Pro CCP 'spamouflage' network pivoting to focus on US election
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Classical propaganda is heavy drum-beating for how great your side is. That goes back to at least Cicero, increased when newspapers came along, and really got going during WWII. That stuff rapidly gets boring, and is usually aimed, at least in part, at stroking the backs of your own political leaders.
Increasing the noise level so that no one can believe anything isn't a new idea. British "black" propaganda during WWII used it quite a bit. "Rumor-mongering" was once a thing.[2] But it didn't scale. It's picked up in recent years partly because it's much more effective when combined with ad targeting. This is a problem.
Vladislav Surkov and propaganda methods of making people distrust everything and sow strife and confusion.
https://youtu.be/Gr7T07WfIhM?t=8567
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=vladislav...
> Classical propaganda is heavy drum-beating for how great your side is.
Isn't that a form of "classical propaganda" in itself? "We are perfect. There is nothing wrong with us. Only our enemies say we have problems."
or
"All our problems are caused by THEM"
or
"If you don't like America you MUST be a commie!" (one of the worst slurs in post-WW2 USA)
Now I guess there's also China.
Example: The way Putin has dealt with opposition within his own country was not to say how great his party was and how bad the others were. It was to financially support some of the opposition group, arrest others, invite other publically, have others beaten up by thugs and have it change by the day. This way they can't trust what's real anymore, they lose hope not because there is none, but because it isn't clear what even to hope for and whom to hope with.
In the same time his party just is and wins by being in comparison more or less a clear, safe and before all known position to bet on — the devil that you know and all that.
So the confusion, the contradiction is the goal. That's why Tucker gets invited and Navalny murdered shortly after.
I like to browse both far left and far right social media to see what different circles are talking about, and a lot of the far right are coming around to be pro Russia (way more than I would have ever expected given US history).
There's also the conservative house representatives majority who are likely to continue blocking any additional military aid to the Ukraine. So on a whole it seems to me that Russian government has been highly effective at advancing their political agenda within the USA recently.
I'm not sure that's actually successful. Even a lot of conservatives seem put off by Tucker's recent activities, especially with the Navalny news today.
Of course, he made no mention of how much $100 is to the average Russian's income proportional to the average American's income.
Some of us just panic and react without thinking about why food is getting more expensive or what policies will improve the world for us now and our children in the future.
When people are hangry, they vote for the loudest monkey.
For a MAGA follower (if they ever hear about it and even know who Navalny is) such combinations induce a cognitive dissonance, which translates either into dispair or into open support of Putin after he killed his major critic, either way it would be a win. And the other side of US politics is in dispair wittnessing how the MAGA crowd handles this, which (from Putins point of view) hopefully makes people stresses enough about politics that they just don't want to hear it anymore.
This idea of confusion and despair is how he managed to get the Russians to stay so apolitical after a short optimistic phase in the 90s. Better not think about it — this is the message.
> As far as I know this is kind of the strategy of Russian propaganda. I would not be surprised if killing Navalny was done purposely shortly after the Tucker interview.
Another data point: Putin is now putting down Carlson:
> Speaking with a state television host, Mr. Putin said he was disappointed that Mr. Carlson had not asked “so-called sharp questions” because he wanted the opportunity to “respond sharply” in his own answers.
> “He turned out to be patient and listened to my lengthy dialogues, especially those related to history, and didn’t give me reason to do what I was ready for,” Mr. Putin said. “So, frankly, I didn’t get complete satisfaction from this interview.” ...
> Mr. Putin’s mockery of Mr. Carlson came as the former Fox host was basking in the aftermath of his interview by offering a steady stream of praise for Russia and Mr. Putin, whose leadership he has extolled as superior to Mr. Biden’s.
(https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/16/business/media/tucker-car...)
On one hand you have a KGB guy, who has for decades promoted himself as loyal-to-the-end, burning documents in East Germany while the wall was falling and Moscow wasn't picking up the phones with his colleagues nowhere to be found. And who has gone to great lengths (like using chemical weapons on UK soil) to punish people he sees as traitors.
