7 ms·

How the Chinese Government Fakes Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction [pdf]

121 points by pulisse 9y ago

TaylorAlexander 9y ago
Whenever I read this stuff, I imagine similar articles about the US government. We don’t do it the same way. US government officials will “leak” certain information to the press, knowing the press will take it and run. The goal is the same. The government wants to strategically distract the populace.
- colordrops 9y ago
  Yes. The Chinese are learning this from the US. A powerful disinformation capability is so much more important in the US because of free speech.
  - TaylorAlexander 9y ago
    We call it “Public Relations”.
    - emacsgifs 9y ago
      https://archive.org/stream/publicrelationse00bernrich/publicrelationse00bernrich_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/publicrelationse00bernrich/public...
    - jordanb 9y ago
      In the context of the government and politicians it's actually called "Perception Management" although the tactics are the same.
  - LiweiZ 9y ago
    Well, in the case of Chinese, most of people learned and are used to stop questioning/exploring/discussing/thinking/caring almost all of the unfiltered information. There is little room to be picky about the food tailor-made and there are even a lot of candies in the past few years. Why bother caring something you can not change/do/affect and sometimes may hurt yourself? More candies brings stronger heart beats and bigger bodies, too.
  - meri_dian 9y ago
    How is China learning this from the US? Chinese manipulation of social media is well known to be vast and incredibly coordinated. There just isn't evidence that the US government is engaged in anything approaching the Chinese scale. Sure we have tremendous surveillance capabilities, but we use them to detect criminal and terroristic behavior, not to police thought crime in the same way that China does. Don't be silly. It's so fashionable for pseudo-intellectuals to adopt a cynicism-all-the-time mentality, especially about America, but it's really just lazy thinking.
    - colordrops 9y ago
      As long as we are throwing out veiled insults, it's clear you exhibit a child-like ignorance and naivety. There's a news story a week some media collusion or propaganda apparatus being brought to light and people like you continue to remain in denial about the truth.
    - wybiral 9y ago
      It makes me wonder how the conspiracy people think this stuff is orchestrated. Does it all get planned out by one council of secret overlords masterminding the flow of public information? How many people are in on the secret? What is their end goal? ...Or maybe social dynamics and global relationships are more complex than that and patterns emerge even without the need for a conspiracy behind them...
      - colordrops 9y ago
        It doesn't take but a modicum of research to know these answers. I'd expect HN commenters to be better than speaking out of ignorance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_in_the_United_State... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Informatio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Information_Agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Information_Agen... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_Secretary_of_State_for_Public_Diplomacy_and_Public_Affairs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_Secretary_of_State_for_P... https://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-brown/propaganda-public-diplomacy_b_1547214.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-brown/propaganda-public-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent And this doesn't even begin to get into the deep collusion between the government and the media with lobbying, regulatory capture, government appointments, politicians on corporate board seats.
  - zghst 9y ago
    China is a historic nation reaching back thousands of years, inventor of mass foreign policy, bureaucracy, and more. She has no need to learn governance, nor the art of influence from the United States
    - colordrops 9y ago
      You say that as if there isn't a massive amount of innovation transfer in all fields, going both ways, with the China and the US, let alone most other countries. National pride is disgusting.
      - zghst 9y ago
