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Good on Twitter and Facebook. On top of blocking thousands of websites (which includes Facebook, Google, Twitter) China's government employs thousands of gover

Good on Twitter and Facebook. On top of blocking thousands of websites (which includes Facebook, Google, Twitter) China's government employs thousands of government employees just to purge even the most mild criticism of the CCP on Weibo [1]. They also employ tens of thousands to export their propaganda overseas, using sock puppet accounts to push their worldview[2]. And their worldview is fiercely anti-democratic. The Internet cannot remain free if we allow governments to use their power to control narratives and suppress the truth. US-based Social media companies are not ideal judges, but at least they publish their methodology and allow public criticism of their platforms. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sina_Weibo#Censorship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sina_Weibo#Censorship [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

kypro 7y ago
> The Internet cannot remain free if we allow governments to use their power to control narratives and suppress the truth. US-based Social media companies are not ideal judges, but at least they publish their methodology. Would it be too cynical to suggest the only reason they're doing this is because they don't operate in mainland China? Do you think they would write a report like this if they found the US government trying to push a pro-democracy narrative into China instead? This puts them on the right side of US regulators where as exposing a US propaganda campaign, not so much. It's not about truth, or what's morally right, it's about money.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  > Do you think they would write a report like this if they found the US government trying to push a pro-democracy narrative into China instead? Yes. It might be framed differently. But besides being something that can be uncovered by a myriad of legal mechanisms (FOIA, state AG suits, sunshine laws, et cetera), it would almost certainly emerge in quarterly risk factor disclosures around political retribution.
- Canada 7y ago
  > Do you think they would write a report like this if they found the US government trying to push a pro-democracy narrative into China instead? Yes, they would. No doubt about it. > This puts them on the right side of US regulators where as exposing a US propaganda campaign, not so much. Which regulator do you think would object to such a revelation? > It's not about truth, or what's morally right, it's about money. Yeah, that's often true, but if it's true that Hong Kongers living under a system where due process is respected is also what's good for "money", then "money" and what's morally right happen to be aligned this time.
  - liuliu 7y ago
    Hong Kong has independent jurisdiction system. So yes, they are living under a system where due process is respected.
    - Canada 7y ago
      What's that worth to Hong Kongers when they can simply be renditioned to Beijing? Does it make sense to you why Americans were extremely upset when the US government did that to people in foreign countries during the Bush administration?
      - liuliu 7y ago
        First, they cannot be renditioned. That's what this protest is about. Yes. It is upset. It is also upsetting that the U.S. actually have limited due process as well (thus, can forfeit the asset without due process). There are practical reasons why, but it is still ideologically upsetting.
        0x8BADF00D 7y ago
        Due process and rule of law can never really exist in Asian countries. It simply is not a part of the shared history and political economy. It is a fundamentally Western tradition, which is why it never works in non-Western countries. My father would often tell me stories of growing up in India during Indira Gandhi and how rule of law never really existed there. It is a philosophy that is fundamentally incompatible with non-Western cultures.
- sword_smith 7y ago
  > Would it be too cynical to suggest the only reason they're doing this is because they don't operate in mainland China? Do you think they would write a report like this if they found the US government trying to push a pro-democracy narrative into China instead? Excellent point. Snowden's revelations show that US tech companies have been threatened to comply with the three-letter agencies' demands. The US govenrment already has a lot of leverage over these companies, so they don't need to use these more primitive methods.
revel 7y ago
The internet is already not free for much of the world. It's depressing to type this but China successfully created a parallel version of the internet that is anything but free. That model got exported and now you see the same approach being taken across the world. The direction we seem to be heading in is one where the world's collective internet systems are effectively Balkanized.
- incompatible 7y ago
  As the article says, "Twitter is blocked in PRC". Probably an own-goal in situations like this, since the army of Chinese-government loyalists can't be fully unleashed upon the world. The people of China generally seem pretty loyal to its government, but I'm unsure how much that is due to constant monitoring and systems like "social credit".
  - diNgUrAndI 7y ago
    From what I saw, `constant monitoring and systems like "social credit"` won't buy loyalty. Ordinary people do that more out of patriotism, an emotion against those who spread misinformation against their country. It's sort of like someone talking shit about your hometown, and you feel the urge to defend. Not a state-sponsored thing.
    - incompatible 7y ago
      Do they make no distinction between the government and their country? Perhaps their country would be even better with a different government, one that isn't constantly bringing itself into disrepute with lack of openness and bullying.
      - diNgUrAndI 7y ago
        Things won't turn to be bright overnight. Openness and no bullying is nice. But it takes time to get there. Some counterexamples are Iraq or Libya. Governments changed overnight to be closer to the way Westerners like. But are people better off? Civil wars. Ethnic group divides. Oil interests. It's easier to point out things you don't like when things aren't the way you like than offer pragmatic solutions.
monster99 7y ago
