China Is Waging a Disinformation War Against Hong Kong Protesters

Other democracies should offer automatic asylum status to anyone who wants to get out now.

If you truly want to help the protestors, please tell them to keep calm, violence and blocking other ppl's life is not how satyagraha works, they will lose support from western ppl. Check interview from Richard Scotford and you know what I mean.

Is there a way to donate? I've heard that because of the daily protests people are losing a lot of money, and protestors can't afford food/masks/protections.

Perhaps by making the article from The NY Times available to non-subscribers?

I think we need to offer the protesters an opportunity to evacuate from Hong Kong. We should give them green cards or citizenship in the US, Canada, or Japan.

Not really ironic — it’s to be expected

The official name of Taiwan is the Republic of China. That government used to control all of China. Then there was a communist revolution and the ROC government fled to Taiwan, still claiming to be the rightful government of China, merely having been forced to make a tactical retreat. This is still the official position of the ROC government, even if no one really believes that the ROC will one day return and reconquer the mainland. Now to be fair, Taiwan probably would have simply declared independence and given up on the mainland but for fear that this would lead to a PRC invasion.

The government even really acts officially as if it is the government of all of China sometimes, such as its support of the PRC in certain maritime claims. The ROC claims certain islands are "part of China" even though they would fall under the physical control of the PRC and thus don't really concern Taiwan.

Isn't that the official position of the Taiwanese government, though - that they are the only legitimate government of all of China and the current administration of the PRC are not legitimate?

I understand that there's a diversity of opinion among the people of Taiwan (and some mixed messages from the government itself) regarding the issue, but it doesn't seem unbelievable that someone might think that the people of Taiwan share a belief in their country's official policy.

Is there something I'm missing?

I'm surprised you don't know that Taiwan never renounced their authority over mainland China.

Imgur is not any better then reddit in this regard...

At first I thought you're talking about disinformation in our countries.

Careful what you wish for, looks like they might add in the brute force option soon:

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/chinese-military-ama...

>"Beijing’s latest response to protesters came as a grave threat issued Tuesday morning through state-run media, saying Hong Kong citizens are "asking for self-destruction,"

The brute force bit might come later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests

They're gearing up for that, or at least posturing that it's coming - perhaps hoping the mere threat is enough. Troop exercises, exercises that would seem suited for civil war not crowd control, troop ships on the border:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/13/colour-revolut...

Me too, so sick of these governments (another example is US): http://www.nbcnews.com/id/45340184/ns/us_news-life/t/police-...

Why can't these brute countries just show a bit mercy to these peaceful protesters?

Probably people flagging it. I tend to flag stories that are "just news" and don't have a particularly compelling link to standard HN topics, or ones in which HN isn't going to have any particularly interesting angle to add to the conversation unique to the community's strengths, or ones that are coming up a lot, like this one. (I mean, yes, nominally everything is on topic, but there's still boundaries.)

There's a strong attractor basin around discussing the same news as everybody else that's worth pushing HN away from, in general.

60/109 points/comments ratio probably kicked off the flame war detector.

It should be noted that YCombinator does business in China. They may have incentives to limit criticism of China on this forum. They announced YC China in August 2018, and nothing indicates that it has been shut down since then.

While there is a lot of great work in high tech and startups coming out of China, we (and the people who run this site) should be clearheaded: there is no significant distinction between the military and industry in China. Cooperation with China comes at a cost that will, eventually, be paid.

Not to say that HN is actively filtering out China-critical posts. But they easily could in the future.

The NYT calling others out for fake news is itself propaganda: the NYT routinely engages in fake news, but is fighting to portray itself as reputable while others engaged in the same aren’t.

Like when the NYT completely blew the Covington story, due to its institutional animosity towards white people:

> The New York Times, sober guardian of the exact and the nonsensational, had cannonballed into the delicious story on Saturday, titling its first piece “Boys in ‘Make America Great Again’ Hats Mob Native Elder at Indigenous Peoples March.”

They were forced to print a retraction less than 24 hours later when facts contradicted their racism.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/media-must...

>serious socialistic regime on the left and right

What's the connection between "great propaganda power" and "serious socialistic regime"?

Also what's a "socialistic regime on the right"?

> Wait, is there a difference, or is it just a matter of scope?

Scope I think is the main indicator. The stranglehold on information in and out of China is very strong, aided by the media being state-run and by the Great Firewall. CNN and NYT clearly are left leaning, but I'd say what happens in China has more in common with Fox, which increasingly over the years has devolved from simply a counter-biased to most news providers, to what amounts to the propaganda arm for the Republicans.

> What is surprising to me is the nonchalant approach to fake news western media is prone to when it comes to both domestic as well as foreign issues.

This is very frustrating indeed. Fox has, since it's inception been droning on and on about how left-leaning the main press is, but instead of simply accepting their bias, they seem deadly intent on proving them wrong all the time (which is of course ridiculous, because Fox is never going to say they aren't biased) and as a result they constantly fall into the trap of false equivalence instead of trying to find the Truth of a given situation, simply presenting both sides of a given argument. Their coverage of Climate Change is especially troubling in this regard because it paints the situation as though it's still unresolved, when in fact the anti-CC scientific community is laughably, hilariously outnumbered by the pro-CC community. It's not even a contest, I think the last number I saw was something like 97%-3%.

> So, yes China is going bad things, but come on NYT

In addition to scope though, I think severity is another one. Basically, how far they have to stretch a given truth to put out what they clearly want to put out. The NYT always has a certain spin, but typically they aren't stretching facts too hard, mostly just editorializing over facts, which in my opinion there's nothing wrong with. I don't think it's reasonable to expect a journalist to completely shed any and all opinions when writing a story, especially when they can cite relevant information to back up their position. In fact, I'd go so far as to say when a journalist has spent a fair amount of time getting immersed in a given topic, I'd very much like to hear their editorializing, because it's likely from a fairly informed viewpoint.

But, I also say all of this as someone who thinks centrism and balance in news coverage is greatly overvalued; I'd much rather see journalism that chases down the truth, and figures out which side has it more right, even if they don't always get it right themselves. I think the modern "just the facts" reporting has done a great disservice to our critical thinking abilities.

I would argue that the difference between "western" (Hollywood, NY Times, WaPo, Fox News, Newsmax) and "eastern" propoganda (CCTV, Xinhua, etc) is that the western outlets are a bit more sophisticated. Propaganda from the "west" is relatively robust, in that even in the absence of government censorship, the majority of consumers of western propaganda still maintain their beliefs even when they observe contrary evidence/information. Propaganda from the "east" is much less robust and thus requires a comprehensive government censorship infrastructure (Great Firewall) to maintain consumer engagement. Perhaps with time, media outlets in China will catch up to the level of sophistication of the west and that may be the day that government censorship controls of foreign media come down in China.

Carrie Lam's resignation, plus:

The complete withdrawal of the proposed extradition bill

The government to withdraw the use of the word “riot” in relation to protests

The unconditional release of arrested protesters and charges against them dropped

An independent inquiry into police behaviour

Implementation of genuine universal suffrage

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/13/what-do-the-ho...

Historically, there was only one: withdraw the extradiction bill.

The amount of police violence during the protests have bumped that number to 5:

https://twitter.com/HongKongHermit/status/116040946563762176...

My feeling is that I'm seeing a lot of comments from people whose usernames are a common word plus three characters that defend China in a backhanded way.

It's just a feeling, but I'd say that's about as credible as these comments.