But the Chinese party is effective. It may be abhorrent to the societal values of most of the people reading this comment, but its great to MANY people in Chin

But the Chinese party is effective. It may be abhorrent to the societal values of most of the people reading this comment, but its great to MANY people in China. But even that, is a red herring. Strongly controlled and moderated communication networks are currently less brittle than open societal systems. Even on a micro scale, on forums, you can see the ideas the Chinese apply being put to use out of sheer necessity. When you Add in state level actors, with the ability to crunch the numbers, then its entirely possible to create the impression of a consensus in human minds with the use of sock puppets/pseudo-human accounts. The holy grail of such research is discovering intent of speakers or groups of speakers. This will be used to stop hate speech as much as it will to kill dissidents. This is a right mess and any tool created to clean it up (other than human effort), is liable to create more problems.