How China Unleashed Twitter Trolls to Discredit Hong Kong’s Protesters
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
That said, the take away from both analysis is that 30 (DI) - 112 (ASPI) of the ~900 accounts have high likelihood of being an disinformation network... that operated for over 2 years, using many re-purposed spam/dating/escort/porn accounts that was never sanitized to preserve cover. Evaluate the scale and operational rigor of this network and it's hard to conclude this is state-level tradecraft than some independent agent/contractor with limited resources and basic scripting knowledge.
Leave it to NYT to sneak in balance at the end with inflammatory headline.
>Elise Thomas, one of the authors of the Australian report, said that the low level of professionalism suggested that the campaign was not the work of the People’s Liberation Army or the Ministry of State Security, which have previously been linked to Chinese cyberespionage and information campaigns.
>“I would be surprised if the P.L.A. was responsible because I would expect they would be more competent than this,” Ms. Thomas said.
Yeah. Look, China is bad at foreign influence campaigns, but this is insultingly bad. I'm completely willing to believe China has expanded propaganda efforts abroad, but this doesn't feel like it.
E: unsurprisingly people are already using the article to accusing others of being bots. Because humans writing and replying unique responses are equivalent to automated bots that copy and base tweets on a schedule.
China's propaganda style is unabashedly similar to "Baghdad Bob". [0]
Here are recent studies on how domestic and foreign Chinese propaganda works.
How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, not Engaged Argument https://datasociety.net/events/databite-no-94-jennifer-pan/
Beyond Hybrid War: How China Exploits Social Media to Sway American Opinion https://www.recordedfuture.com/china-social-media-operations...
Overlapping findings of both reports is that Chinese propaganda focus on overwhelmingly positive, benign messaging i.e. it placates and downplays instead of argue, attack or antagonize. Both also suggest 50c doesn't operate outside of China. Again, I wouldn't be surprised if Chinese foreign influence has expanded. I hope it would at least be closer to meme-able Baghdad Bob than whatever low-effort campaign that twitter alleges.
The other guy's channels are in fact insightful, but hers is more interesting because she was born and raised there, but also has relatives in HK and an American husband. She is completely unemotionally attached to all the propaganda and nonsense so it's fun to hear her take on these things.
I don't disagree with this, but it's annoying how much casual western internet users will rely on glorified travel youtubers when there are many veteran China watchers with much more substantial things to say. I.e., Bill Bishop Sinocism (cost $$$) newsletter is widely regarded as one of the best English newsletter on Chinese developments. One would be hard pressed to find a weekly brief this extensive and well thought out for most countries, yet it's available for anyone curious about China. There are also tons of podcasts and articles by established western think tanks and subject matter experts (of various agendas) out there since China has become increasingly topical.
Without commenting on quality of these experts which vary greatly, because China is a big place and confusing, even to it's own technocrats, I find it a little unsettling how much these Youtubers inform discussions on Chinese culture to lay audiences. I know it's unreasonable to expect people to become experts, but these "sources" needs to be contextualized and called out for what they are: slice-of-life clickbait expat travel vlogs.
In the old world a person's word was their bond, not their status in society. As much as you may not like what some people say about China, it doesn't mean it's not true.
I have met many people from many other countries, I've travelled, I have relatives in multiple countries right now, and it's all too easy to see something in the news, or think one person is "respectable" because some random person on the internet says so.
I will take facts over opinions any day of the week.
Then why place so much faith on 2 YouTubers instead of a seasoned China hand who has been around longer, whose work has been recognized by other China hands, who aggregates information from both western and Chinese sources to provide a relatively impartial view of the situation?
My contention isn't an appeal to authority and call to defer to experts, but to point out that there are many experts out there trying to understand and elucidate various parts of China. But lay audiences have consistently decided to fallback on a couple Youtube content creators and appeal to their authority instead. I'd like to see someone nominate 2 non-American youtubers who lived in NYC and Toledo and goes on the occasional road trips as the basis for forming general consensus on US culture and politics. But that's an asinine exercise, yet it's pretty much how a shocking amount of Chinese understanding is derived.
