Chinese disinformation targeting U.S. features fake people on fake news programs
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As I once explained in a previous comment on another HN post -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33847117 -- I was involved in a political campaign that involved using fake profiles on Twitter and Facebook to boost news that favored the politician and attacked their opponents (I was a naive college kid then). The Twitter account still exists today.
Mind you, this campaign was a small operation in a third world country with less than two dozen people. Imagine what governments with millions to billions of dollars at their disposal could do. America's opponents can obviously not invade it or place sanctions, so they'll try to attack it wherever they can, and you can be sure they are doing it.
After my experience, I stopped paying attention or believing anything from social media. The majority of it are outright lies or half-truths, and I have not the time or strength to sift through them...not to talk of social media being outrage farming for the purpose of securing ad dollars.
1- https://www.npr.org/2017/11/01/561427876/how-russia-used-fac...
Doesn't even have to be foreign. I think most of the propaganda the majority is exposed to comes from our own media and the politicians they cover. When they tell us not to trust X and Y that's just them being scared of losing the narrative.
The US is the most extreme in a western context (don't know much about the east I don't speak their language), the level of polarization in their media is mind-blowing. From the outside it's fucked up to read, and even worse to see normal people acting like this is somehow the other sides' fault.
People need an enemy today, and it can't be those in charge they're making sure of that.
While you blame the "brainwashed", I blame the executives and workers at the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, et al. They know their platform is being exploited to rile up anger but it brings them the sweet ad dollars so they don't care. They can even feel better and feign some self-righteousness by blaming the "brainwashed" instead of the platforms they oversee...very difficult to get them to admit to the problem when their financial interest depends on it.
Agreed. I deleted all my social media accounts except for this one and it helped immensely. I sometimes feel like I live in a different world.
Why would you care to blame the gullible who don't know any better?
Long-lasting societies have a complex dynamic of cohesive and repulsive forces between people - causes that unite them and causes that divide them. It only takes subtle nudges to move the balance, to de-emphasize compromise and stoke conflict. Modern internet surveillance makes it possible to do this with precision, like a finely monitored industrial process. We're not nearly at the end game yet and we don't know how to protect a society from this kind of attack.
The two-party system adds perverse intensives where you win by pushing people as far as possible to the extreme. Moving for conciliation and moderation is ceding ground to the other side.
Then the so called gullible are simply normal people asking for open discussion. And some people on their high horses claim they're brainwashed, gullible, russian agents or bots. Now a lot of that so called misinformation is showing to be true, even the far-fetched lab leak with gain-of-function research funded by a US agency, in fucking China.
What's even real anymore. The most important thing humanity can do today is putting higher standards of truth on themselves and their allies instead of knee-jerk reactions and calling the opposite side gullible. They have their arguments if we take a breath and listen. And there's a good chance you're just as brainwashed as those you oppose.
The whole premise of this article is "believing misinformation". And on that note, it's also not "my point" either.
But, let's also allow words to mean what they mean, shall we? Gullible, "easily deceived or duped", is not too off the mark to describe those who fall victim to misinformation. Especially so when it was generalized to a large population always including those more prone to being gullible in whatever context.
From your last paragraph, I don't think we disagree, but I suspect that what I wrote would come across more accurately, if it wasn't assumed to be inflammatory. In fact, my argument was that it wasn't the fault of "the gullible", because they will always be there, to some extent. But that the blame should perhaps be directed at those aiming to exploit it, or allow it.
Have you ever stopped to think that maybe you're the gullible one?
They don't have to be foreign. And tangentially, good propaganda is not recognized as such. For a borderline example, see how Call of Duty changed the attackers in the highway of death from the US to Russia [1]. But since it's only "inspired" by real events, they can claim they didn't falsify history, all the while contributing to a false perception of US forces.
Non-borderline cases are even subtler and more insidious, often indistinguishable from artistic intent, and can be anything from casting choices to subject matter (ever notice how some historical events get more attention than others?). Less overt, less coherent, but when so much media comes from California or New York, it makes their attitudes the default everywhere where that media dominates.
Imagine if the default, ambient culture, was shaped by Mumbai as much as it is today by Hollywood/New York. Yet even with your experience with propaganda, it slips under your radar. That's power.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/mbmwgn/modern-warfare-the-hi...
I didn't find the "Wolf News" segments, but other video using the same Synthesia avatars is available:
The male avatar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cm7Vl2kvfA
The female avatar: https://www.synthesia.io/features/avatars
Have the Chinese discovered fiverr? They could generate hundreds of these a day.
The Chinese government hires Western influencers to spread their propaganda all the time. Those who are on Youtube and elsewhere.