        I am not Chinese, however I can recognize it’s great contributions to humanity. I hold this nation in upmost respect, though I disagree strongly with its domestic policies. This has nothing to do with national pride and everything to do with the highest respect toward something that is greater, older and much wiser than myself.
    - opportune 9y ago
      This is just stupid. Does Ethiopia have nothing to learn from the rest of the world because that's where humanity (probably) invented fire? Good, useful information spreads regardless of whether a country invented any arbitrary institution in the past
      - zghst 9y ago
        China has institutional knowledge reaching back thousands of years. It does not need US expertise on how to handle foreign policy nor governance. It is arguable that the top layers of society such as technological progress, social hygiene, consumer culture, etc., hold value and are worthy of integration, however, the critical mass of civilization and intelligence within greater Chinese history serves as the best guide for their national affairs.
      - simonh 9y ago
        China has a long history of central control of the media, censorship, state propaganda and bureaucratic control all of which are directly relevant to this particular topic. All the poster is doing is pointing that out. It isn’t Ethiopia.
- zghst 9y ago
  We don’t really have to bring the US into this, do we?
  - meri_dian 9y ago
    They try so hard to make everything about America... I've noticed that so many people on this site are incredibly cynical, it's sad. They're so wedded to conspiratorial thinking they lose sight of reality.
    - zghst 9y ago
      With my statement I make no assumptions on the intentions or advocacy that they reader may want to relay. I want to keep the conversation focused on the topic at hand, with relevant discussion.
    - wybiral 9y ago
      People love having something to hate and someone to blame for things not being ideal. It sure is a lot easier than acknowledging that the world is incredibly complex and nuanced.
    - opportune 9y ago
      This is not conspiratorial thinking, it's verified fact. The world is not run by completely well-intentioned people, just as it's not run by completely evil-intentioned people. Just people, which can be capable of both
    - jlarocco 9y ago
      Speaking of being cynical and conspiratorial, I think you're making more out of this than there really is. HN is hosted in the United States and that's where most of the readers are. It's natural for a person to use their own country as a comparison in discussions about governments and countries that are foreign to them. There's no conspiracy, and the same thing happens on any discussion site where a majority of users are from a specific country.
  - volgo 9y ago
    The reason to bring US into discussions like this is more because it's a familiar comparison, and less of whataboutism. When you look at something objectively, it's hard to know how sinister (or lack thereof) it is. Because most folks here live in the U.S., it makes the comparison easier.
- taneq 9y ago
  The same thing happens in Australia too. We have some scandal in a state government and then some poor sod conveniently gets eaten by a shark and we're in for three months of nothing but "Shark cull: Yes or No?", "How you can avoid being eaten by a shark", "Huge Protests Against Proposed Shark Cull", "Building a Net To Keep Sharks Out", "Sharks are a Vital Part of Our Aquatic Ecosystem", blah blah blah. It's pretty blatant. What happened with the Mayor's kid and the drug lab? Who cares?! SHARKS!
  - jabretti 9y ago
    Are you suggesting that the government causes shark attacks? Do they control the sharks, or just have agents to push the swimmers into their jaws? Seriously though, democratic governments are much less good at propaganda operations than despotic ones, not necessarily because the people involved are much more honest on an individual level, but just because democratically elected governments are never really in all that much agreement about what sort of propaganda ought to be spread. The genius of democracy is that if you keep the people in power constantly fighting with each other they don't have as much time left over to screw the rest of us. So although "whatabout the US?" is inevitably the top comment on every thread about the evils of China, I think that just sometimes we ought to actually pay attention to China qua China.
    - Cpoll 9y ago
