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Comment by krapht | Hacker News Reader

1) whataboutism 2) citation needed 3) Even if both sides utilize propaganda, historically the scale of agitprop coming from authoritarian countries has been much greater. This is still newsworthy.

You can't even read most Western propaganda in China because the government goes to great lengths to censor narratives counter to offical views.

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> historically the scale of agitprop coming from authoritarian countries has been much greater

Is this actually the case or is it just that we're not seeing the stuff the west does?

> You can't even read most Western propaganda in China because the government goes to great lengths to censor narratives counter to offical views.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/15/all-lies-how... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera_bombing_memo#Previo...

Depends how narrowly you define agitprop. If you consider everything that comes out of the American media/news conglomerates as propaganda, then it's orders of magnitude greater than the efforts of China or Russia.

The difference is that American media isn't owned by the government. Chinese media can't tell the government to "fuck off" if they don't want to report something. In the US they can.

You’re delusional if you don’t think the US government controls the media. It does so in an indirect way but it does.

and Hollywood. And Facebook. And X

> You can't even read most Western propaganda in China because the government goes to great lengths to censor narratives counter to offical views.

Sure, because you can watch Russian news channels like RT in the EU, or read websites like rt.com - oh no, they're blocked.

Just like in the EU, where the government goes to great lengths to censor narratives counter to offical views, so does China.

Whataboutism: a smear word used to imply that hypocrisy is irrelevant. It isn't.

On HN, it’s basically an excuse to say that China can’t do what the US is already doing.

1) Do not hide behind "whataboutism"

2) CIA

3) Citation needed

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