>The Internet cannot remain free Uhh have you not been paying attention for the last 20 years? We went from ownign our software and devices to not owning them as the tech illiterate masses got internet and smartphones. Google apps, app stores, steam, mmo's... those are all NOT FREE internet. They are not there for your benefit when you have to login and your software is controlled by a remote party, you are monitored and controlled. People in the west seem blind to the fact that they are basically corporate slaves, when a cursory examination of the facts is that they are amongst the most enslaved indoctrinated people in history. The US is a lawless empire and has been it's founding, if you don't think western governments aren't interested in clamping down on the internet further, just view this by former national security advisor of the United states, Zbigniew Brezinski: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7ZyJw_cHJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7ZyJw_cHJY
samstave 7y ago
You know whats going to be an interesting dev in the next ten years: Musk's Skynet! How will that be regulated. What device signals and routing can be blocked from that. Imagine a GoPro which is perm-linked up to that constellation and a cloud storage platform that it streams its blobs to. And a not youtube corrupt POS viewing platform. Get these devices that talk to the constellation and stream continuously and cant be censored or blocked. We will then realize true information freedom.... C'mon Musk. Don't fuck it up.
- sword_smith 7y ago
  I was thinking the same thing. But powerful countries (US, China, Russia, and probably a few other countries) have the capabilities to shoot down satellites. Maybe they will opt for that or at least threaten to do that if Musk allows to much freedom?
  - Jedi72 7y ago
    China will not be able to shoot down satellites just to stop video feeds escaping. Its an act of war. Also the USA will surely have capabilities to resist such attacks, and it only takes 1 stream to get through. Democracy/free-enterprise need only hold its nerve, and it will win. Not for some moral reason, but simply because the overhead of maintaining a police-state is so much greater than a transparent society.
    - sword_smith 7y ago
      I hope you are right.
khawkins 7y ago
>The Internet cannot remain free if we allow governments to use their power to control narratives and suppress the truth. I wish more people applied this same line of reasoning towards the US-based social media companies themselves. If we hold true that Twitter's influence is so powerful that world superpowers are gaming it effectively to control narratives, then why aren't people more outraged at the near constant censoring of alternative voices in the West? Why are we cheering the use of corporate power when it's wielded against an ideological opponent in the East, but when it's wielded against ideological opponents in the West we hear a chorus of "it's a private company, it can do what it wants". Ultimately, we're just rejecting communist state-power with corporatist private-power. I can agree that the latter is preferable, but I wish people would see the parallels.
- ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago
  Agreed. Would Twitter take the same stand against a regime whose policies it agreed with?
- kpU8efre7r 7y ago
  Both parties aren't perfect but compared to state media, great firewall, social credit, kidnapping, and concentration camps it's weird to point out the shortcomings of Western social media companies.
- Solvitieg 7y ago
  The hive mind refuses to engage with hard-hitting analysis like this. Hence the down votes and no responses. Outside of this scope, what is concerning me is that you can't hold a pro-china position. Look at the other comments here. > I have some friends in China posting similar anti-protest posts on WeChat social media. It's like the news they read has a completely different story than what it's being told in legitimate new sources. Holding a pro-china position apparently means you're reading fake news or part of a misinformation campaign. The news we read is CORRECT, the news you read is WRONG. We have the same problem here in the West. If you go against the church of progressivem you're a Russianbot. Twitter needs to not get involved. It's election meddling, even if they take the "pro-democratic" side.
woah 7y ago
Even here on Hacker News, a week or so ago I saw someone being chided for “breaking the HN guidelines” by calling out a sock puppet. When I looked at the comment history of the account doing the chiding, all of its comments were on China related articles, taking a pro-China view.
- dang 7y ago
  There are two site guidelines that apply to this. First, it's not ok to use HN primarily for political, ideological, or national battle. If a commenter is posting as you describe, we ask them to stop. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20727426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20727426. But by no means does it follow that a commenter behaving that way must be a sockpuppet, astroturfer, shill, spy, foreign agent, etc. That's where the second guideline comes in: the one that asks users not to insinuate these things in HN threads, but rather to email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can look for actual evidence. Accusing others without evidence is a serious breach of the rules, and a personal attack. When people do that, we ask them to stop as well. Example, from the same thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20727420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20727420. Does that mean that abuse doesn't exist, or that we don't take it seriously? No—it does and we do. But the way we take it seriously is by looking for evidence. So far, such evidence as we've found on HN nearly always indicates that the commenter is legit—they just hold a view that some other commenters find so wrong that they can't believe it's sincere. (Corporate astroturfing is a different can of worms, btw, and I'm not talking about that here.) Here's the most remarkable case we've seen of a mass influx of new accounts angrily defending "pro-China" views: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20236444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20236444. Most users who are inclined to perceive astroturfing would have declared this an obvious case of manipulation. The only reason we didn't get an inundation of such accusations is that the wave of new accounts only showed up a day or two later, after most readers had stopped looking at the thread. But even this case, when we followed up on the evidence, turned out to be something quite different. I emailed every one of those commenters who had left an email address in their profile, and many responded. It turned out that the study under discussion had gone viral in China, someone had posted a link to the HN thread to the Chinese Quora-equivalent, and the new accounts were people who had found their way to HN from there and created accounts to speak their minds. I also posted in the thread asking the new accounts to explain how they'd come to HN, and several