      I think the point is that shark attacks are non-news, and the surge in interest is suspicious. You can probably replace 'shark attack' with any other 1-in-10-million occurrence/human interest story. Of course, the cynical interpretation is that there's nothing weird going on, and people just have a larger attention span for gruesome fluke accidents than for corruption.
      - jabretti 9y ago
        Shark attacks are no more non-news than at least 80% of the crap that fills media outlets, and it's not the least bit suspicious. Shark attacks are lurid and scary and human attention is notoriously poorly distributed. Yesterday, President Trump gave a speech about his trip to Asia, and 90% of the headlines were about the fact that he drank water during it.
- forapurpose 9y ago
  It's not comparable at all. Leaking stories to media organizations independent of the government, who may or may not report it, and who may or may not report it in the manner that the government wishes, is not the same thing as wholesale propaganda on a massive scale. As the U.S. president regularly demonstrates in his complaints (and as all his predecessors did, to a lesser degree) the U.S. government has little power over the news media and is very unhappy with what they do. I do think the government's ability to place favorable stories and narratives in News Corp. publications (Fox, Wall St Journal) might be comparable as a propaganda operation. My sense is that that's their primary purpose. But it's still different; News Corp has the choice of whether to comply.
- existencebox 9y ago
  I find this comment upsetting for a few reasons. 1. It's a blatant example of whataboutism[0], and a discussion of the reprecussions/implications of Chinese social manipulation can be had entirely without bringing America into the picture. 2. Even if we accept that we do the same thing, that in no way justifies it in either place, as you seem to suggest in a comment below 3. If you've read the article you'll see that distracting from the topic is a key tactic the propagandists use to derail discussion. I'm going to be generous and not assume you're in that basket, but can you see why your response might seem tone-deaf in that context? 4. The extent to which China has been experimenting with social manipulation is so beyond the pale of anything that happens in the US. [1][2][3] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System [2] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/muslims-china-police-state-state-surveillance-freedom-human-rights-religious-freedom-a7841401.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/muslims-china-police-state... [3] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/24/china_installing_mobile_spyware/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/24/china_installing_mo...
azifali 9y ago
It would be good to do a similar analysis of the Indian government.
- pvelagal 9y ago
  Indian Govt is totally inefficient. It is impossible as there are too many states, too many languages, too many view points and first of all, it is not even needed. Political parties (Be it state level or central) have enough money, machinery to throw dirt on each other through every kind of media. Coupled with the age old methods of vote buying, throwing freebies or use of religion/region/language/caste "cards" always work !
marmight 9y ago
The authors are overstating their case when they assume that why the 50 cent party posters are not engaging in discussion must be a result of an intentional Chinese government strategy. The moniker "50 cent party" comes from the idea that the members make 50 cents for each post they make. They aren't really making 50 cents per post, but if they are operating in a system which incentivizes them to make more posts, then they are not going to engage in discussion because that takes too much time. To get a higher post count it is easier to spam cheerleading posts that would be appropriate in any discussion context. The more simple explanation for the observed behavior is human nature rather than an intentional Chinese government strategy.
- pulisse 9y ago
  I think your comment misses the paper's point. You're talking about the motivations of individual posters working within an incentive system created by the Chinese government. The paper isn't concerned with such individual motivations, but instead with the motivations of the Chinese government in creating that system.
- simonh 9y ago
