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> If you actually study a bit about China, you would know that rumors are a huge problem and people are not cautious enough to verify them before getting tricke

> If you actually study a bit about China, you would know that rumors are a huge problem and people are not cautious enough to verify them before getting tricked into believing them. Rumors spread quickly in the United States too, often through Facebook and Twitter. We even have a website dedicated to debunking them (snopes.com). But we don't see rumors that Trader Joe's is going out of business, the Weather Channel switching to Celsius, or that the president is a Muslim as a particular problem or a justification for totalitarianism.

paradite 11y ago
Trust me, there are people in China and around the world working against the Chinese government specifically (you can spot some of them as the new accounts created just to add accusations as replies to my comment) that create very good rumours that look very genuine. They put in much more efforts into crafting their speeches in order to make them look real and trick people into believing in them, nothing like the April Fool's joke. Hence it is a very difficult task to fight rumours in China, especially when people are having trust issues with the government.
- justinlardinois 11y ago
  You're not too far from teetering into the "everyone who disagrees with me is a shill" mentality. > it is a very difficult task to fight rumours in China, especially when people are having trust issues with the government. Is distrust of government such a bad thing? Here in the United States it's pretty much a founding value.
  - paradite 11y ago
    I understand why you would feel that way. In fact if I were grown up in the US or the west, I would reply the same thing. The thing that many westerners like you do not understand, is that it's not simply a fight between China and the free world, there are other parties that deliberately paint China black and the free world would gladly welcome them as their allies. So when there is overwhelming evidence that China is bad, combined by the good investigative journalism and the rumors created by the 3rd parties, it's hard to distinguish one from another. Now, there are plenty of people who disagree with me, some of them are good people, they present evidence and facts, and I do not try to argue my way out. But at the same time I had to recognize that there are people who pretend to be genuinely interested in freedom of speech but with the hidden agenda, which I had to disagree with. The problem here is that the two are often mixed together, in news articles and on Wikipedia, hence it would appear that people like me are lunatic and having the mentality you described above.

paradite 11y ago

Trust me, there are people in China and around the world working against the Chinese government specifically (you can spot some of them as the new accounts created just to add accusations as replies to my comment) that create very good rumours that look very genuine. They put in much more efforts into crafting their speeches in order to make them look real and trick people into believing in them, nothing like the April Fool's joke. Hence it is a very difficult task to fight rumours in China, especially when people are having trust issues with the government.

justinlardinois 11y ago
You're not too far from teetering into the "everyone who disagrees with me is a shill" mentality. > it is a very difficult task to fight rumours in China, especially when people are having trust issues with the government. Is distrust of government such a bad thing? Here in the United States it's pretty much a founding value.
- paradite 11y ago
  I understand why you would feel that way. In fact if I were grown up in the US or the west, I would reply the same thing. The thing that many westerners like you do not understand, is that it's not simply a fight between China and the free world, there are other parties that deliberately paint China black and the free world would gladly welcome them as their allies. So when there is overwhelming evidence that China is bad, combined by the good investigative journalism and the rumors created by the 3rd parties, it's hard to distinguish one from another. Now, there are plenty of people who disagree with me, some of them are good people, they present evidence and facts, and I do not try to argue my way out. But at the same time I had to recognize that there are people who pretend to be genuinely interested in freedom of speech but with the hidden agenda, which I had to disagree with. The problem here is that the two are often mixed together, in news articles and on Wikipedia, hence it would appear that people like me are lunatic and having the mentality you described above.