Can a foreigner get a bank account and buy land in China? How hard is it to get a job as an white westerner in China? What kind of jobs are prevalent for foreigners in China?
Look at the videos of people getting hit by cars there and no helps. Why? Because their legal system can end up putting more burden on those that help than those that just leave people to die. Feel free to point me to a video that says this not true, and I can show you a bunch that says it is.
China's policies on the Muslim population being put into re-education centers (remind you of a European country's actions in the early 20th century?) there are videos of these places online of it happening right now, not from clickbait vloggers.
China destroys churches, persecutes it's own people based on many types of religions. It has a social score system that blocks people from travelling.
This doesn't even cover government supported fraud, IP theft, espionage, currency manipulation, etc... The garbage China pulls on the rest of the world is overwhelming.
And you think that a couple vloggers are the cause of this bad press???
No, but they did proceed the recent normal in poor Chinese reporting. I think their first viral video was on Chinese ghost cities 4 years ago? And people have been linking their hot takes ever since. You often see this in conjunction with "lol my Chinese wife / girlfriend / fried / coworker who grew up in China is really nice and smart but when it comes to issues of China they're so brainwashed". But two white expats who lived in China briefly, in situations that are fairly atypical even by expat standards, of course _their_ assessments are accurate reflections of reality.
I don't even know where to start breaking down all your questions. The answer to almost all of them is, it's complicated. There has been an increase in garbage reporting by western MSM since the tradewar. Geopolitical conditions are different now and biased Sinophobic agenda driven pieces are everywhere to the point where a Chinese person familiar with living under censorship is surprised that manufactured consent by a free 5th estate + low information readers is almost indistinguishable from state propaganda. It doesn't help that foreign reporting in Asian bureaus are full of folks with limited regional language and cultural proficiency and sexpats.
>The garbage China pulls on the rest of the world is overwhelming.
This doesn't strike me as the opinion of someone who lauds hearing "multiple sides to an argument".
There are ghost cities in the US, to say there are none in China is ridiculous. You can do quick search and turn up many respected news sources reporting this.
One side of the argument has been heard for decades, we thought China was quaint and had an old quiet society that respected traditions.
The other side we are just now starting to hear (from respected news sources, other governments and yes vloggers), is that China has been hiding it's true nature. And that is the garbage.
Just go look up what is going on in Hong Kong right now. Or go look up how the current leader of China declared himself ruler for life. That is what despot does.
Not so much as dodge facts as, I assume your questions are rhetorical, and it's not worth the effort to elaborate on each.
Re: Ghost Cities
I didn't claim there are none? Though if we are on the topic they are loaded propaganda characterization like "debt trap" to paint a certain image of Chinese (mis)allocations of resources which was used to support unending China inflate GDP, China collapse theories that have failed to manifest. The alternate narrative is that these are under-utilized cities that will slowly become populated as Chinese urbanization continues. Chinese urbanization targets is 50% to 80% in the next 30 years, or 400 million people and 100 million more new residential units. Building new cities ahead of time and populating them on a 15 year phase is literally part of the development strategy [1]. That's not to dismiss the wild speculation that surrounds these development, and that some will take longer than others, but many previously touted ghost cities are reaching targeted capacity. Often after transit infrastructure is finalized.
This kind of alarmist news has happened for decades. I don't know how you're drawing conclusions that reporting on China has focused on quaint Chinese interest stories, or that China somehow managed to conceal it's nature all this time. When the dominant coverage is has been over the scale of Chinese modernization and the sustainability of Chinese development model including ghost cities, previously they might have been filed under human interest. Now they're given more significance post Olympics -> global financial crisis which China percieved as failure of western systems -> China decided to be more assertive -> China 2025 / SSC makes Obama pivot to Asia -> present day trade war / great power competition with US. Non of this is new. It's just being activated opportunistically now.