replied with the same story. Does that prove they weren't communist agents? No, nothing would prove that. But the null hypothesis—that people hold their views sincerely—was amply supported by the evidence. This was an extreme case, but over and over, the story we see is like that. Ornate machinations add zero explanatory power, but invoking them poisons the community; therefore we ask users not to invoke them. Most people hold the views that they do because of their background. HN is a large, international community, orders of magnitude larger than your or my circle of acquaintances. What are the odds that in a group this large, quite a few people will have different backgrounds than you or I, and thus hold different views? The odds are basically 1. That means you're going to hear some "pro-China" views here, because there are users whose background connects them to China—by birthplace, family, education, work history, you name it—in ways that HN's Western audience mostly doesn't share. Because this is happening, we have to decide what kind of community HN should be. Should we ban accounts, or allow them to be persecuted, for "pro-X" views where X is outside, say, a standard deviation of what most people here take for granted? Or do we want to be a pluralistic community that is strong enough to hold space for such views, and such people, even when most of us disagree? It's unclear which way HN is going to go about this—sctb and I can't control HN, only try to persuade—but I know that I'm only interested in participating in the latter. The other way leads to a community in which it's ok to smear others (such as a nation or ethnicity) and have mob attacks on innocent individuals: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403358 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403358 for one example that turned out ok; unfortunately there have been others which didn't, and users have been run out of town. I don't believe anyone here wants those things, but the tragedy of the commons will take us there if we don't all consciously resist it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
trilila 7y ago
Soon there will be comments from those against facebook and twitter moderating such content because “we are loosing freedoms in the west”.
zawerf 7y ago
There are pretty fun examples of how people try to dodge censorship. For example the Hong Kong billionaire Li Kha Shing managed to post a two page newspaper ad which contains a hidden message: https://i.imgur.com/7IJLn3g.jpg https://i.imgur.com/7IJLn3g.jpg Translation: https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/csg9yz/hong_kong_billionaire_tycoons_call_for_end_to/exetfcp/ https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/csg9yz/hong_kong_bill...
- meowface 7y ago
  That's a super clever way of hiding a message.
- antpls 7y ago
  For people who cannot open Reddit on mobile : "if you take the last character from each part, top to bottom, left to right: 因果由國容港治己義憤民誠 - Cause and effect came from (or depends on) the country, allow Hong Kong govern itself, righteous indignation came from people being honest."
daveheq 7y ago
The US mainstream media is bought and paid for by corporations, who don't have the public good in mind, but maximizing profit at the expense of all else including reporting on corruption, oligarchy, and environmental abuse. The government should not control the media, but neither should advertisers.
- rickycook 7y ago
  true, and that’s definitely a problem, but government is a bigger issue because they have the ability to force a population: corporations can only influence (we can have a different discussion about how corporations give you “choice” but not really, but i think they’re different cases, and government is clear cut)
  - profalseidol 7y ago
    Ain't government is comprised of corporate owners? President. Then there's lobbying/bribing. Create/participate in wars. Sell weapons to the human rights respecting Saudi. And when corporations die, they take the people's money. That's beyond giving me a choice. Lols.
    - rickycook 7y ago
      i agree with you completely, but a law is far more clear cut than complex social dynamics. the outcome is similar in either way, and both are equally bad, but one is far easier to define specific actions, and specific parties that are not acting correctly.
wybiral 7y ago
Some of the accounts were so obvious that I accidentally found them just reading tweets in Hong Kong related hashtags. There were random-looking screen names with stolen images for avatars tweeting almost verbatim the same messages: https://twitter.com/davywtf/status/1160959728626929671 https://twitter.com/davywtf/status/1160959728626929671
ryacko 7y ago
US-based social media companies publish more methodology about how they remove Chinese accounts as opposed to how they remove American accounts. It becomes even more absurd considering that Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council contains no civil libertarians or anything resembling balanced interests.
mycall 7y ago
Most of those "sock puppet" accounts are not hard to detect and bucket.
kr4 7y ago
China's all-weather partner, Pakistan, has been doing similar information warfare against India regarding Kashmir after abrogation of article 370 on Aug5. "We have found that just after the annulment of Article 370, more than 1,500 bots (fake profiles) from Pakistan surfaced on social media and started trending anti-India narrative. In these tweets, they are also urging United Nations to intervene," said Tarun Vig, co-founder of Innefu Labs, a cybersecurity firm. He added on August 5 alone, more than 1,000 Twitter accounts were created from Pakistan which was discussing India and Kashmir. Bot profiles were sharing the same tweets over and over again. 0: https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/newsindia/pakistan-bots-wage-cyber-warfare/ar-AAFHyyy https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/newsindia/pakistan-bots-wage-... Some fake videos: https://www.altnews.in/pak-minister-shares-edited-clip-to-falsely-depict-atrocities-in-kashmir/ https://www.altnews.in/pak-minister-shares-edited-clip-to-fa... https://www.indiatoday.in/fact-check/story/kashmir-massacre-video-pakistan-isi-son-abdullah-gul-truth-1579581-2019-08-10 https://www.indiatoday.in/fact-check/story/kashmir-massacre-... https://www.republicworld.com/india-news/general-news/isi-backed-pakistan-cyber-army-launches-fake-news-war-against-republic-watch-them-get-exposed https://www.republicworld.com/india-news/general-news/isi-ba... Some twitter action: https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/check-our-transparency-report-says-twitter-on-pak-operated-handles/story-e53OhOI3cirdL8JYLjcqjP.html https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/check-our-transpar...

