What is stopping Twitter from releasing server logs for others to independently authenticate attribution? Facebook, Google have not declared. The ASPI analysis proceeds on assumption that Twitters attribution is correct. The startup Digital Intelligence concludes confidently "China has made its debut as a confirmed information operations actor" because the bots coordinated behavior "emulat[es] divisive disinformation tactics seen in other disinformation campaigns from Russia and Iran".
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.
> some independent agent/contractor with limited resources and basic scripting knowledge.
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.
The question is, is this the kind of activity China would outsource to this quality? This recklessly on a sensitive topic like HK so close to 80th anniversary. Was it that time-sensitive / desperate to allow something this amateurish to roll out. They're paying millions buying advertisement in foreign newspapers, I'd expect an social median influence operation would get more funding than 100 poorly cultivated bot accounts.
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 watched a few videos of a western man living in China (married to a Chinese woman). Their views on propaganda, information, privacy, leadership, marketing, power structures, etc... are all so vastly different from ours that it's almost unbelievable until you hear about it first hand.
China's propaganda style is unabashedly similar to "Baghdad Bob". [0]
I hope this isn't an endorsement of serpentza or laowhy86, bitter expats with middle school mandarin proficiency flunking out of China are not insightful sources. There are millions of Chinese diaspora who lived in both Chinese and western cultures with much more useful things to say.
Here are recent studies on how domestic and foreign Chinese propaganda works.
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.
I could imagine some lesser agencies, like some local small CPC offices have some of their workers going online in their spare time to push narratives. Whether encouraged just an an act of patriotism or something more organized where they look at your results and help manage what to hit.
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'.
This strikes me as an unfair characterization of those YouTubers. I’ve followed them for a while and have quite a different impression.
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:
I found Laowhy86 slightly more genuine. I have not viewed their videos in a while, maybe I got an unfair representation seeing their content at the height of clickbait YouTube titles and expats flunking out of China. Regardless, per my comment below, these are youtubers who optimize(d?) content that often distorts reality (as another user describes) and should not form the basis of understanding and discussions on China. But for many lay users, they are. The Chinese perspective from an expat lens will be vastly different from the Chinese perspective from a Chinese lens etc. I'll go through his summation video after work, someone else linked to his wife's channel. I'll be upfront and say regardless of how my opinion changes of them as people, I still don't believe they should be dominant sources for informing views China. There aren't any dominant sources just like 2 vlogs shouldn't form your opinion on US.
No, I think it's a completely fair assessment. In fact, it probably doesn't even go far enough in terms of criticism. These two expats are notorious in the non-expat world for perpetuating unsubstantiated stereotypes and myths about China for the sake of views. They know there's an audience for it and they've adjusted their content accordingly. Somehow, they've managed to convince a vast number of people that they are experts on the subject matter despite all evidence to the contrary. If you listen to what they say you'll end up with a very distorted view of reality.
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.
You’ve offered a very general critique. In contrast, the video I linked mentions many specific events and incidents which informed the speaker’s impression of China. Give that you’re making vague assertions on a throwaway account, and given that I’ve followed these YouTubers for years and corroborated the kinds of things they’ve said with friends who visit China or are Chinese, I’m not inclined to agree with you.
If you believe there are “higher-quality” China YouTubers with a different view, don’t just allude to them, please share links.
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.
It really disturbs me how these two constantly get touted as authoritative sources on China in western social media. I could not imagine a more misleading introduction into what daily life in China is like than the videos produced by these guys.
I think it's useful to hear multiple sides to an argument, and to dismiss one side of an argument with ad hominem attacks, like you just did, only demonstrates how vital it is to hear various sides of a situation.
>I think it's useful to hear multiple sides to an argument
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.
Are facts determined to be accurate by only people with an education or skilled speakers?
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.
>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.
Just this past week China blocked American's from leaving their country (exit bans), even though they didn't commit any crimes. That is seriously tyrannical level activity.
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???
>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".
"It's complicated" is a phrase to dodge facts. Here's some balance. The US has done a bunch of terrible things to other countries, they aren't a good and righteous nation, none are, and neither is China.
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.
I wouldn’t trust Laowhy86’s commentary on China’s macroeconomic development. Nor would I trust Bill Bishop to tell me what it’s like to raise a young family in a third-tier city in China. Both voices have some utility.