As for despot / emperor / dictator Xi, this again is a profound naive social media tier hottake. Xi has to play domestic politics and is beholden to the CPC politburo standing committee. Repealing term limits required the consent of standing committee, same with his recent elevation to people's leader at BeiDaiHe this year after failing a year before. His power is not absolute. There's various analysis of his ascent and relative power in the Chinese system, but the one I subscribe to is that Xi was elected internally to shepherd China through a difficult transition (middle income trap / demographic bomb etc / reunification). The CPC is flexible enough to nominate a despot when the situation calls for.
[1] https://pic1.zhimg.com/80/5a158c5bda6b768cdebc6571663c4e84_h...
All tyrants have the same excuse.
Today’s video from Laowhy86 is a good short summation of his time in China, and how his perspective has shifted over time while living there and running a business, marrying a Chinese woman, starting a family, etc:
As the parent commenter said, there are plenty of higher quality Youtubers and vloggers who do a much better job at describing what life is really like for expats living in China. In general, the more reliable and accurate sources are the people who don't make their living from producing clickbait videos.
If you believe there are “higher-quality” China YouTubers with a different view, don’t just allude to them, please share links.
I hope they don't say "Nathan Rich". ;-)
But as you mentioned these could only really work within China. I doubt they have enough local english speakers who could effectively communicate in purely western social media channels. At least for the average party member.
Those people obsessed with politics twitter are a super paranoid bunch these days too. They suspect anyone who disagrees with them might be a Russian bot. So there would be a lot of scrutiny of anyone pushing pro-Bejing narratives without both subtly and a careful grasp of the language and culture.
They'd need some real professionals to do this right.
Otherwise there's still going to be plenty of Chinese people who automatically defend their country. If not simply for propaganda reasons and an impulse to defend your home and people, especially as their media often presents them as the victim of western conspiracies to sideline them and prevent their greatness. They simply want to correct any negative images attributed to the Chinese, which is understandable and easy to dismiss as being a 'bot'.
Outsourcing seems likely. Last month an invitation for bids was posted for a contract to promote Chinese state media on Twitter for 1.2 million yuan, payable if the follower count increased by at least 580,000 at the end of the contract period. [1]
Some people have framed it as "China openly buys followers", but it seems clear that whoever came up with the contract intended for those followers to be real people, since a propaganda account is pretty useless if it's only read by bots. Of course the successful bidder would be likely to try and add some fake accounts if they couldn't hit the target otherwise. Someone seems to have realized that and pulled the announcement, which is why I had to use an archive.org link.
This spam campaign might have been similar; with a contract to spread propaganda messages that lacked the necessary safeguards to ensure subtlety.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190822113315/http://www.ccgp.g...
Services for hitting western social media KPIs are dime a dozen, but a private industry for foreign influence campaigns not so much. Maybe those Estonian fake news kids. Would be interesting to see what that tender would look like though, at least they're paying more than 50c.
I agree with this sentiment.
only groups of people seem relevant nowadays. makes me really wonder about the philosophy and history of individualism.
These "bots" are mostly spontaneous people, they are not even government-sponsored Wumao, they genuinely love China and defend it, their reason being it may have some flaws but any other country has too and is worse than China, and them being either students or comfortable middle-class help.
The response to corruption by local Nazi party members, was along the line of "if only the Fuhrer knew"
> The accounts posted in Indonesian, Arabic, Portuguese and other languages. They promoted hookup services, posted about Korean boy bands and retweeted messages about pop-punk music.
> “As a Hong Kong person who loves Hong Kong, I really miss the Hong Kong of before, which was developed and ruled by law,” @derrickmcnabbx wrote in Chinese on June 15. The account’s location was described as “Georgia, USA.” Before this year, nearly all of its tweets were links to pornography.