Getting paid for spreading that government propaganda (and for doing "normal" Chinese company ads) as a white person is referred to in China as going for "a white monkey job".
See, for example: [1] concerning the unbelievably incorrect account of Boris Johnson's resignation [2] delivered by someone [3] billed as a former advisor to Johnson, who does indeed dissemble like someone who has sat at the feet of the master, but who seems rather to be a self-promoting ex-youtuber and social media guru wannabe.
1: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/tucker-car...
2: https://twitter.com/JamesAALongman/status/154709789313961984...
3: https://scrutable.science/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=3430&start=35...
This tech will save the Murdochs, Sinclairs, every purveyor of infotainment, so much money. No more salaries for anchors. No more huge payouts to settle (sexual) harassment and descrimination lawsuits.
Agitprop like this will be automated, turnkey, ubiquitous:
Sinclair's Local News Anchors all Read Same Script https://youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo
So much potential. These are exciting times for trolls and grifters.
The format is already perfected. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo [Sinclair Broadcast controversy]
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
If anyone cares, one reason why such perceptions are notoriously unreliable is that people generalize based on what they notice, and what they notice is conditioned by what they agree/disagree with, like/dislike, and so on: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The truth is that HN is divided on divisive topics the same way that society at large is divided (or rather, societies at large, because this is also a highly international site, although mostly Western). You can't take the appearance of opposing views as signalling anything other than that a topic is divisive. As for perceptions of "HN is more X" or "HN is less X" - in my experience over many years, they're mostly random.
Not that I was around for the Red Scare or Cold War, but China feels like it replaced Russia as the Boogieman.
The current "Two Assemblies" meetings in Beijing are likely only to exacerbate this trend, with, e,g. all control of the security agencies shifted away from the State Council to Xi Jinping himself.
It happened with the Japanese in the 80s/90s as well where American media vilified Japan because it thinks Japan will become more powerful than the US.
China is trying to climb its way out of the "cheap labor" economy and into a developed economy. The US and the west are trying its hardest to prevent this from happening and this includes using every tactic possible including propaganda, sanctions, etc.
"Apple Services Shut Down in China in Startling About-Face"
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/technology/apple-no-longe...
So, too, Wolf Warrior tactics against South Korea over China's anger at U.S. THAAD system, including the destruction of Lotte's entire business in China.
"One company [Lotte] is bearing the brunt of China's anger over U.S. missile system"
https://money.cnn.com/2017/03/07/news/china-lotte-thaad-sout...
Ironically, China adopted Wolf Warrior tactics in large part because the claim you make about the perceived threat of the U.S. treating China like Japan in the 1980s is now a commonplace cliche all over China, used to justify a host of aggressive policies. This hostile posture, overseen by Xi Jinping, has helped achieve the near impossible: political unanimity in the U.S. Congress against China.
That's probably only me. I've been more pro-China on HN because I believe western media is spreading way too much anti-China propaganda. I believe it needs better balance. The truth is always somewhere in between the propaganda on both sides.
It is disinformation to say "both sides", but it is in some extent true. The real way to stop disinformation is teach information literacy, but that would stop propaganda being effective for everyone.
On both sides...
Whatever the topic, they don't have to be right. Just by obsfucating, delaying, misdirecting, going off on tangents, quoting dodgy research, burying the topic with downvotes whatever...the subject matter just gets turned into a muddy swamp with no clear conclusion and then everybody moves past it to the next new thing. Mission accomplished.
It is important to remember the near-global admiration for China's lockdowns during the first year of the pandemic. Highly manufactured. Twitter was a huge incubator for it.
What did you think would happen?
Note that Uighurs are majority Muslim and they aren’t all being exterminated (certainly some are), but the primary efforts seem to be making that region and ethnicity much more similar in culture to Han-Chinese. It rings of the “white genocide” and “Jews will not replace us” slogans.
The Chinese government seems to use the 9/11 style “we are monitoring them so they don’t become radical Islamic terrorists”. The government efforts are to destroy practice of Islam, to restrict / deter the spread of Islam and criticisms of the government.
Interestingly the most anti-Chinese people in the US are the ones with the biggest intersection with these policies and claim the US is doing the exact same thing to them.American Christians who claim they aren’t able to practice their faith in the US, while simultaneously insisting that the US is a Christian nation, that Islam shouldn’t be practiced in the US, that Islam creates terrorism, that civil liberties should be rolled back in the efforts to reduce terrorism, and insist that Islamic Sharia law is endemic in the US.
American Anti-Chinese sentiment of the social type seems like a cry bully. There are some far more valid criticisms of the wider social controls and economic policy in China.
This is quite the impressive paragraph. What are you even saying?
The same idiotic argument of “extermination” is used by some people in our society.