Am starting to feel this trolling is an industry (like troll farm) of its own - there are people or bots dedicated to trolling and reporting people who raise voice against the discrimination.. I recently had to report an unfair service by virgin atlantic staff after an emergency landing - I tweeted the pictures and video of the incident.. I was immediately trolled by twitter accounts about how i should be happy that I am alive - I was complaining about how the staff handled the issues after the emergency landing .. wish the social media companies could raise voice against companies or countries that use their platform to discredit real concern - guess people do not matter anymore
You may not believe it, the vast majority of Chinese actually love the CCP and the system, they only just hate that a few corrupt low-level officials who are the bad apples fucking up leaders' glorious visions.
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.
I wouldn't say most Chinese love the system. They don't despise it though.
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).
I feel like all the people who are involuntary organ-donors might disagree if they weren't dead. China has a way of disappearing people who don't like it. I wonder how many people would come out more vocally if you weren't disappeared for disagreeing or even being outspoken.
Give you some hint: According to Godel theorem, a system in higher order is necessary to judge the truth in current system. So self claim the story is true implied the story teller (i.e. the author of the news) is not quite intellegent and maybe very naive to mix fact and belief.
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.
> 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.
Legally I'm not Chinese but it's not relevant in this context. You have a wrong assumption about the cause. Another wrong assumption is I'm offended which I’m not. Here's the subtle difference: A person's behaviour is insulting meanings he/she could offend some (not all) people who follow some rules, which might be: reasoning process should base on relative facts/axioms within the same axiomatic system.
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.
Godel has nothing to do with this. Chinese organ donation is well documented across many news organizations. There are some crazy facts regarding how quickly you can get a new liver, for instance. It can take people months or years in most cases to find an appropriate liver, but in China you can get one in weeks. They execute prisoners and extract their organs. Chinese doctors have even admitted this. [0]
'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]
> You may not believe it, the vast majority of Chinese actually love the CCP and the system, they only just hate that a few corrupt low-level officials who are the bad apples fucking up leaders' glorious visions.
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.
> You may not believe it, the vast majority of Chinese actually love the CCP and the system, they only just hate that a few corrupt low-level officials who are the bad apples fucking up leaders' glorious visions.
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?
Well, because the quality of life is indeed getting better and better in China. CCP successfully satisfied the fundamental need of people who were living under extreme poverty before right? Perhaps the next generation of Chinese people will start to demand more freedom, etc..
> Well, because the quality of life is indeed getting better and better in China. CCP successfully satisfied the fundamental need of people who were living under extreme poverty before right?
That's a reason one might suspect that people would support the regime, but not an answer to the question asked in GP.
That would seem logical, but it’s less accurate than you might think. Revolutions actually become more common as society exists famine and extreme poverty.
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.
I've lived in a place like that. Communist Poland, 1985/1986. It was pretty weird. Inlaws, very well to do by Polish standards were continuously reminding their twenty something daughter that she should keep out of that because 'names were being recorded' and nothing good would ever come out of it. Never mind the details of Zomo's beating up people in the streets, it was their own reputation they were scared of. They looked pretty silly for a while when the wall fell, but then all their connections landed on their feet and made bank, and nothing really changed for a long time. By now it fortunately has changed, but still, lots of the fat cats from before the wall fell are much fatter still today.
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.
It is extremely hard to get an honest opinion about what anybody feels, but it is important to know the context. China is an extremely large place with a history of attempts at cohesion which is 98% successful but only in the last several decades.
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.
That's very true. CCP controls the communications and spreading propaganda. Those who doesnt know how to get pass GFW are simply living inside the Matrix. There are also some who can receive information from the outside world but choose to shut their mouth as they afraid the consequence to speak the truth.
Of the people that receive information from the outside - and are actually on the outside - there is only an extremely small subset bothered by it in the way you want them to be.
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.
I'm glad more people are noticing this. The idea of huge bot or troll farms on Twitter is, as far as I can tell, more or less completely in the heads of people with particular political views.
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:
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:
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.
> 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.
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.
The examples given in the article are hardly "genuine, spontaneous citizens". Of course, the important question is to quantify bots vs. genuine--though the following examples are pretty clear-cut. Quotes from the article:
> 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.
Russia and China have, in effect, trained people to assume posts defending them are paid or bots. Many of us have seen the sudden swarm of patterned posts, sometimes with bad English, show up in comments. And we've seen news articles like this one.
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?
I suspect when living under a system experiencing nearly miraculous economic growth people are less political and more willing to look the other way with potential abuses.
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.
I would say "love" might not be accurate word. A lot of things CPP did are quite controversial and it's well known to most educated people. However alternatives are much worse which is not very well known outside of Chinese speaking community. In addtion, western media constantly brain wash their wesern audiance by distorting news coverage so that quite some Westerners believe CPP defenders are the brain washed groups added fuel to nationalist sentiment by insulting those CPP defenders.
