Why China Silenced a Clickbait Queen in Its Battle for Information Control | Hacker News Reader

Why China Silenced a Clickbait Queen in Its Battle for Information Control

nytimes.com

52 pointsdanso16 comments

> But late last month, Ma Ling, a blogger who commanded an audience of more than 16 million people, went conspicuously silent.

> In the battle for control of the Chinese internet, the authorities had designated Ms. Ma a threat to social stability, pointing to an article she published about a young man with cancer whose talent and virtue were not enough to overcome problems like corruption and inequality.

> Soon, however, internet users pointed to factual errors and said the piece had been invented.

> Ms. Ma had to apologize.

I feel sorry for the Chinese people. Xi Jinping wants to suppress all discourse doesn't praise him and the government's policies. That might have worked in ancient China, but it simply doesn't work in the modern industrial era. Society is too complicated and so you need free discourse to find out what is going on and discuss policy alternatives. Xi's policies may work for a while, but in the long term they are going to make things more and more dysfunctional.

Ancient China does have a pretty interesting interpretation of its occasional revolutions...

Quite true. Confucianism was a remarkably successful political philosophy, and it even included a positive place for revolutions. The problem with Confucianism today is that it was designed for an earlier technological era.

Is there any discussion on HN about how to handle these kinds of for-profit fake news factories?

Edit: I found one here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16774129

Please don't do this: criticism and false information are different things.

> But the government did not relent. People’s Daily, the flagship newspaper of the Communist Party, accused Ms. Ma of manipulating public opinion. Her social accounts were deleted on Feb. 21.

The overlapping of the concepts of misinformation and false news are already quite worrying without censorship being confused with "policing the internet".

Can you elaborate? This seems like a fake news operation: you make up a story and people share it because it resonates with some truism they believe in.

> The article was widely circulated online and prompted debate about China’s wealth gap, surging medical costs and the value of education — common complaints of China’s middle class. Soon, however, internet users pointed to factual errors and said the piece had been invented.

I remember awhile ago someone got criticized for doing the same thing, getting people riled up over some fake immigrant violence or something.

see answer to the OP

The government is definitely suppressive and has zero tolerance on 'rumors'. https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/06/chinas-lessons-for-figh...

But this particular shop definitely falls into the category of fake news factory. Sensational stories with clickbait titles are invented to drive up viewership.

Some actors in new media spread false informations, and this is a real issue. But in China, people turn to blogs as a result of the censorship. ...More filtering cannot be an answer.

You don't combat false news by electing an arbiter of the truth (whoever it might be), because that's the start of a journey in a rabbit hole with no end.

Some possible solutions are forcing an organisation to publish corrections and clarifications, forcing people to critical thinking by engaging them in a civil discussion (one of the reasons I like HN).

Total banning and complete erasure shouldn't be options worth considering.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com