn't seem to even think it was terribly important to hide.
Anyways, it would be interesting to know if there is any kind of US presence on Chinese/Russian social networks (like, is there some bizarro mirror world /r/the_donald in Russian with posts pushing some kind of US agenda?)
IMO we should not do covert activity that reciprocates Russia's in this case. We should do overt things like trade sanctions or embargoes.
I mean, i think it comes down to whether or not you can sleep at night knowing what you’re doing. Much of the “voice of america” actions of the last century do not pass this sleep test.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lone_Gunmen_(TV_series)
And really. People joked about it being equal to House of Cards. But the real facts were way too outrageous to get into a fictional script.
Really?
I bet you are these kinds that think Brazil was been "left-wing" brainwashed and the federal universities are all bolivarian. But a TV Series is just a TV Series.
Probably nothing like that at all. Remember, the Russian ads everyone is going on about were basically clones of the ones domestic groups had created related to various social issues (BLM, gun violence, etc.). So really US propaganda in other parts of the world would just be cloning and amplifying social commentary...
It's the US version of China's "50 Cent Army" and Russia's "Troll Farm."
All promote their own propaganda and many also attack their rivals via sock puppets. As far as I know the only country using trolls to push general unrest is Russia.
If people uncritically eat up whatever they are fed by their newsfeeds, then we are hopeless. If, however, people can consume news critically, then propaganda may merely be annoying, hardly harmful.
Maybe because they're part of the problem?