So to consider lot of mainland Chinese defending CPP as "they love CPP" is a simplified interpretation. Does'nt reflect reality
To take a single example: The Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s which caused the deaths of many millions of people through famine. Which alternatives do you think were 'much worse' than that?
I’ve pointed this out before, but China has a huge population. They also have hundreds of millions of “migrant workers” who aren’t allowed to live in cities without having an active job. These works have to collect money so they can send it back to their farms and pay for their brothers or kids education(s) (because in China you have to pay for education).
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...
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.
>people found out the government lied, that patriotisme can reverse quickly.
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.
China’s still going through massive economic growth, and it has for many young people’s entire lives. The USSR is remembered by food shortages and other various struggles.
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.
This goes much further back, Russian peasants often expressed similar sentiments towards their tsars. Even Robin Hood stories feature benevolent king who would come in and fix everything, if only he knew.
It is an industry that goes way beyond Twitter and PR companies. It's incredibly popular for US businesses to pay firms in Asia, Africa, etc. to trawl social media and collect data using various automaton tools for BI and other purposes.
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.).
What's the point in complaining on twitter about it? The situation sucks, but the airline was most likely doing its best to resolve it. It's probably not possible to plan ahead much for unexpected diversions.
I'll have to second this. None of the accounts who belligerently responded look to be obvious bots or otherwise committed trolls. It looks like your account caught the attention of several news organizations, which means their tweets to you would have been seen by their followers. Or anyone checking out the "vs138" hashtag.
Last summer I remember a coworker telling me he was writting bots to counteract what he belived to be bots employed by republican polititions. I already felt like the signal to noise ratio on twitter had gotten pretty bad but at that point I realised there isn't enough left to ever justify exposing myself to it again.
It's a good time to remember that the vast majority of people never use Twitter. The media has had a fixation with the platform for as long as I can remember, which has helped it gain an unearned reputation as being relevant.
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.
I'd broaden that out. The entire MSM is now largely a low-truth information source. I can't find the exact quote now, but one of the leading media execs in the UK was just a few weeks ago openly advocating that media organisations should consider reporting the truth lower down their priorities than advancing their own agenda. Personally judging on how things have gone down in the past I don't think that have a media cleaned of inconvenient truths can end well - at all - but folk seem, depressingly, ever more intent on regurgitating what they are fed instead of questioning it, and living in a dumbed-down, disempowered fantasy world of pointless interests and meaningless pursuits. If this doesn't sound too emo.
> It's not relevant. It's the trash heap of the internet.
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.
Agreed, it may still be a trash heap, but it's still very relevant culturally. It's also a lazy source for headlines and (occasionally) breaking news so it gets far more relevance media-wise than it warrants in terms of quality.
They are NOT exactly known for doing a "good job" in anything related to handling people. Just look at how they handle Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjian, etc.
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.
It's incredibly funny to me how concerned western netizens seem to be about Chinese astroturfing... as if it's an actual problem they need to worry about.
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?
"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.
Whatever China and Russia are doing, cant be more than drops in the ocean, in comparison to the modern Western News media. They are triggering people, including themselves 24x7x365. Matt Taibbi describes the consequences better than most - https://taibbi.substack.com/p/introduction-the-fairway
I really hate how inherently biased and subjective most reporting about "social bots" seems to be.
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.
In a few years the Chinese economy will experience much slower growth rate (similar to the West) and people will get out of the this 30-year hypnotic state of fast-moving and dehumanizing economic development and quest for money (which the CCP has used to consolidate its grip) and with the growing corruption at increasingly higher levels of the government, the people will eventually demand what is theirs: The right to rule and appoint their rulers and then the CCP will be in trouble, and there won't be a blazingly fast economic growth to hide behind.
twitter is just a cesspit now. I have watched this happen to my own country (the UK) with trolls and bots constantly pumping out anything which gets an emotional reaction of outrage.
I see this in YouTube comments a lot on Hong Kong-related videos. Also they flag videos. A Cantonese language YouTuber I follow posted one video with her opinions and got flagged and hit with a strike on her account.
They don't even need to. It's not like they are having any problems doing what they want currently and their power is so far from being threatened that it's not even worthing monitoring.
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.
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?
I think 95%+ of opinions are directly regurgitated from others, but we humans mistake our own novelty with the idea for the idea actually being original.
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.
What do you think is the best approach to make sure one's opinion is independent without spending a massive amount of time on getting an expertise in the subject?
You can't. Independent opinion doesn't exist - you would have to validate every datum you're presented with starting from first principles, which is impossible.
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.