kypro 7y ago

> The Internet cannot remain free if we allow governments to use their power to control narratives and suppress the truth. US-based Social media companies are not ideal judges, but at least they publish their methodology. Would it be too cynical to suggest the only reason they're doing this is because they don't operate in mainland China? Do you think they would write a report like this if they found the US government trying to push a pro-democracy narrative into China instead? This puts them on the right side of US regulators where as exposing a US propaganda campaign, not so much. It's not about truth, or what's morally right, it's about money.

JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> Do you think they would write a report like this if they found the US government trying to push a pro-democracy narrative into China instead? Yes. It might be framed differently. But besides being something that can be uncovered by a myriad of legal mechanisms (FOIA, state AG suits, sunshine laws, et cetera), it would almost certainly emerge in quarterly risk factor disclosures around political retribution.
Canada 7y ago
> Do you think they would write a report like this if they found the US government trying to push a pro-democracy narrative into China instead? Yes, they would. No doubt about it. > This puts them on the right side of US regulators where as exposing a US propaganda campaign, not so much. Which regulator do you think would object to such a revelation? > It's not about truth, or what's morally right, it's about money. Yeah, that's often true, but if it's true that Hong Kongers living under a system where due process is respected is also what's good for "money", then "money" and what's morally right happen to be aligned this time.
- liuliu 7y ago
  Hong Kong has independent jurisdiction system. So yes, they are living under a system where due process is respected.
  - Canada 7y ago
    What's that worth to Hong Kongers when they can simply be renditioned to Beijing? Does it make sense to you why Americans were extremely upset when the US government did that to people in foreign countries during the Bush administration?
    - liuliu 7y ago
      First, they cannot be renditioned. That's what this protest is about. Yes. It is upset. It is also upsetting that the U.S. actually have limited due process as well (thus, can forfeit the asset without due process). There are practical reasons why, but it is still ideologically upsetting.
      - 0x8BADF00D 7y ago
        Due process and rule of law can never really exist in Asian countries. It simply is not a part of the shared history and political economy. It is a fundamentally Western tradition, which is why it never works in non-Western countries. My father would often tell me stories of growing up in India during Indira Gandhi and how rule of law never really existed there. It is a philosophy that is fundamentally incompatible with non-Western cultures.
sword_smith 7y ago
> Would it be too cynical to suggest the only reason they're doing this is because they don't operate in mainland China? Do you think they would write a report like this if they found the US government trying to push a pro-democracy narrative into China instead? Excellent point. Snowden's revelations show that US tech companies have been threatened to comply with the three-letter agencies' demands. The US govenrment already has a lot of leverage over these companies, so they don't need to use these more primitive methods.