  The 50. Ent strategy has evolved though. It’s named that way because originally government porpaganda farms paid 50 cents per post, but the Chinese government isn’t a bunch of idiots. They have adapted and evolved their astroturfing strategies. There almost certainly are simple 50 cent style post farms operating, but they are also operating taste-maker and influencer programmes as well. It’s a spectrum from the original 50 cent guys at one end, right up to the presenters on state television talk shows at the other. The 50 cent moniker is used just for convenience.
zghst 9y ago
I wonder if these researchers ever visited the Chinese internet? They dissect their heirarchy and composition, yet not their effectiveness or reputation? The Chinese people see 50 mao bots from 10 miles away. The very nature of the internet makes humanity question truth and authority. So many sources to visit, so many opinions and so angles to reflect upon. Themes and patterns don’t go so quietly unnoticed on the internet. It seems that even many, many of these sources are far behind, though it is a new policy that US researchers are encouraged to dissect Chinese institutions publicly. This paper would have been groundbreaking in 2010-pre Snowden. Sadly, it is a hay in the growing stack of a US-engineered lashing at Chinese domestic policies.
- smilekzs 9y ago
  > The Chinese people see 5[0] mao bots from 10 miles away > The very nature of the internet makes humanity question truth and authority The short answer would be, these aren't really targeting people who can tell the difference and/or ask questions. Instead, the tech-illiterate, senior citizens (largely regardless of education level), rural "guest workers", etc.. It's the Nigerian scam game. Maximize # people affected per $.
paradite 9y ago
Not sure about others but I find myself practicing doublethink when juggling between Chinese media and Western media and have no symptoms of cognitive dissonance. To me it's just a matter of perspective. Maybe we need to take that into account when discussing the impact of propaganda. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink
- gerdesj 9y ago
  Wot?
  - zbyte64 9y ago
    Gaslight?
- musage 9y ago
  ElsaGate, enabled by Google and Disney (which owns at least network which owns at least one involved channel) and consisting faked videos for toddlers for strategic destruction and some sort of weird grooming. needles? taping people up? humiliating parents? kids driving cars? adults drugging people and getting them pregnant including minors? eating loads of feces? brand products left, right and center? verified accounts? monetized videos? people begging for removal since last year? but oh yeah look what China is doing. anyone feel like data crunching? crunch this. https://gitlab.com/elsagate/blacklist/raw/master/blacklist.txt https://gitlab.com/elsagate/blacklist/raw/master/blacklist.t... and while the data is downloading -- because it's not possible that a community of hackers would look the other way when blatant child abuse (that's defined by what happens to the child, not what the perpetrator gets out of it) is going down directly under their nose or even hands, right? right? it's brain hacking, it's technology, it's mystery, it's capitalism, it's SV, what more do you want? nevermind the material responsibility, the real harm done to, the needless additional pain in the lifes of kids who 'just' get left to autoplay on youtube for long enough -- read this maybe: https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2 https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in... edit: whoever downvoted this without argument, you'll think back to this and feel bad, if you're lucky and both informed and human enough. no more needs to be said. the info is there, CRUNCH THE DATA.
r1b 9y ago
Today the white house boasted about US capabilities with respect to 0days and vulnerability disclosure. [1] Their silence on the topic of state-sponsored astroturfing is deafening. [1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2017/11/15/improving-and-making-vulnerability-equities-process-transparent-right-thing-do https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2017/11/15/improving-and-mak...
- gowld 9y ago
  http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/politics/under-bush-a-new-age-of-prepackaged-tv-news.html http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/politics/under-bush-a-new-... Back in 2005, the White House was shipping propaganda to be broadcast by local TV news stations across USA
  - r1b 9y ago
    Thank you for sharing, I was not aware of this.