And on the other hand you have Tucker, a CIA reject who is now running interference against his own nation's interests, who presents himself as a journalist while knowing less about Putin than Putin knows about him, and who was as intrepid as a wet noodle in that interview.
Putin made him wait for 2 hours before it even started. I think he just enjoys dunking on people.
I've seen a few political influencers who reliably follow a pattern of saying something abjectly stupid/offensive which draws mockery and attention for a week or two, and just when this attention is waning, saying something else of more substance which gets widely circulated by the same attention network. If one has a thick skin for hostile criticism, it's a great amplification technique.
Pro-Russia or pro-US? The alt-right stance I've been seeing is that the war accomplishes nothing, introduces a lot of needless risks and wastes resources better spent elsewhere. It looks like all the US is achieving is piles of dead Slavs. That isn't wealth generation or strategically useful.
It has been decades since US foreign interventions have done anything useful for the US, the base rate here leans strongly towards pacifism being the most effective strategy. Even in the Russia-Ukraine war, I've been arguing that this gives China opportunities more than anything else. Hopefully the CCP are too inept to seize on them.
You might liken it to vowing to never voting Republican, even if you agree on some issues
It cleverly uses the hate for democrats to push for the love for Russia. Once you normalize this line of thinking, Russia is seen in a more favourable light by anyone who falls for it.
Honestly, that sounds mostly like a troll designed specifically to derange liberals ("own the libs" or whatever). If I remember my 2016 correctly, liberals were freaking out about Russian election interference at the time.
Yeah I know I used a lot of editing but the sentiment and word choice is there. I don’t want the US to be the world police but I don’t want to dismiss that Putin is deeply rotten. And I don’t think whether something is “useful” is the only concern.
Are we helping? Are we making things worse? These are how we should talk about things.
Then the US intervened. Maybe the European powers too, I dunno what the politics in the NATO war room looked like. Now it looks like the country is levelled, Europe is undergoing an energy crisis because of their response, it is now a realistic possibility that NATO might not be able to coerce Russia, China or even Iran on the outside. My money is still on the US but they're making it look like a struggle.
And the plan for Ukraine recovering seems to involve them being bankrolled by a bankrupt US so I don't see that working out well either. This isn't the 1950s, the US is not in a position to go rebuild Europe. They have enough problems figuring out how to build prosperity in the USA without trying to do it overseas. That is a core complaint of the right wing and a significant part why said right-wingers are trying to vote a wrecking ball into the presidency.
Is the US helping? Maybe. Not a very clear picture yet. Compare this to Iraq or Afghanistan where nobody stood up for them after the US invasion. It was bad for the countries, I don't know if it was worse than what is going on in Ukraine but I suspect we'll discover that US intervention has made things worse.
It’s definitely possible that sending weapons into a conflict just makes it worse. Especially when soldiers are just people on both ends.
My only dispute with your text is that we definitely have the ability to get our shit together financially in the US. The opposition is purely ideological. “We can’t” becomes “we don’t try” becomes “we can’t”.
One the one hand yes. On the other that is true of all countries, and most of them are basket cases when it comes to financial governance and they aren't in any position to be putting their finger on the scales in wars half a world away. The US just doesn't have a resource surplus and it is in question whether they can sustain their interventionist foreign policy without first sitting down and getting the house in order.
Where are the resources going to come from? Going back to the thread root, that is the core of the right wing backlash that is brewing on this topic. All this stuff going to Ukraine to get blown up could be going to the US to make life better for people.
You’re debating two things: whether the US should intervene in Ukraine, and whether the US should get its internal affairs in order.
Your points are that war is expensive*, the US has a poor ability to run its internal systems (yes and no, but how does this imply we should sit on our hands with foreign policy), this war isn’t useful.
*The monetary cost of this war (to the US) is just not a legitimate part of the debate. It’s pittance what we’ve supplied.