revel 7y ago

The internet is already not free for much of the world. It's depressing to type this but China successfully created a parallel version of the internet that is anything but free. That model got exported and now you see the same approach being taken across the world. The direction we seem to be heading in is one where the world's collective internet systems are effectively Balkanized.

incompatible 7y ago
As the article says, "Twitter is blocked in PRC". Probably an own-goal in situations like this, since the army of Chinese-government loyalists can't be fully unleashed upon the world. The people of China generally seem pretty loyal to its government, but I'm unsure how much that is due to constant monitoring and systems like "social credit".
- diNgUrAndI 7y ago
  From what I saw, `constant monitoring and systems like "social credit"` won't buy loyalty. Ordinary people do that more out of patriotism, an emotion against those who spread misinformation against their country. It's sort of like someone talking shit about your hometown, and you feel the urge to defend. Not a state-sponsored thing.
  - incompatible 7y ago
    Do they make no distinction between the government and their country? Perhaps their country would be even better with a different government, one that isn't constantly bringing itself into disrepute with lack of openness and bullying.
    - diNgUrAndI 7y ago
      Things won't turn to be bright overnight. Openness and no bullying is nice. But it takes time to get there. Some counterexamples are Iraq or Libya. Governments changed overnight to be closer to the way Westerners like. But are people better off? Civil wars. Ethnic group divides. Oil interests. It's easier to point out things you don't like when things aren't the way you like than offer pragmatic solutions.

monster99 7y ago

>The Internet cannot remain free Uhh have you not been paying attention for the last 20 years? We went from ownign our software and devices to not owning them as the tech illiterate masses got internet and smartphones. Google apps, app stores, steam, mmo's... those are all NOT FREE internet. They are not there for your benefit when you have to login and your software is controlled by a remote party, you are monitored and controlled. People in the west seem blind to the fact that they are basically corporate slaves, when a cursory examination of the facts is that they are amongst the most enslaved indoctrinated people in history. The US is a lawless empire and has been it's founding, if you don't think western governments aren't interested in clamping down on the internet further, just view this by former national security advisor of the United states, Zbigniew Brezinski: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7ZyJw_cHJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7ZyJw_cHJY

samstave 7y ago

You know whats going to be an interesting dev in the next ten years: Musk's Skynet! How will that be regulated. What device signals and routing can be blocked from that. Imagine a GoPro which is perm-linked up to that constellation and a cloud storage platform that it streams its blobs to. And a not youtube corrupt POS viewing platform. Get these devices that talk to the constellation and stream continuously and cant be censored or blocked. We will then realize true information freedom.... C'mon Musk. Don't fuck it up.

sword_smith 7y ago
I was thinking the same thing. But powerful countries (US, China, Russia, and probably a few other countries) have the capabilities to shoot down satellites. Maybe they will opt for that or at least threaten to do that if Musk allows to much freedom?
- Jedi72 7y ago
  China will not be able to shoot down satellites just to stop video feeds escaping. Its an act of war. Also the USA will surely have capabilities to resist such attacks, and it only takes 1 stream to get through. Democracy/free-enterprise need only hold its nerve, and it will win. Not for some moral reason, but simply because the overhead of maintaining a police-state is so much greater than a transparent society.
  - sword_smith 7y ago
    I hope you are right.

khawkins 7y ago

>The Internet cannot remain free if we allow governments to use their power to control narratives and suppress the truth. I wish more people applied this same line of reasoning towards the US-based social media companies themselves. If we hold true that Twitter's influence is so powerful that world superpowers are gaming it effectively to control narratives, then why aren't people more outraged at the near constant censoring of alternative voices in the West? Why are we cheering the use of corporate power when it's wielded against an ideological opponent in the East, but when it's wielded against ideological opponents in the West we hear a chorus of "it's a private company, it can do what it wants". Ultimately, we're just rejecting communist state-power with corporatist private-power. I can agree that the latter is preferable, but I wish people would see the parallels.

ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago
Agreed. Would Twitter take the same stand against a regime whose policies it agreed with?
kpU8efre7r 7y ago
Both parties aren't perfect but compared to state media, great firewall, social credit, kidnapping, and concentration camps it's weird to point out the shortcomings of Western social media companies.
Solvitieg 7y ago
The hive mind refuses to engage with hard-hitting analysis like this. Hence the down votes and no responses. Outside of this scope, what is concerning me is that you can't hold a pro-china position. Look at the other comments here. > I have some friends in China posting similar anti-protest posts on WeChat social media. It's like the news they read has a completely different story than what it's being told in legitimate new sources. Holding a pro-china position apparently means you're reading fake news or part of a misinformation campaign. The news we read is CORRECT, the news you read is WRONG. We have the same problem here in the West. If you go against the church of progressivem you're a Russianbot. Twitter needs to not get involved. It's election meddling, even if they take the "pro-democratic" side.

woah 7y ago

Even here on Hacker News, a week or so ago I saw someone being chided for “breaking the HN guidelines” by calling out a sock puppet. When I looked at the comment history of the account doing the chiding, all of its comments were on China related articles, taking a pro-China view.

dang 7y ago
There are two site guidelines that apply to this. First, it's not ok to use HN primarily for political, ideological, or national battle. If a commenter is posting as you describe, we ask them to stop. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20727426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20727426. But by no means does it follow that a commenter behaving that way must be a sockpuppet, astroturfer, shill, spy, foreign agent, etc. That's where the second guideline comes in: the one that asks users not to insinuate these things in HN threads, but rather to email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can look for actual evidence. Accusing others without evidence is a serious breach of the rules, and a personal attack. When people do that, we ask them to stop as well. Example, from the same thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20727420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20727420. Does that mean that abuse doesn't exist, or that we don't take it seriously? No—it does and we do. But the way we take it seriously is by looking for evidence. So far, such evidence as we've found on HN nearly always indicates that the commenter is legit—they just hold a view that some other commenters find so wrong that they can't believe it's sincere. (Corporate astroturfing is a different can of worms, btw, and I'm not talking about that here.) Here's the most remarkable case we've seen of a mass influx of new accounts angrily defending "pro-China" views: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20236444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20236444. Most users who are inclined to perceive astroturfing would have declared this an obvious case of manipulation. The only reason we didn't get an inundation of such accusations is that the wave of new accounts only showed up a day or two later, after most readers had stopped looking at the thread. But even this case, when we followed up on the evidence, turned out to be something quite different. I emailed every one of those commenters who had left an email address in their profile, and many responded. It turned out that the study under discussion had gone viral in China, someone had posted a link to the HN thread to the Chinese Quora-equivalent, and the new accounts were people who had found their way to HN from there and created accounts to speak their minds. I also posted in the thread asking the new accounts to explain how they'd come to HN, and several replied with the same story. Does that prove they weren't communist agents? No, nothing would prove that. But the null hypothesis—that people hold their views sincerely—was amply supported by the evidence. This was an extreme case, but over and over, the story we see is like that. Ornate machinations add zero explanatory power, but invoking them poisons the community; therefore we ask users not to invoke them. Most people hold the views that they do because of their background. HN is a large, international community, orders of magnitude larger than your or my circle of acquaintances. What are the odds that in a group this large, quite a few people will have different backgrounds than you or I, and thus hold different views? The odds are basically 1. That means you're going to hear some "pro-China" views here, because there are users whose background connects them to China—by birthplace, family, education, work history, you name it—in ways that HN's Western audience mostly doesn't share. Because this is happening, we have to decide what kind of community HN should be. Should we ban accounts, or allow them to be persecuted, for "pro-X" views where X is outside, say, a standard deviation of what most people here take for granted? Or do we want to be a pluralistic community that is strong enough to hold space for such views, and such people, even when most of us disagree? It's unclear which way HN is going to go about this—sctb and I can't control HN, only try to persuade—but I know that I'm only interested in participating in the latter. The other way leads to a community in which it's ok to smear others (such as a nation or ethnicity) and have mob attacks on innocent individuals: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403358 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403358 for one example that turned out ok; unfortunately there have been others which didn't, and users have been run out of town. I don't believe anyone here wants those things, but the tragedy of the commons will take us there if we don't all consciously resist it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

trilila 7y ago

Soon there will be comments from those against facebook and twitter moderating such content because “we are loosing freedoms in the west”.