I think a lot see the HK thing as an attack on their country. There's a fair bit of history (the insult of losing territory to foreign powers) and also current tensions ('locusts' is a HK slur against mainland Chinese). A lot of HK people kinda dislike mainlanders coming to HK, but the city kinda relies on mainland money.
So there's already a bit of contention, then a large number of HK people are protesting against mainland China having any influence. It's then easy to conflate attacks on mainland China (the government) with attacks on mainland China (the people).
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/true-stories/the...
I totally respect your strong belief about the story. But don't enforce others accept your personal opion by imply your personal belief is truth. It's quite insulting.
Are you Chinese? You being offended by his post makes me feel like you are. He wasn't forcing his oppinion on you.
Also godel's theorem doesn't have anything to do with this, as godel's theorem is about mathematical systems.
Let me explain a little more about where the insulting comes from. During daily conversation people usually omit many relevant consensus details: context and premises. Otherwise communication would be extremely redundant.
One thing is important is: anything put into premise that other conclusions can drawn from, should be relative facts which all the parties agree. By providing personal belief as premise to draw other conclusion without explicitly stating that’s just personal belief means the “evidence” provider cannot tell the difference , unintentionally and implicitly force others reasoning within “evidence” provider’s own axioms system, without knowing there’s totally different axioms system with other premises exist.
In short: There's no problem at all to express personal opinions. However put personal opinion into a premise to draw other conclusions during reasoning without explicit emphasise is not good.
About Godel theorem, strictly it’s only about Math. You are right on that. I’m half joking but it’ an analogy. In sports field there’s a referee because if one team can act as authoritative way to claim they own truth implicitly gives the other team the same authority which will lead to chaos. There’s a parallel relation here.
EDIT: typo and grammar fix
'In 2006, allegations emerged that a large number of Falun Gong practitioners had been killed to supply China's organ transplant industry. An initial investigation stated "the source of 41,500 transplants for the six year period 2000 to 2005 is unexplained" and concluded that "there has been and continues today to be large scale organ seizures from unwilling Falun Gong practitioners".' [1][2]
'In December 2005, China's Deputy Health Minister acknowledged that the practice of removing organs from executed prisoners for transplants was widespread.' [3]
'China Daily reported in August 2009 that approximately 65% of transplanted organs still came from death row prisoners. The condemned prisoners have been described as "not a proper source for organ transplants" by Vice-Health Minister Huang Jiefu...' [4]
[0] Matas, David (2011). Steven J. Jensen (ed.). The Ethics of Organ Transplantation. Catholic University of America Press. p. 234. ISBN 978-0-8132-1874-8. [1] http://organharvestinvestigation.net/ [2] http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/00... [3] http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/asia/article2612313... [4] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8222732.stm
This has been a common theme with this "Fake News and Social Bots" stuff since the very beginning not reserved to China.
On the 34C3 there was a really interesting talk [0] about the troublesome nature of classifying users as "social bots" and how it regularly turns out to be completely wrong, with plenty of absurd examples.
Tho the English translation is a bit spotty, especially in the beginning.
Is that what they actually feel, or is that exactly the upper limit of what the State accepts as legitimate dissatisfaction with the status quo, which the vast majority of people are aware of an unwilling to buck out of fear of the consequences? More to the point, in an authoritarian regime that is known to punish dissidents who go outside of the tolerated limits, how could one ever hope to get honest enough answers from a diverse enough base to confidently state this?
That's a reason one might suspect that people would support the regime, but not an answer to the question asked in GP.
The issue is when people start wanting more than food and shelter it becomes more apparent all the things they can’t buy like free speech, or more recently clean air.
The amount of legitimate dissatisifaction is proportionally inverse to people's general well being and with China having made very rapid progress on that front you can bet that people are in principle quite satisfied with their leadership.
If it stagnates for too long or crashes then things will change. The dissidents are not even a blip on the radar until the economy goes haywire, then they will matter.