Well we're crossing from the point where I can talk about "the right" because the stances I've heard are too mutually incoherent; this is the part where everyone has their own opinions. My argument is if you have an unreasonably large budget, then you donate some stuff, then the budget needs to get bigger again to cover the donations.
Fair summary of the thread so far by the way, not often I get to say that in threads that go beyond 2 posts.
> The monetary cost of this war (to the US) is just not a legitimate part of the debate. It’s pittance what we’ve supplied.
I have a few problems with that line of thought.
Firstly, describing it as a pittance is unreasonable. The resources sent to Ukraine could have been used in the US to achieve good things. It is 10s of billions of dollars; it could get dumped on some random small struggling town in the rural US and no-one there would ever have to work again (across multiple generations if they managed their investments right). There is an opportunity cost to wasting that much money that means the US is worse off.
Secondly, if you add all the "pittances" up that the US wastes on foreign war you get real money. The the war in Afghanistan ended up being around 2 trillion over 20 years which comes to a burn rate in the range of the US spending in Ukraine (~100 billion/yr in Afghanistan vs ~75 billion/yr in Ukraine [0]). These pittances aren't pittances from that perspective either.
And finally US doesn't look like it can afford a pittance. It is like someone with a deep debt problem buying lottery tickets. The financial situation in the US is dire; the threshold has been crossed where the principle on their debt isn't going to be paid back and we're looking for the point where either they stop borrowing or the interest doesn't paid back either. It is unreasonable to be talking about just finding a little surplus to give away - the US exhausted those options years ago. There has to be an answer to the "what is being given up?" question.
Now if the US was getting some sort of payoff or helping the Ukrainians in some way then that cost might be justifiable, but it seems that all the US involvement is doing is transforming Ukrainians into other-countrians and corpses while securing China's geopolitical position. We have established international norms for how theses invasions should play out, they were established in the 2000s by the US's adventurism. They're getting broken here with no obvious upside gained.
[0] https://www.cfr.org/article/how-much-aid-has-us-sent-ukraine... - I just took the number from this article, I'm sure there are big error bars depending on the start & end dates used.
Now we're beginning to approach fungible with domestic content production in every market.
And the US domestic market is now often funded by international interests. China-backed films highlight the intelligence and cunning of Chinese citizens, which often provide critical advice or technology to the dumb action-oriented Americans [1].
When's the last time China was an adversary in a film? Or that the henchmen or Bond villain was Chinese? It's always gotta be an Arabic, Persian, North Korean, or Russian villain.
[1] Independence Day, The Trench, etc. etc.
It looked like that you're treating Hollywood-style cultural export as competition, and your conclusion is "America is losing control because of the involvements from China-backed films", believing the evidence is clear given how rare China was shown as "an adversary in a film"?
If what you said were pure true, that "US domestic market is now often funded by international interests" is the reason for current reality, which in turn implies that "US domestic market" is a complete sellout, then why Hollywood won't accept investments from the Persians, and then introduce some Persian superheros that sometimes randomly goes "Allahu Akbar"? The are huge money in this, why the US domestic market won't make it happen?
Maybe you're looking at the wrong direction. Maybe Hollywood (and US culture) is losing it's shine because by now, thanks to the Internet and medias (Vox, Vice, John Oliver etc), people starts to see the reality that America, behind all it's sparkling glares, also has quite a few flaws. Maybe China don't often get picked as an adversary simply because Americans just subjectively don't hate Chinese THAT much.
Here's my perspective as a Chinese: the exporting of cultural is more of a test than competition. It's a tool that communicates the cultural aspect of the exporter, to see if the importer welcomes it. It's a good tool if you want to infer the inner compatibility of the two parties, but it does very little beyond that.