121 points by pulisse 9y ago

Whenever I read this stuff, I imagine similar articles about the US government. We don’t do it the same way. US government officials will “leak” certain information to the press, knowing the press will take it and run. The goal is the same. The government wants to strategically distract the populace.

colordrops 9y ago
Yes. The Chinese are learning this from the US. A powerful disinformation capability is so much more important in the US because of free speech.
- TaylorAlexander 9y ago
  We call it “Public Relations”.
  - emacsgifs 9y ago
    https://archive.org/stream/publicrelationse00bernrich/publicrelationse00bernrich_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/publicrelationse00bernrich/public...
  - jordanb 9y ago
    In the context of the government and politicians it's actually called "Perception Management" although the tactics are the same.
- LiweiZ 9y ago
  Well, in the case of Chinese, most of people learned and are used to stop questioning/exploring/discussing/thinking/caring almost all of the unfiltered information. There is little room to be picky about the food tailor-made and there are even a lot of candies in the past few years. Why bother caring something you can not change/do/affect and sometimes may hurt yourself? More candies brings stronger heart beats and bigger bodies, too.
- meri_dian 9y ago
  How is China learning this from the US? Chinese manipulation of social media is well known to be vast and incredibly coordinated. There just isn't evidence that the US government is engaged in anything approaching the Chinese scale. Sure we have tremendous surveillance capabilities, but we use them to detect criminal and terroristic behavior, not to police thought crime in the same way that China does. Don't be silly. It's so fashionable for pseudo-intellectuals to adopt a cynicism-all-the-time mentality, especially about America, but it's really just lazy thinking.
  - colordrops 9y ago
    As long as we are throwing out veiled insults, it's clear you exhibit a child-like ignorance and naivety. There's a news story a week some media collusion or propaganda apparatus being brought to light and people like you continue to remain in denial about the truth.
  - wybiral 9y ago
    It makes me wonder how the conspiracy people think this stuff is orchestrated. Does it all get planned out by one council of secret overlords masterminding the flow of public information? How many people are in on the secret? What is their end goal? ...Or maybe social dynamics and global relationships are more complex than that and patterns emerge even without the need for a conspiracy behind them...
    - colordrops 9y ago
      It doesn't take but a modicum of research to know these answers. I'd expect HN commenters to be better than speaking out of ignorance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_in_the_United_State... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Informatio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Information_Agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Information_Agen... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_Secretary_of_State_for_Public_Diplomacy_and_Public_Affairs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_Secretary_of_State_for_P... https://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-brown/propaganda-public-diplomacy_b_1547214.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-brown/propaganda-public-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent And this doesn't even begin to get into the deep collusion between the government and the media with lobbying, regulatory capture, government appointments, politicians on corporate board seats.
- zghst 9y ago
  China is a historic nation reaching back thousands of years, inventor of mass foreign policy, bureaucracy, and more. She has no need to learn governance, nor the art of influence from the United States
  - colordrops 9y ago
    You say that as if there isn't a massive amount of innovation transfer in all fields, going both ways, with the China and the US, let alone most other countries. National pride is disgusting.
    - zghst 9y ago
      I am not Chinese, however I can recognize it’s great contributions to humanity. I hold this nation in upmost respect, though I disagree strongly with its domestic policies. This has nothing to do with national pride and everything to do with the highest respect toward something that is greater, older and much wiser than myself.
  - opportune 9y ago
    This is just stupid. Does Ethiopia have nothing to learn from the rest of the world because that's where humanity (probably) invented fire? Good, useful information spreads regardless of whether a country invented any arbitrary institution in the past
    - zghst 9y ago
      China has institutional knowledge reaching back thousands of years. It does not need US expertise on how to handle foreign policy nor governance. It is arguable that the top layers of society such as technological progress, social hygiene, consumer culture, etc., hold value and are worthy of integration, however, the critical mass of civilization and intelligence within greater Chinese history serves as the best guide for their national affairs.
    - simonh 9y ago
      China has a long history of central control of the media, censorship, state propaganda and bureaucratic control all of which are directly relevant to this particular topic. All the poster is doing is pointing that out. It isn’t Ethiopia.
zghst 9y ago
We don’t really have to bring the US into this, do we?
- meri_dian 9y ago
  They try so hard to make everything about America... I've noticed that so many people on this site are incredibly cynical, it's sad. They're so wedded to conspiratorial thinking they lose sight of reality.