150 years ago there was a stalemate with a guy claiming to be Jesus' brother before the winners decided to absolve the state of religion. In that context its clear how order is kept over there.
There are 8 cities in the region surrounding Hong Kong with distinct cultural nuances and history which are now also more economically relevant to China and arguable the world stage. Shenzhen, the one bordering Hong Kong, is an marvel on its own, and it would make sense if our news had more represenation about things happening there alone, than Hong Kong, purely from academic and industrial advances. The standard of living in those areas does contrast to Hong Kong now: HK has the extreme market driven inequalities as London, Vancouver, San Francisco, you name it - while the spacious but dense neighboring zones offer modern spacious but practical accomodations and safety nets as a byproduct of the marxist ideologies with the newly added twist of valuing private ownership and increasing forms of capital formation.
Its not as simple as trying to school every Chinese person you see on how oppressed they are. It will always, 100% of the time, be met with vitriol. Its just not that simple.
In classic socialist fashion it does remain to be seen what happens when the economy downturns. The outcome is predictable. But for now, the party has won after a long history to get where it is, it maintains cohesion and stability and rising living standards for the world's largest population, while others in the world practicing a market based ideology struggle with their also predictable problems.
Its not relevant to the average person that the communist party acts in its own interest. The corruption is aggravating but there is nothing to act on. Its not relevant on a day to day basis that disgusting party members all the way up north in beijing are having dissident's body parts harvested so the party member stays healthy. This has nothing to do with the cohesion of the country, and there is zero context to imagine a rule of law ideal that applies to prevent this. Its not relevant that all the way on the other side of the Gobi fuckin desert, there are concentration camps. There are also no threats of islamic extremism. Yet again, something the loudest countries also aren't able to brag about.
Its important to understand how irrelevant Hong Kong residents are to Chinese people internally. Its important to understand how irrelevant the authoritatian central planning of Beijing is to Chinese people on a daily basis. Then, you can begin to understand how Chinese respond to the things we focus on. We focus on everything dark about China, as if everything about China is dark. They simply don't.
The party isn't playing a game of civil rights. They are playing the millenium old game of "lets run a country and make sure nobody attacks us". Mission accomplished, nobody is attacking China or even wants to, not even non-state religious extremists. The people accept that role of government, accept that centralized power comes with disproportionate privileges even its aggravating, and accept that they're being provided for.
They watch their competitors continue to play imperialist and watch them undermine their own budgetary contraints and their own national security. Whereas China loosens marxist restrictions on their entrepreneurs to develop in burdgeoning and fragmented markets that the west is ignoring, and doesn't undermine its national security in the process. Its an approach, its a perspective. I think we should try to incorporate that context into why they do what they do.
Think about it like if you found out that the Waco disaster was actually a much larger massacre against an ideology that wasn't really that fringe. It wouldn’t really change your mind about the viability of your country or the federal government based on the excessive response to that incident - even after you then found out about rendition sites and border camps. There is an extremely small chance you would consider it a defining moment in history that you would dedicate your own cause to escaping from or changing. Everyone of that ideology thinks you are afraid to talk about it but honestly you’re aware and just got better shit to do, whether there were consequences of caring or not, whether you rationalized how the government responded correctly or not.
You can see this at the start. The guy has to give a grovelling disclaimer in his first slide that he's leftist, hates Nazis, hates racists etc. He has to say this because he's about to destroy a conspiracy theory held exclusively by these kinds of people.
I did an analysis a few years ago of a typical claim along these lines. It turned out to be what I could only describe as academic fraud:
https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...
Of course the media ran with it and never published any corrections or critical analysis. Everyone who read the relevant stories in the Times of London/New York Times was simply misled and fell further down the rabbit hole of imagining non-existent Twitter bots.
Now the same newspaper (NYT) that's published outright fraudulent stories about Twitter bots as fact in the past, is trying to convince us that China is using the same tactics. Maybe they are. But given how much wrongness is out there on this topic, I am very skeptical.