Just to knock you out of your "winning" mindset: the movie Saving Private Ryan maybe resonate very well amongst Americans, after all, it's an true American hero doing American hero things. But in Chinese people's eyes (the eyes of the rest of the world, really) the movie just don't feel the same. Everyone got their own heros back home, you know? Funny enough, after watching the firm, I asked some of my friends whether or not they will save their soldier colleagues under similar situation showed in the firm, many of them answered solidly "Yes". To clarify, they were not thinking about saving Mr Ryan, instead, they were thinking about saving CHINESE soldiers Mr Zhao, Mr Qian, Mr Sun and/or Mr Li, maybe even under direct gun fire from Mr Ryan. That's something you might want to think about the next time you bring up your theories on the "victory" of America media exports ;-)
Because it 1000% is, and China is engaging in the same game today.
> Hollywood won't accept investments from the Persians,
It absolutely would. Money can buy access. China has been one of the only countries to spend in this way for this access.
Hollywood is dying. Americans are more interested in video games, Instagram, YouTube, and the Internet. Hollywood will take money from anyone to save itself.
> Maybe Hollywood (and US culture) is losing it's shine because by now, thanks to the Internet and medias (Vox, Vice, John Oliver etc), people starts to see the reality that America, behind all it's sparkling glares, also has quite a few flaws.
> Here's my perspective as a Chinese: the exporting of cultural is more of a test than competition. It's a tool that communicates the cultural aspect of the exporter, to see if the importer welcomes it.
It's also a test to see how incompatible or divergent our societies have become. Whether due to polarity shifts, indoctrination, or tribalism and team sports.
These are the symptom of an underestimated immune system with little else to do. Most of the evils in the world are gone, so we've started chasing down the last mile. We've turned it into entertainment to attract viewers and make money.
> To clarify, they were not thinking about saving Mr Ryan, instead, they were thinking about saving CHINESE soldiers Mr Zhao, Mr Qian, Mr Sun and/or Mr Li, maybe even under direct gun fire from Mr Ryan.
Tribal thinking at it's finest. I'd save Mr. Ryan and Mr. Zhao. Or at least I think I would. That kind of courage is insane and highly laudable.
So China is exporting it's movie such as the Battle of Chosin Reservoir to saturate America market with it's propaganda? Can you offer any example of that happening?
The truth however, is that as soon as when China steps out of their line, America clamps down really hard. There are real world example of this happening/happened. I'm not really sure why you're painting a picture showing how weak America is when in the reality it's not the case at all.
Also, there are way more America heros in the movies than Asian ones. If everything you saw in a movie was just few Asian dudes acting cool, and it got you agitated... then maybe just wait for few years until Hollywood seeks it's new diversity hotness to show off.
> Tribal thinking at it's finest. I'd save Mr. Ryan and Mr. Zhao.
So, what you were saying is that, it's "Tribalism" if in the story Mr Miller only saved Ryan brothers, but did not but also save German soldier Mr Altenburg, Mr Bachmann and Mr Chmielewski and his 5 month old pet cat who fired at you following their orders?
I mean, how do you save someone who's actively endangering your life from a distance? I imagine it would be really hard.
Plus, do US soldier really consider to save the life of their opponents in real life during an operation? Not judging anything there, just trying to be realistic.
https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/hu-jintao-dragged-out-...
I mean King Henry VIII had parliament ratify his changes to the English church so that he could remarry 5 times.
Xi has more power than the CCP.
One man just does not get political power without the support of powerful people around him. Even kings and emperors work the same way.
Xi has consolidated power in himself to an extent not seen since Mao, maybe Stalin. Xi controls the CCP and has no rivals alive (anymore.)
It's just that Xi (and Putin to a slightly lesser degree) have isolated themselves so much that even the US political establishment has little idea what they want or plan to do. I'm not sure even the political establishment within China knows much better.
There are elections in China, and there have been for many decades.
There are other aspects of these elections that make them less likely to succumb to soft influence from the outside.
> There are elections in China, and there have been for many decades.
There is a reason why the refrain is not just "elections" but "free and fair elections." Communist countries are famous for offering elections with no actual choice.
Election interference in China is not possible, because its "elections" are total shams so there is no point to try.
In many ways it's even necessary because the political system is so byzantine that online venting is really the best feedback loop there is.