  - zghst 9y ago
    With my statement I make no assumptions on the intentions or advocacy that they reader may want to relay. I want to keep the conversation focused on the topic at hand, with relevant discussion.
  - wybiral 9y ago
    People love having something to hate and someone to blame for things not being ideal. It sure is a lot easier than acknowledging that the world is incredibly complex and nuanced.
  - opportune 9y ago
    This is not conspiratorial thinking, it's verified fact. The world is not run by completely well-intentioned people, just as it's not run by completely evil-intentioned people. Just people, which can be capable of both
  - jlarocco 9y ago
    Speaking of being cynical and conspiratorial, I think you're making more out of this than there really is. HN is hosted in the United States and that's where most of the readers are. It's natural for a person to use their own country as a comparison in discussions about governments and countries that are foreign to them. There's no conspiracy, and the same thing happens on any discussion site where a majority of users are from a specific country.
- volgo 9y ago
  The reason to bring US into discussions like this is more because it's a familiar comparison, and less of whataboutism. When you look at something objectively, it's hard to know how sinister (or lack thereof) it is. Because most folks here live in the U.S., it makes the comparison easier.
taneq 9y ago
The same thing happens in Australia too. We have some scandal in a state government and then some poor sod conveniently gets eaten by a shark and we're in for three months of nothing but "Shark cull: Yes or No?", "How you can avoid being eaten by a shark", "Huge Protests Against Proposed Shark Cull", "Building a Net To Keep Sharks Out", "Sharks are a Vital Part of Our Aquatic Ecosystem", blah blah blah. It's pretty blatant. What happened with the Mayor's kid and the drug lab? Who cares?! SHARKS!
- jabretti 9y ago
  Are you suggesting that the government causes shark attacks? Do they control the sharks, or just have agents to push the swimmers into their jaws? Seriously though, democratic governments are much less good at propaganda operations than despotic ones, not necessarily because the people involved are much more honest on an individual level, but just because democratically elected governments are never really in all that much agreement about what sort of propaganda ought to be spread. The genius of democracy is that if you keep the people in power constantly fighting with each other they don't have as much time left over to screw the rest of us. So although "whatabout the US?" is inevitably the top comment on every thread about the evils of China, I think that just sometimes we ought to actually pay attention to China qua China.
  - Cpoll 9y ago
    I think the point is that shark attacks are non-news, and the surge in interest is suspicious. You can probably replace 'shark attack' with any other 1-in-10-million occurrence/human interest story. Of course, the cynical interpretation is that there's nothing weird going on, and people just have a larger attention span for gruesome fluke accidents than for corruption.
    - jabretti 9y ago
      Shark attacks are no more non-news than at least 80% of the crap that fills media outlets, and it's not the least bit suspicious. Shark attacks are lurid and scary and human attention is notoriously poorly distributed. Yesterday, President Trump gave a speech about his trip to Asia, and 90% of the headlines were about the fact that he drank water during it.
forapurpose 9y ago
It's not comparable at all. Leaking stories to media organizations independent of the government, who may or may not report it, and who may or may not report it in the manner that the government wishes, is not the same thing as wholesale propaganda on a massive scale. As the U.S. president regularly demonstrates in his complaints (and as all his predecessors did, to a lesser degree) the U.S. government has little power over the news media and is very unhappy with what they do. I do think the government's ability to place favorable stories and narratives in News Corp. publications (Fox, Wall St Journal) might be comparable as a propaganda operation. My sense is that that's their primary purpose. But it's still different; News Corp has the choice of whether to comply.
existencebox 9y ago
I find this comment upsetting for a few reasons. 1. It's a blatant example of whataboutism[0], and a discussion of the reprecussions/implications of Chinese social manipulation can be had entirely without bringing America into the picture. 2. Even if we accept that we do the same thing, that in no way justifies it in either place, as you seem to suggest in a comment below 3. If you've read the article you'll see that distracting from the topic is a key tactic the propagandists use to derail discussion. I'm going to be generous and not assume you're in that basket, but can you see why your response might seem tone-deaf in that context? 4. The extent to which China has been experimenting with social manipulation is so beyond the pale of anything that happens in the US. [1][2][3] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System [2] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/muslims-china-police-state-state-surveillance-freedom-human-rights-religious-freedom-a7841401.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/muslims-china-police-state... [3] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/24/china_installing_mobile_spyware/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/24/china_installing_mo...

