This is great.
Please, please let this concept enter the general public's mind.
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.
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".
This guy gets it. I absolutely agree that China needs the searing scrutiny of the world for the sake of its people and the world but China is also still in absolute infantile stages of propaganda sophistication. Straight up censorships and news suppressions are things the West did in WWI. Astroturfing is a step up but operating under the premise of a palatable freedom of information and political choice while being inundated with what to think without ever receiving 'literal fake news' is light-years ahead of China.
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.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8moePxHpvok
Information/Tragedy buffer overflow attacks basically.
It is as deeply ingrained as it can get in American public online discourse https://www.fec.gov/data/disbursements/?two_year_transaction...
"Any/all organizations can/do seed a particular narrative to serve their strategic purposes" ?
> 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.
In terms of intent or morality or whatever, it's just a different method for propaganda. I don't see this as a different category for what other governments have done in the past.
>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.
"Lesson number one: trust no one. The minute God crapped out the third caveman, a conspiracy was hatched against one of them."
I never claimed that in my comment, you should read it more closely.
What I did claim is that regular HN posters will often comment (for their own reasons) in a way that would make the Chinese propagandists and censors happy.
Do you think we're in an "information war"? If we are, who are our most dangerous opponents?