Here's an example of just one of the absurd mis-identifications:
https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/i-m-not-a-russian-tro...
Also remember that Twitter themselves are a big part of the problem here. As the speaker in the video observes, any time you try and research this topic you can find people whose accounts were suspended and frequently find them complaining about it on other platforms (i.e. not bots). A Twitter employee himself has openly referred to (real) Trump supporters as "bots":
Just go to a random [Trump] tweet and just look at the followers. They’ll all be like, guns, God, ‘Merica, and with the American flag and the cross. Like, who says that? Who talks like that? It’s for sure a bot
The video of that can be found on Project Veritas.
He said that because in Germany it's actually quite mainstream to blame everything on social bots.
When the German alt-right gained popularity, and alt-right topics became very popular on Facebook, the reaction of the German mainstream to that was to go "Those are all Russian social bots! There are no alt-right Germans! Facebook you need to fight those fake news and social bots harder!" [0].
By now those supposed "social bots" are going to elections and are voting [1]. The German mainstream reaction to that is to keep ignoring it, after marginalizing it as "Russian propaganda" didn't work.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/11/ge...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/01/world/europe/german-far-r...
If everything goes well, it can stay that way.
Bit when things go to shit and people found out the government lied, that patriotisme can reverse quickly. Depends on the roots of doubt on your close relatives.
Living in partial fear for the social credit ain't helping and realizing you live behind a firewall online is enough to grow doubts, from my point of view.
Eg. See Russia now and how the Soviet Union crumbled.
So long as people are fed and comfortable, China won’t suddenly collapse. Any various small problems will be brushed off or silenced until they pass.
Pretty much why CPC is reluctant to endorse patriotism, patriotic positions can be much more extreme than the party line - it's very hard to walk back.
>Living in partial fear for the social credit ain't helping and realizing you live behind a firewall online is enough to grow doubts
These are not really considerations for the general population. Sentiment for social credit where it's tested is positive. People like seeing financial criminals punished. They also like "civilizing" behavior modifications of mass surveillance, i.e. country bumpkins in tier3 cities stop spitting, speeding and jaywalking because they're under observation. GFW is an annoyance but easily circumvented with lax VPN rules.
>Depends on the roots of doubt on your close relatives.
If China is going to collapse, it's going to be due to the demographic time bomb when only-childs watch their aging parents languish because there isn't sufficient social safety net. CPC living standards goals is to "become a moderately prosperous society" where poverty is largely eliminated by 2021 and "fully developed nation" by 2049, presumably one with sufficient social services. I think they're a little behind, and time is not on their side.
Maybe it works, on average, but it tends to undermine real people's posts. Why listen to someone who is likely to be a bot?
Growth leads to a lot of things being a lot better for a lot of people.
If that ever slows down though I think there will be trouble.
It's good to think long term, but removing term limits seems to increase risk around transitions of power. Though at the moment I suppose they could point to the US's current political situation as a reason you can't trust the public to have unfiltered access to the internet with elections.
We are likely only seeing the voices of people who love the CCP. I do agree many love China, of course they do, everyone has to or they aren’t allowed to work, or have internet...
You know this how?
So to consider lot of mainland Chinese defending CPP as "they love CPP" is a simplified interpretation. Does'nt reflect reality
That said I also believe a lot of trolls and political posters are just normal people voicing their malignant opinions to the point where it is nearly impossible to identify astroturfing as long as the accounts are "tenured" enough (real pictures, some age, etc.).
It's not relevant. It's the trash heap of the internet. I can't understand why anyone would continue to spend time on it when it's become universally known that bots and trolls run the show.
It's got heads of state, leaders of enterprise, and myriad celebrity on the platform. As much as I'd like to see Twitter, Facebook, et. al. nuked from orbit, they're very much relevant.