zawerf 7y ago

There are pretty fun examples of how people try to dodge censorship. For example the Hong Kong billionaire Li Kha Shing managed to post a two page newspaper ad which contains a hidden message: https://i.imgur.com/7IJLn3g.jpg https://i.imgur.com/7IJLn3g.jpg Translation: https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/csg9yz/hong_kong_billionaire_tycoons_call_for_end_to/exetfcp/ https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/csg9yz/hong_kong_bill...

meowface 7y ago
That's a super clever way of hiding a message.
antpls 7y ago
For people who cannot open Reddit on mobile : "if you take the last character from each part, top to bottom, left to right: 因果由國容港治己義憤民誠 - Cause and effect came from (or depends on) the country, allow Hong Kong govern itself, righteous indignation came from people being honest."

daveheq 7y ago

The US mainstream media is bought and paid for by corporations, who don't have the public good in mind, but maximizing profit at the expense of all else including reporting on corruption, oligarchy, and environmental abuse. The government should not control the media, but neither should advertisers.

rickycook 7y ago
true, and that’s definitely a problem, but government is a bigger issue because they have the ability to force a population: corporations can only influence (we can have a different discussion about how corporations give you “choice” but not really, but i think they’re different cases, and government is clear cut)
- profalseidol 7y ago
  Ain't government is comprised of corporate owners? President. Then there's lobbying/bribing. Create/participate in wars. Sell weapons to the human rights respecting Saudi. And when corporations die, they take the people's money. That's beyond giving me a choice. Lols.
  - rickycook 7y ago
    i agree with you completely, but a law is far more clear cut than complex social dynamics. the outcome is similar in either way, and both are equally bad, but one is far easier to define specific actions, and specific parties that are not acting correctly.

wybiral 7y ago

Some of the accounts were so obvious that I accidentally found them just reading tweets in Hong Kong related hashtags. There were random-looking screen names with stolen images for avatars tweeting almost verbatim the same messages: https://twitter.com/davywtf/status/1160959728626929671 https://twitter.com/davywtf/status/1160959728626929671

ryacko 7y ago

US-based social media companies publish more methodology about how they remove Chinese accounts as opposed to how they remove American accounts. It becomes even more absurd considering that Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council contains no civil libertarians or anything resembling balanced interests.

mycall 7y ago

Most of those "sock puppet" accounts are not hard to detect and bucket.

kr4 7y ago

China's all-weather partner, Pakistan, has been doing similar information warfare against India regarding Kashmir after abrogation of article 370 on Aug5. "We have found that just after the annulment of Article 370, more than 1,500 bots (fake profiles) from Pakistan surfaced on social media and started trending anti-India narrative. In these tweets, they are also urging United Nations to intervene," said Tarun Vig, co-founder of Innefu Labs, a cybersecurity firm. He added on August 5 alone, more than 1,000 Twitter accounts were created from Pakistan which was discussing India and Kashmir. Bot profiles were sharing the same tweets over and over again. 0: https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/newsindia/pakistan-bots-wage-cyber-warfare/ar-AAFHyyy https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/newsindia/pakistan-bots-wage-... Some fake videos: https://www.altnews.in/pak-minister-shares-edited-clip-to-falsely-depict-atrocities-in-kashmir/ https://www.altnews.in/pak-minister-shares-edited-clip-to-fa... https://www.indiatoday.in/fact-check/story/kashmir-massacre-video-pakistan-isi-son-abdullah-gul-truth-1579581-2019-08-10 https://www.indiatoday.in/fact-check/story/kashmir-massacre-... https://www.republicworld.com/india-news/general-news/isi-backed-pakistan-cyber-army-launches-fake-news-war-against-republic-watch-them-get-exposed https://www.republicworld.com/india-news/general-news/isi-ba... Some twitter action: https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/check-our-transparency-report-says-twitter-on-pak-operated-handles/story-e53OhOI3cirdL8JYLjcqjP.html https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/check-our-transpar...