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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

Yes. The Chinese are learning this from the US. A powerful disinformation capability is so much more important in the US because of free speech.

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How is China learning this from the US? Chinese manipulation of social media is well known to be vast and incredibly coordinated. There just isn't evidence that the US government is engaged in anything approaching the Chinese scale.

Sure we have tremendous surveillance capabilities, but we use them to detect criminal and terroristic behavior, not to police thought crime in the same way that China does. Don't be silly.

It's so fashionable for pseudo-intellectuals to adopt a cynicism-all-the-time mentality, especially about America, but it's really just lazy thinking.

It makes me wonder how the conspiracy people think this stuff is orchestrated. Does it all get planned out by one council of secret overlords masterminding the flow of public information? How many people are in on the secret? What is their end goal?

...Or maybe social dynamics and global relationships are more complex than that and patterns emerge even without the need for a conspiracy behind them...

It doesn't take but a modicum of research to know these answers. I'd expect HN commenters to be better than speaking out of ignorance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_in_the_United_State...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Informatio...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Information_Agen...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_Secretary_of_State_for_P...

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-brown/propaganda-public-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

And this doesn't even begin to get into the deep collusion between the government and the media with lobbying, regulatory capture, government appointments, politicians on corporate board seats.

"Propaganda" is an ambiguous word. By some definitions every country engages in ongoing propaganda. Especially in times of war (where the majority of these "modicum of research" you provided took place) there is sometimes a need to establish channels of communication and leadership.

Maybe it's easier to believe in a massively orchestrated conspiracy machine masterminding all of this, but I believe that the world and ongoing international affairs are slightly more nuanced than that.

>in times of war

We have always been at war with Eastasia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_mili...

What are you on about a "massively orchestrated conspiracy"? No one but you is talking about that.

Sorry, it seemed like that was being implied here but I must be mistaken.

Perhaps you were simply referring to the normal complexity one would expect out of a diverse crowd of interests from bodies of government and businesses acting in ways that sometimes overlap when you said:

> "deep collusion between the government and the media with lobbying, regulatory capture, government appointments, politicians on corporate board seats"

Well, in the case of Chinese, most of people learned and are used to stop questioning/exploring/discussing/thinking/caring almost all of the unfiltered information. There is little room to be picky about the food tailor-made and there are even a lot of candies in the past few years. Why bother caring something you can not change/do/affect and sometimes may hurt yourself? More candies brings stronger heart beats and bigger bodies, too.

China is a historic nation reaching back thousands of years, inventor of mass foreign policy, bureaucracy, and more. She has no need to learn governance, nor the art of influence from the United States

You say that as if there isn't a massive amount of innovation transfer in all fields, going both ways, with the China and the US, let alone most other countries.

National pride is disgusting.

I am not Chinese, however I can recognize it’s great contributions to humanity. I hold this nation in upmost respect, though I disagree strongly with its domestic policies.

This has nothing to do with national pride and everything to do with the highest respect toward something that is greater, older and much wiser than myself.

This is just stupid. Does Ethiopia have nothing to learn from the rest of the world because that's where humanity (probably) invented fire? Good, useful information spreads regardless of whether a country invented any arbitrary institution in the past

China has institutional knowledge reaching back thousands of years. It does not need US expertise on how to handle foreign policy nor governance. It is arguable that the top layers of society such as technological progress, social hygiene, consumer culture, etc., hold value and are worthy of integration, however, the critical mass of civilization and intelligence within greater Chinese history serves as the best guide for their national affairs.

China has a long history of central control of the media, censorship, state propaganda and bureaucratic control all of which are directly relevant to this particular topic. All the poster is doing is pointing that out. It isn’t Ethiopia.

We call it “Public Relations”.

https://archive.org/stream/publicrelationse00bernrich/public...

In the context of the government and politicians it's actually called "Perception Management" although the tactics are the same.

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