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In China the government hires people to sway public opinion. In the US, special interests and those with money do it. Is it worse that the Chinese government do

by monocle 10y ago

In China the government hires people to sway public opinion. In the US, special interests and those with money do it. Is it worse that the Chinese government does it to "keep the peace", while those in the US do it to get your money? Super PACs, political activists, pharmaceutical companies, Reddit power users, brigades and pay-for-votes services... not sure if there's any real difference.

Chickenality 10y ago
One major difference is how concentrated the special interests are. In the case of the Chinese government, public opinion is being swayed by a single entity. In the US, a large number of interest groups are all competing to try to sway public opinion. In the latter case, I think it's harder (at least in principle) for any one group to have a large effect on its own.
- danharaj 10y ago
  Except in the common intersection of their interests.
- JulianMorrison 10y ago
  Except, centralization of wealth means that the opinions of a relatively few people control the seeming surface diversity of "influencers" in the USA by holding the purse strings (when the proles resort to crowd funding they can break out of this to an extent, Bernie being an example).
  - stcredzero 10y ago
    The elites rig the elections and the public sphere, while the proles use the one election where they can still sway the vote to vote for dangerous populists as a protest. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trrqslUpfdw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trrqslUpfdw Old republican values are relegated to the dustbin, and a civilization becomes a shadow of its former self. This has happened before, and will happen again.
- tikhonj 10y ago
  This seems to play out in practice—in the US, the issues that have the most lobbying and airplay tend to have strong voices on both sides. Sometimes it's companies on one side and activist groups on the other, but often it's a mix of different activists and companies on both sides. They're not always matched evenly, but few things are entirely one-sided. The really scary lobbying is the sort that stays out of the public opinion and tries to influence the government in niche areas the average person doesn't know or care about (like very specific industry regulations). That's where companies get away with the most egregious things, at least until something finally brings the issue to the public conscience.
- notahacker 10y ago
  The other major differences is that political cultures that place high value on free expression of political views and public political participation generally don't have to bother paying people to reason, brigade or troll for their preferred political cause
- ConfuciusSay02 10y ago
  Totally disagree, in the US as in China there is a ruling wealthy elite. Both are roughly the same proportion of the population, and both are pushing their agendas. The one meaningful difference is that in the US they still pay lip service to the idea of free speech.
JulianMorrison 10y ago
It's my opinion that attempts to sway public opinion are spitting in the wind, but normally in the same direction as the wind, resulting in an illusion of efficacy. You can see their lack of real impact when they desperately try (and fail) to turn the public. Cf Trump. Control of ideas is massively oversold by both proponents and opponents, who both have a vested interest in believing it works. The reality is that the public has beliefs which are more cultural than anything else, and so do the "influencers", and so they tend to push in the direction the public was already going. And the opponents find it easier to blame influence rather than a cultural rejection of their ideas.
- battlebot 10y ago
  No, they're not, it is highly effective--I saw it firsthand during the run up to the Gulf War in 2003. I was on a message board and suddenly there would be all these "pro war" type members showing up posting basically propaganda and giving people a hard time and mostly creating chaos. The latest time I saw this behavior was on Reddit during the just completed 2016 elections. And then my suspicions were validated when Correct The Record was outed as the group doing it. This is ugly, ugly behavior--propaganda of the nastiest kind.
  - JulianMorrison 10y ago
    "I don't know how Nixon won, nobody I know voted for him". People live in bubbles. When you encounter a cultural clique with contrary ideas it can look like a villainous conspiracy simply because it's assumptions are so alien and yet so strongly held. Surely they must be shills, trolls, etc? No, generally not. People actually do have those beliefs and consider them worth grouping up and fighting for. Not the people you hang with, but elections in particular are great puncturers of bubbles; they count the real numbers.
    - greesil 10y ago
      So paid-for propaganda in online comments didn't happen?
PJDK 10y ago
An important part of the political theory behind pluralism is to do with managing certain realities beyond just individuals. You will have multiple power centres within societies (corporations, universities, trade unions, NGOs etc.). Allowing them a free voice has many benefits. Particularly it helps keep the peace, it makes power structures more obvious and it allows legitimate concerns to be surfaced more quickly and reliably. Just because it's not the weakest member of society controlling things in either system doesn't make both systems the same.
darkhorn 10y ago
Nice try 50c, nice try!
vkou 10y ago
In the UK, the government hires people, via the GCHQ, to sway public opinion. "Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. " https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/ https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
ConfuciusSay02 10y ago
Ummm, in the US the government hires people to sway public opinion too.
dv_dt 10y ago
I wouldn't feel so safe from US Gov't backed propaganda either. The US recently enacted the "Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act," which, in following recent bill naming history in the US, seems to be more about the opposite of its title: setting up the gov't infrastructure to push it's own propoganda and controlling speech it deems as sourced from "enemies".
- lightbyte 10y ago
  That all sounds like fear mongering hyperbole. I just read over the text of the bill here (https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/5181/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/5181...) and nothing in it suggests that would happen. Most of it is purely about identifying foreign propaganda.
  - dv_dt 10y ago
    I see the directive "to develop, plan, and synchronize, in coordination with the Secretary of Defense, the Director of National Intelligence, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, and other relevant departments and agencies, to ... proactively advance fact-based narratives that support United States allies and interests" I see no reporting requirements for public oversight of exactly what narratives are advanced, nor does the cast of officers listed particularly hint that such information would be forthcoming, nor are there requirements to identify that its the government doing the pushing when a particular narrative is being advanced to the American public. While there is value in countering foreign propaganda, I feel that to do it in secret is US propaganda and of less lasting value than doing it in the open.
jobu 10y ago
In the US it seems like the stuff that really goes viral is just bullshit schemed up by people trying to make a few bucks: http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503146770/npr-finds-the-head-of-a-covert-fake-news-operation-in-the-suburbs http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503... And as the stories spread, Coler makes money from the ads on his websites. He wouldn't give exact figures, but he says stories about other fake-news proprietors making between $10,000 and $30,000 a month apply to him. Here's a great example of the effect these stories can have: He was amazed at how quickly fake news could spread and how easily people believe it. He wrote one fake story for NationalReport.net about how customers in Colorado marijuana shops were using food stamps to buy pot. "What that turned into was a state representative in the House in Colorado proposing actual legislation to prevent people from using their food stamps to buy marijuana based on something that had just never happened," Coler says. Longer (audio) version of the story here: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/12/02/504155809/episode-739-finding-the-fake-news-king http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/12/02/504155809/episo...
- ZeroGravitas 10y ago
  As much as that author may wish to take all the credit, "Poor/Black people using food stamps to buy things that anger conservatives" is a long established genre in certain media circles, and it's clear he just put a small twist on it. The most recent one I saw was people using food stamps to buy food from Amazon. I don't even understand why that's a bad thing, but someone wrote a story trying to gin up some outrage over it. http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/01/16/amazon-begin-accepting-food-stamps/ http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/01/16/amazon-be... http://www.infowars.com/amazon-to-accept-food-stamps-under-new-obama-regs/ http://www.infowars.com/amazon-to-accept-food-stamps-under-n...
  - tangent128 10y ago
    The "logic" probably goes that somebody with internet access is well-off enough to not need food assistance. (Internet access still being seen as a luxury rather than a necessity to participate in modern society/economy.)
mzemel 10y ago
I think the difference is that we can choose not to buy products, but we can't choose a different government. So one stifles competition but the other stifles reform.