>For example, why do prominent faces of the movement such as Joshua Wong frequently use the phrase "God Bless Hong Kong" for Western media interviews (and in a congressional hearing yesterday)?
Joshua Wong is Christian, having been raised Lutheran by his Hong Kong parents. About 10% of Hong Kong identifies as Christian.
It is not far-fetched to believe that hktruth is a Chinese person living abroad. They would have an interest in preserving their anonymity. In this tense environment, a Chinese person in a Western country expressing support for the Chinese regime would risk being accused of being a Chinese spy.
Yes, overseas Chinese communities are divided, as are families too.
What's happening now is that a Chinese person who doesn't support the protestors is labelled as being pro-China, which is ludicrous.
Protestors have been described as "Little Black Guards", a reference to the Cultural Revolution and the student led Red Guards.
Why? Because it's dangerous to voice an opinion or argue with protestors. There have been numerous assaults. The protestors even beat up a man and tied him up in the middle of Hong Kong international airport!
Now, there are daily fist fights between different factions, between police, radical protestors and pro-government supporters. Excessive force and violence has been committed by all sides.
It’s not a big deal to discuss it even in China. My father bragged he was with the student leader the night before 64 happened. It’s CCP’s fault to commit mistakes when handling students. Is it worth overthrowing CCP just because of it? Hell Chinese people answered no, at least when they are doing most other things right. “Greater good”, you have to understand this to understand Chineses first
I actually heard it is heavily censored and people are kept at bay from openly talking about it. Am I misimformed? If so, can you tell me what is the general purpose of having the great firewall and why is there a need to keep people in the dark about certain things?
I grew up in Beijing and because of the affinity politics are more common topic there. It’s not that “open”, more like in private dinner party, inner circle friend hangout and more likely you can safely start those conversations with taxi drivers who blames the government all the time
The decision to keep people in dark to me is silly but the motivation was always rumors spreads too fast and too wild in China, so it makes sense for the ruler to fear even if they aren’t that dirty. What’s funny is the harder they try to cover up things the quicker it spreads “hey try search XXX it’s blocked”
We currently live in a world where people don't feel comfortable expressing dissenting opinions about Hong Kong and China from their primary accounts. Any dissenting opinion is immediately suppressed and the user in question surrounded by a hostile interrogation squad.
When they make anonymous green accounts for the specific purpose of airing these opinions, they get accused of astroturfing because they "only discuss" the specific subject. Just think about the irony of that for a second as it relates to what HK supporters purport to be fighting for.
Personally I am very skeptical of the western media coverage of the Hong Kong demonstrations. I do not think for a minute that it has the popular support now that it had earlier (2 mios in the streets etc.).
And a lot of the pro-China support online gets categorised as bots or Chinese agents because it is in broken English and comes from the same few vpn ip-addresses.
In truth, I find that most Westerners have a much more distorted view of China than Chinese people do. That may seem strange and obvious to say, but there are so many Westerners who know next to nothing about China, yet confidently talk about Chinese people being brainwashed. The thing is, those "brainwashed" people have a much better informed and more nuanced view of China. The people calling them "brainwashed" are typically just regurgitating whatever they read in the newspaper this morning, which is usually sensationalized (imagine a non-American's impression of the US being formed entirely by news accounts of mass shootings).
My previous comment was mostly based on my personal experiences discussing US politics online - and seeing people on both sides retweet ideas that are not logically consistent but make them feel good about their team. I'm sure this common in most political discussions, but I'm not well versed in Chinese politics personally.
Perhaps there are people who want to voice unpopular opinions anonymously in order to avoid social backlashes? We at HN frequently celebrate anonymity as a means of free speech.
Frequently, people have political opinions that are incredibly nationalistic, to the point of sounding like complete gibberish to anyone outside their bubble.
I generally don't assume that they are bots, shills, or trolls, even if they sound like them. I need only look at the outcome of elections to know that those positions have incredibly broad grassroots support.
True, but consider that they're equally productive for any discourse, that is to say a net negative. Therefore it would be pertinent to treat them similarly.
what kind of "discourse" are you aiming for after you've labeled and dismissed everyone with a pro-China sentiment? a debate where the only participants have the same opinions seems like the least productive possible form of discussion.
...of course? Who else would you even be debating with? What is there to discuss between two people who hate scientology? Isn't the point of debate to entertain different views and/or to persuade others?
We gotta stop blaming `China` -- The China brand has been tarnished unfairly in my view as we use it to be synonymous with the so-called `Communist Party of China`
As usual, with the downvotes, allow us to clarify:
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
There needs to be some sort of internet sanction where the offending country's internet access to the world is cut off until they start acting like good global citizens.
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.