azifali 9y ago

It would be good to do a similar analysis of the Indian government.

pvelagal 9y ago
Indian Govt is totally inefficient. It is impossible as there are too many states, too many languages, too many view points and first of all, it is not even needed. Political parties (Be it state level or central) have enough money, machinery to throw dirt on each other through every kind of media. Coupled with the age old methods of vote buying, throwing freebies or use of religion/region/language/caste "cards" always work !

marmight 9y ago

The authors are overstating their case when they assume that why the 50 cent party posters are not engaging in discussion must be a result of an intentional Chinese government strategy. The moniker "50 cent party" comes from the idea that the members make 50 cents for each post they make. They aren't really making 50 cents per post, but if they are operating in a system which incentivizes them to make more posts, then they are not going to engage in discussion because that takes too much time. To get a higher post count it is easier to spam cheerleading posts that would be appropriate in any discussion context. The more simple explanation for the observed behavior is human nature rather than an intentional Chinese government strategy.

pulisse 9y ago
I think your comment misses the paper's point. You're talking about the motivations of individual posters working within an incentive system created by the Chinese government. The paper isn't concerned with such individual motivations, but instead with the motivations of the Chinese government in creating that system.
simonh 9y ago
The 50. Ent strategy has evolved though. It’s named that way because originally government porpaganda farms paid 50 cents per post, but the Chinese government isn’t a bunch of idiots. They have adapted and evolved their astroturfing strategies. There almost certainly are simple 50 cent style post farms operating, but they are also operating taste-maker and influencer programmes as well. It’s a spectrum from the original 50 cent guys at one end, right up to the presenters on state television talk shows at the other. The 50 cent moniker is used just for convenience.

zghst 9y ago

I wonder if these researchers ever visited the Chinese internet? They dissect their heirarchy and composition, yet not their effectiveness or reputation? The Chinese people see 50 mao bots from 10 miles away. The very nature of the internet makes humanity question truth and authority. So many sources to visit, so many opinions and so angles to reflect upon. Themes and patterns don’t go so quietly unnoticed on the internet. It seems that even many, many of these sources are far behind, though it is a new policy that US researchers are encouraged to dissect Chinese institutions publicly. This paper would have been groundbreaking in 2010-pre Snowden. Sadly, it is a hay in the growing stack of a US-engineered lashing at Chinese domestic policies.

smilekzs 9y ago
> The Chinese people see 5[0] mao bots from 10 miles away > The very nature of the internet makes humanity question truth and authority The short answer would be, these aren't really targeting people who can tell the difference and/or ask questions. Instead, the tech-illiterate, senior citizens (largely regardless of education level), rural "guest workers", etc.. It's the Nigerian scam game. Maximize # people affected per $.

paradite 9y ago

Not sure about others but I find myself practicing doublethink when juggling between Chinese media and Western media and have no symptoms of cognitive dissonance. To me it's just a matter of perspective. Maybe we need to take that into account when discussing the impact of propaganda. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink

gerdesj 9y ago
Wot?
- zbyte64 9y ago
  Gaslight?
musage 9y ago
ElsaGate, enabled by Google and Disney (which owns at least network which owns at least one involved channel) and consisting faked videos for toddlers for strategic destruction and some sort of weird grooming. needles? taping people up? humiliating parents? kids driving cars? adults drugging people and getting them pregnant including minors? eating loads of feces? brand products left, right and center? verified accounts? monetized videos? people begging for removal since last year? but oh yeah look what China is doing. anyone feel like data crunching? crunch this. https://gitlab.com/elsagate/blacklist/raw/master/blacklist.txt https://gitlab.com/elsagate/blacklist/raw/master/blacklist.t... and while the data is downloading -- because it's not possible that a community of hackers would look the other way when blatant child abuse (that's defined by what happens to the child, not what the perpetrator gets out of it) is going down directly under their nose or even hands, right? right? it's brain hacking, it's technology, it's mystery, it's capitalism, it's SV, what more do you want? nevermind the material responsibility, the real harm done to, the needless additional pain in the lifes of kids who 'just' get left to autoplay on youtube for long enough -- read this maybe: https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2 https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in... edit: whoever downvoted this without argument, you'll think back to this and feel bad, if you're lucky and both informed and human enough. no more needs to be said. the info is there, CRUNCH THE DATA.

r1b 9y ago

Today the white house boasted about US capabilities with respect to 0days and vulnerability disclosure. [1] Their silence on the topic of state-sponsored astroturfing is deafening. [1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2017/11/15/improving-and-making-vulnerability-equities-process-transparent-right-thing-do https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2017/11/15/improving-and-mak...

gowld 9y ago
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/politics/under-bush-a-new-age-of-prepackaged-tv-news.html http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/politics/under-bush-a-new-... Back in 2005, the White House was shipping propaganda to be broadcast by local TV news stations across USA
- r1b 9y ago
  Thank you for sharing, I was not aware of this.