by monocle 10y ago

Chickenality 10y ago

One major difference is how concentrated the special interests are. In the case of the Chinese government, public opinion is being swayed by a single entity. In the US, a large number of interest groups are all competing to try to sway public opinion. In the latter case, I think it's harder (at least in principle) for any one group to have a large effect on its own.

danharaj 10y ago
Except in the common intersection of their interests.
JulianMorrison 10y ago
Except, centralization of wealth means that the opinions of a relatively few people control the seeming surface diversity of "influencers" in the USA by holding the purse strings (when the proles resort to crowd funding they can break out of this to an extent, Bernie being an example).
- stcredzero 10y ago
  The elites rig the elections and the public sphere, while the proles use the one election where they can still sway the vote to vote for dangerous populists as a protest. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trrqslUpfdw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trrqslUpfdw Old republican values are relegated to the dustbin, and a civilization becomes a shadow of its former self. This has happened before, and will happen again.
tikhonj 10y ago
This seems to play out in practice—in the US, the issues that have the most lobbying and airplay tend to have strong voices on both sides. Sometimes it's companies on one side and activist groups on the other, but often it's a mix of different activists and companies on both sides. They're not always matched evenly, but few things are entirely one-sided. The really scary lobbying is the sort that stays out of the public opinion and tries to influence the government in niche areas the average person doesn't know or care about (like very specific industry regulations). That's where companies get away with the most egregious things, at least until something finally brings the issue to the public conscience.
notahacker 10y ago
The other major differences is that political cultures that place high value on free expression of political views and public political participation generally don't have to bother paying people to reason, brigade or troll for their preferred political cause
ConfuciusSay02 10y ago
Totally disagree, in the US as in China there is a ruling wealthy elite. Both are roughly the same proportion of the population, and both are pushing their agendas. The one meaningful difference is that in the US they still pay lip service to the idea of free speech.