The US used to fly planes to drop leaflets over population centers, so there was the expense of creating/printing the leaflets, the expense of flying them into place, the risk of invading foreign airspace, blah blah. Now, it's some keyboard warriors sitting in an office using a exponentially more efficient delivery system.
What goes around, comes around
I think there's plenty of evidence that counters your claim.
There are lots of things going on here, I'd be careful about being too dismissive about this.
Whoever paid money to show me those ads, wasted it.
"I'm not addicted. I can stop at any time"
So this is funny. USA wanted Pakistani prime minister out so when he leaked the cable showing American meddling, Pakistani courts found him guilty of leaking state secrets and had him removed from office?
Recently he was awarded 5 year jail sentence for among other things, for having "improper marriage" with his wife. As in her waiting period apparently from divorce - remarriage wasn't enough but that being a mere irregularity, courts had to find him guilty because they want to crucify him. Why?
Is your point that this is so inexpensive that it’s hardly a line item on a budget? Printing leaflets and flying a plane.
Seems a lot cheaper than defending Ukraine from a madman terrorist. A madman terrorist in cahoots with PRC.
The effectiveness of the leaflets greatly depended on the number of people that actually found them. Social platforms allow you to have your post placed directly in front of the eyeballs of your target. You even get analytics on the campaign.
I was just using old vs new techniques to show how much more modern day shenanigans are
Surely all major powers tried to influence all elections of interest wherever and whenever they could? Both then and now?
It's also much more difficult to deny a leaflet drop, but we have people here on a very technically oriented forum denying the effectiveness of these campaigns. I guess it's a positive that they are not being denied that they are happening.??
I'm just honest here, I have to assume we've been meddling in each other's leadership and civil directions for a long long time. Like forever. And I just can't believe that the USA is somehow unique either as a perpetrator or a victim. I could believe that there was a time when the USA was more effective and that time may not be right how, but the "coming back to bite you" argument doesn't ring true.
Now with Internet the power is "democratised".
I absolutely think the US currently does culturally destabilizing stuff against what it considers its geopolitical adversaries. They are also. I don’t think it’s a causal effect in either direction - I.e., the US did X so everyone turned around and did it back. It it’s more like a well understood concept that’s been going on for decades if not longer.
The key I think is the US political system other than in the early 1900’s, essentially since FDR, has been extremely stable. There was an enormous amount of cultural effort put into homogenizing the social and political dialogue during WW2, and even more in the 1950’s. In the 1960s the Soviet Union absolutely manipulated political unrest to their advantage and it weakened the will of the people to stand for the Vietnam war and helped nudge us into retreat gaining a Cold War victory. 70’s and 80’s saw a retrenchment of homogenization, but the 90’s individualism weakened the walls so to speak in favor of globalization, multiculturalism, etc (which fwiw are all great things in my mind).
I think the change is the advent of algorithmic social networks, memes, broad homogenized cultural enclaves that span spacial and social constraints, etc. This coupled with the broad access to interaction with the cultural “others” (I.e., while generally q-anon wackos isolate together, they’re constantly exposed to information and cultural influence by more liberal culture due to the internet, creating an opportunity to polarize).
This is specifically being exploited by nation states against each other. China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and the “bad guys” dominated by authoritarian dictators and oppressive regimes, are extremely well aware these technologies can be used to foment cultural discord that would destabilize their nations, not just internally but by external agents, and have cracked down on it aggressively. Knowing democratic and individualist cultures won’t and can’t, they have ramped up learning how to exploit the dynamics of algorithms, cultural polarization, etc. So it feels very one sided - because it is. It’s that way though because “they” have defended themselves against this vector of disruption, while “we” have explicitly invested in exposing everyone as much as possible to the vector for profit.
But the history isn’t one sided then and somehow swung around against the US. It’s more that this specific vector of cultural attack is a key weakness in the west because we believe it’s more valuable than dangerous, while “they” believe it’s more dangerous than valuable.