99.9999% of comments you'll find online are highly critical of China. The most upvoted submissions on Reddit and HN are often those critical of China. Most Americans (60% last time I checked) already have a negative view of China and their knee-jerk reaction is to support anything or anyone who speaks out against the CCP.
Does anyone really think 17 bots on Twitter tweeting messages in Chinese is going to change this?
Try 17 thousand or 17 million bots, Tweeting in English.
This is also only a small fraction of what they are actually doing. If you take a look at many new movies coming out in the US, many are financed by a Chinese company.
They have also started buying major stakes in media companies, like Reddit.
The strange thing about the Hong Kong protests is that I can't seem to find any balanced coverage of it and I almost saw no coverage of it here on major US television networks.
And now they've got Reddit covered with /r/Sino but I'm unsure if that's new or not.
Yes they are good at amassing people to build infrastructural projects. But that is very different than having to convince people. The regime is hard-coded to do things with brute force.
For these last years headlines about all kinds of "bot armies" are constantly making the rounds, getting blamed for pretty much everything from Trump's election to Brexit.
Often based on some research that defines the parameters for a user being a "social bot", that they have extremely high false-positive rates, but still end up only identifying hundreds, maybe thousands of accounts, on platforms that have total user numbers in the hundreds of millions or even over a billion.
That is already enough to cause widespread paranoia about Chinese/Russian/Iranian trolls supposedly being everywhere.
So anybody on Twitter, Facebook or Reddit who's opinions and views don't align with a certain Overton window, are quickly labeled as being "foreign influencers", regardless of any arguments or facts whatsoever, in a purely ideological reaction of "What, you do not agree that <insert country> is evil?! How dare you!".
Meanwhile, barely anybody talks about the reality that these kinds of games are played by pretty much everybody [0] [1], but I guess it would be weird for a US American platform to ban users for spreading pro-US propaganda. Tho, it's still scary how completely oblivious most people seem to be about that, while seeing the Chinese/Russian/Iranian version everywhere.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit...
The well has already been poisoned.
Paranoia has now been compounded.
Clarity regarding contemporary domestic political landscape has now been further muddled.
Effective astroturfing was always a secondary objective.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/22/technology/22cyber.html
This is purely something that's pushing a political agenda. In China, there's a single party, so disagreement is perceived as sabotage. While in other countries, its accepted as part of the system.
In US we have a house/senate minority leader: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_leader
In Westminster-based systems (Australia, Canada, UK), they call them opposition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_opposition
So if China lacks this representation, what is there to counterbalance? Wouldn't it lead to viewpoint discrimination?
There are things that need a more direct form a democracy to fix. Rent control, tighter restrictions on who does business/runs for election there. For instance, should agents of Beijing be fit to represent the people of HK and craft laws?
If you'd like to see what happens when foreign governments sabotage legislature, Poland's first legislative councils were rampant with it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Poland_in_the_Early...
What other outlet is there but giving control to HK citizens have total and complete sovereignty to handle their own localized issues?
Thinking about my teenage years, I'd often see a documentary and then "come up" with concepts it covered a week or two later.
Similarly, I think one of the biggest issues with "bot influencers" is that the average human is not good at thinking for themselves and regurgitates whatever they agree with/protects the ego. The online activity of many technology-naive middle aged users gradually becomes indistinguishable from the bots they follow.
Accept that most of your opinions will be informed by the opinions of others, likely directly, and your method for judging truth will instinctively be biased more towards emotion, social status and ego-preservation than than logic and fact, because humans are social animals and that's just how we're wired.
At present there are still people just like us being saddled with some mandarin fever dream of the social credit system while we're treating the whole continent of China like a troll brigade pumping fake news on twitter and suppressing Hong Kong video clips on TikTok
We've gotta understand that fighting totalitarianism with prejudice and stereotypes plays right into the hands of the puppet masters and doubly victimizes the innocent people caught in the crossfire, who could very well be us in another life