JulianMorrison 10y ago

It's my opinion that attempts to sway public opinion are spitting in the wind, but normally in the same direction as the wind, resulting in an illusion of efficacy. You can see their lack of real impact when they desperately try (and fail) to turn the public. Cf Trump. Control of ideas is massively oversold by both proponents and opponents, who both have a vested interest in believing it works. The reality is that the public has beliefs which are more cultural than anything else, and so do the "influencers", and so they tend to push in the direction the public was already going. And the opponents find it easier to blame influence rather than a cultural rejection of their ideas.

battlebot 10y ago
No, they're not, it is highly effective--I saw it firsthand during the run up to the Gulf War in 2003. I was on a message board and suddenly there would be all these "pro war" type members showing up posting basically propaganda and giving people a hard time and mostly creating chaos. The latest time I saw this behavior was on Reddit during the just completed 2016 elections. And then my suspicions were validated when Correct The Record was outed as the group doing it. This is ugly, ugly behavior--propaganda of the nastiest kind.
- JulianMorrison 10y ago
  "I don't know how Nixon won, nobody I know voted for him". People live in bubbles. When you encounter a cultural clique with contrary ideas it can look like a villainous conspiracy simply because it's assumptions are so alien and yet so strongly held. Surely they must be shills, trolls, etc? No, generally not. People actually do have those beliefs and consider them worth grouping up and fighting for. Not the people you hang with, but elections in particular are great puncturers of bubbles; they count the real numbers.
  - greesil 10y ago
    So paid-for propaganda in online comments didn't happen?

PJDK 10y ago

An important part of the political theory behind pluralism is to do with managing certain realities beyond just individuals. You will have multiple power centres within societies (corporations, universities, trade unions, NGOs etc.). Allowing them a free voice has many benefits. Particularly it helps keep the peace, it makes power structures more obvious and it allows legitimate concerns to be surfaced more quickly and reliably. Just because it's not the weakest member of society controlling things in either system doesn't make both systems the same.

darkhorn 10y ago

Nice try 50c, nice try!

vkou 10y ago

In the UK, the government hires people, via the GCHQ, to sway public opinion. "Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. " https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/ https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/

ConfuciusSay02 10y ago

Ummm, in the US the government hires people to sway public opinion too.

dv_dt 10y ago

I wouldn't feel so safe from US Gov't backed propaganda either. The US recently enacted the "Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act," which, in following recent bill naming history in the US, seems to be more about the opposite of its title: setting up the gov't infrastructure to push it's own propoganda and controlling speech it deems as sourced from "enemies".

lightbyte 10y ago
That all sounds like fear mongering hyperbole. I just read over the text of the bill here (https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/5181/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/5181...) and nothing in it suggests that would happen. Most of it is purely about identifying foreign propaganda.
- dv_dt 10y ago
  I see the directive "to develop, plan, and synchronize, in coordination with the Secretary of Defense, the Director of National Intelligence, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, and other relevant departments and agencies, to ... proactively advance fact-based narratives that support United States allies and interests" I see no reporting requirements for public oversight of exactly what narratives are advanced, nor does the cast of officers listed particularly hint that such information would be forthcoming, nor are there requirements to identify that its the government doing the pushing when a particular narrative is being advanced to the American public. While there is value in countering foreign propaganda, I feel that to do it in secret is US propaganda and of less lasting value than doing it in the open.

jobu 10y ago

In the US it seems like the stuff that really goes viral is just bullshit schemed up by people trying to make a few bucks: http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503146770/npr-finds-the-head-of-a-covert-fake-news-operation-in-the-suburbs http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503... And as the stories spread, Coler makes money from the ads on his websites. He wouldn't give exact figures, but he says stories about other fake-news proprietors making between $10,000 and $30,000 a month apply to him. Here's a great example of the effect these stories can have: He was amazed at how quickly fake news could spread and how easily people believe it. He wrote one fake story for NationalReport.net about how customers in Colorado marijuana shops were using food stamps to buy pot. "What that turned into was a state representative in the House in Colorado proposing actual legislation to prevent people from using their food stamps to buy marijuana based on something that had just never happened," Coler says. Longer (audio) version of the story here: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/12/02/504155809/episode-739-finding-the-fake-news-king http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/12/02/504155809/episo...

ZeroGravitas 10y ago
As much as that author may wish to take all the credit, "Poor/Black people using food stamps to buy things that anger conservatives" is a long established genre in certain media circles, and it's clear he just put a small twist on it. The most recent one I saw was people using food stamps to buy food from Amazon. I don't even understand why that's a bad thing, but someone wrote a story trying to gin up some outrage over it. http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/01/16/amazon-begin-accepting-food-stamps/ http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/01/16/amazon-be... http://www.infowars.com/amazon-to-accept-food-stamps-under-new-obama-regs/ http://www.infowars.com/amazon-to-accept-food-stamps-under-n...
- tangent128 10y ago
  The "logic" probably goes that somebody with internet access is well-off enough to not need food assistance. (Internet access still being seen as a luxury rather than a necessity to participate in modern society/economy.)

mzemel 10y ago

I think the difference is that we can choose not to buy products, but we can't choose a different government. So one stifles competition but the other stifles reform.