My belief is like a virus analogy, society will build meme antibodies and be able to more clearly distinguish mandating information. Most of the victims of this stuff tend to be poorly educated with minimal sophistication in online interactions. They are also not generally accepted in broader society, and over time the broader society will replace these vulnerable pockets of more susceptible minds and the effectiveness of cultural psyops via algorithmic and meme attacks will weaken quickly and social stability will emerge naturally. But it’ll take time.
Interestingly this means the authoritarian regimes populace are still highly vulnerable to highly sophisticated attacks. All it would take is a weakening of the walls against social media and algorithmic manipulation. I actually think you see this under the radar on platforms like signal and telegram, but they’re not well understood as there’s explicitly no national dialog allowed.
In any case, you can easily find the accounts by searching for the tweeted texts. It's very unlikely that these are regular Twitter accounts. But I see little reason to think this is part of a camouflaged "CCP propaganda operation" to influence the US election. You need to at least make an attempt to masquerade as a "fellow American" to qualify as election interference, but many of these accounts have handles/names that are literally pinyin, or have Chinese profile pics, or regularly retweet/like tweets in Chinese.
It's also not clear to me just what claim the report is making. It says Spamouflage "is already pivoting to focus on [the election]". Then later it says "the bulk of the content appears aimed at creating a sense of dismay over the state of America without any clear partisan bent... These [the issues focused on] are not election-specific narratives and have been a significant feature of Spamouflage's content over several years." So Spamouflage is at once pivoting to focus on the election and mostly talking about issues that aren't election-specific; and it's at once trying to improperly influence the election outcome and doing so in a way 'without any clear partisan bent'...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FemF_adUoAAgbAF?format=jpg&name=...
People are easily influenced by messaging. Today it is easy to create targeted messaging. A state actor could send messages to Republicans that are different than the ones sent to Democrats. In this way it is correct that the actor has no partisan bent. They just want to sow confusion, doubt, misinformation.
One can imagine that it is possible to influence an election without using election specific issues. If, for instance, welfare reform is not an issue in an election but talking about it in a way to create fear and anger can influence an electorate’s desires. I believe that if the CCP is actively engaged in an information war against Americans that they could do so in ways that, on the surface, would appear to be ineffective.
only then a peace deal can be made, politics should never be a one sided effort.
I have family who got sucked into Q-related stuff, and this kind of over-the-top ominous imagery is all over the telegram channels they are addicted to.
Many people in these circles take it very seriously, and Jan 6 is a bit of a counterpoint to the lack of interesting-ness, IMO. It shows what can happen when people buy in fully, and I think it’s best to see these memes not as a representation of what is, but a representation of what some people are trying to bring about.
I wish nothing but pain and misery on anyone who knows better but willingly purveys this shit to score political points.
"Cross-Platform Spam Network Targeted Hong Kong Protests"
"used hijacked and fake accounts to amplify video content"It's sad to see so much provocation and doomerism on the news and social media, ironically among people who want the US to improve. I'm not saying it's as blatant or harmful as CCP propaganda, but I'm certain it's very bad for the country.
This seems pretty global.
I'm very certain every political party likes to pretend every election is a civil war.
Very odd selection you've chosen there.
> However, the bulk of the content appears aimed at creating a sense of dismay over the state of America without any clear partisan bent. It focuses on issues like urban decay, the fentanyl crisis, dirty drinking water, police brutality, gun violence and crumbling infrastructure.
Maybe it's not so bad for people to be dismayed.
This is not exactly news, and there are plenty of American videos exposing these issues for years now. Maybe Congress should be spending that inflation printed money fixing them so that we don’t have to wait for a new president to get to work.
According to you and the mainstream media, yes, but not the voters. The point is that if you don’t want other countries to tell us how much we suck, we can maybe stop sucking. And our own propaganda machine is doing a great job of getting in the way of that, all the way down to the kids on reddit telling you you’re a bad person if you don’t vote a certain way.
I won’t be voting for the incumbent for reasons that are supposedly not “election issues”.