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China sows disinformation on Hong Kong using porn accounts on Twitter

224 points by hardmaru 7y ago

FreeHugs 7y ago
I don't understand it. So there are bots that have been posting "porn" for a bunch of years. And now they post political messages. How does that influence anybody? Who subscribes to porn bots? I would have thought only other porn bots follow porn bots? Can somebody link to an example of such a bot?
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  The concept is that an account that is years old and has thousands of followers seems more plausible than one that was just created
  - GrumpyNl 7y ago
    99% change , those followers are bots to.
  - gruez 7y ago
    Great idea, poor execution. It's going to be suspicious that these accounts suddenly go from NSFW posts to pro-china posts.
    - shawnz 7y ago
      If you look at the tweet history and not just the numbers. What percentage of people that see the tweets will do that?
- simias 7y ago
  >Who subscribes to porn bots? I would have thought only other porn bots follow porn bots? Clearly if they exist they must have some marginal use. It's like saying "who falls for nigerian prince scams?" or "who is influenced by ads?". Clearly some people are, otherwise they wouldn't be quite as popular. I'm sure some real people follow porn bots in order to... see porn. As for the influence I think in isolation it's probably negligible, but if people get flooded by propaganda on social networks it may be quite efficient. "Everybody says it, it can't be completely wrong". The echo-chamber nature of many social networks probably plays into that too. Many people would probably be more likely to follow an obvious bot spamming propaganda that aligns with their beliefs than a real person holding a different opinion. For instance an obviously biased propaganda outlet like Prager U has 2 million followers on Youtube, I doubt all of those are bots.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    PragerU isn't obvious to most people that's what's insidious about it. It's a fake "university" for people who are too ignorant or low intelligent to know what a real one looks like. Compare PragerU to "A People's History of the United States" book. Both are highly politically biased, both oppose "mainstream" education, but one is intellectually much better than the other. Discerning which requires higher level thinking many people lack.
    - simias 7y ago
      I think you're wrong to assume that it only works with people who are "too ignorant or low intelligent". Confirmation bias is not limited to dumb people. It's always more pleasant and comforting to listen to people agreeing with you (even if what they're saying isn't super insightful) rather than people arguing against your values (even if what they're saying is very interesting). Searching for contradictory viewpoints and actually managing to listen to the argument with an open mind takes effort. That's the big problem with most social media currently, they amplify this bias to the extreme. You can hold a fringe belief like "earth is flat" and still manage to find thousand of people agreeing with you, spending hours every day consuming flat earth content and avoiding any dissenting voice.
  - b_tterc_p 7y ago
    Well they’re clearly being marketed as having actual use. Whether it’s true... could go either way
- lijogdfljk 7y ago
  Google, perhaps? I've been obsessing about (creating) a federated information store recently, and this was one of my points to address. In my view bad actors don't have to just misinform, but make it more difficult to locate. Doing that seems shockingly easy, as much of our ability to locate data online is limited to brittle keywords. Not to deviate, but in case anyone is curious: One of my attempts at mitigating this problem is via content hashes. Building a UX where the content hashes are often the point of reference and indexed by search engines might allow us to locate data and related data based on content hashes, rather than easily flooded semantic keys. Metadata pertaining to the hashes would also have to be provided for them to be useful, eg "related:04136e24". Lots of to discuss, but I'm trying to limit my off-topic, despite it being related to [dis|mis]information. edit: I don't understand the downvote - can someone explain? Not sure exactly if something I said is factually incorrect? To be clear I wasn't saying Google was the thing running the bots, but that Google / search engines might be the point.
- Numberwang 7y ago
  China uses them to paint a picture of westerners as being decadent and animal like.
- wastedhours 7y ago
  Not sure if it's 100% the case here, but a lot of bots respond to popular threads from legitimate people, either countering or supporting their position. Less about the credibility of the account, and more about creating a lot of buzz or, well, counter-buzz around another thread.
- opencl 7y ago
  Nobody has to subscribe to them, they just search for relevant terms and reply to anyone talking about the protests.
- rgoulter 7y ago
  "So there are bots that have been posting "porn" for a bunch of years. And now they post political messages." The article says accounts like this can be purchased cheaply from resellers. "How does that influence anybody?" I think the most effective use is in replies to other tweets. All the replies to a tweet are shown if you look at a tweet. You might look at the profile of some user who makes a tweet, but perhaps won't take such a deep look at their profile to see the earlier porn tweets. High number of tweets, high number of followers, long time on the site would indicate 'actual person' rather than bot, or so you'd think without scrolling down far enough to see it filled with spam posts.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  Perhaps it is SEO algorithmic gaming to try to get it trending and it wasn't meant to influence in itself but make others more visible?
- usrusr 7y ago
  They are a stepping stone, not intended to directly influence anyone: hashtags appearing en masse on "influential" (due to bulk porn subscribers) but utterly unrelated accounts will add weight to on-topic posts using the same tags elsewhere. Not much different from the link farms of the early days of SEO which were never meant for human eyes.
lallysingh 7y ago
Sounds like a classic lowest-bidder government contractor situation. "Sure, we have 100,000 accounts, and we'll charge 1.25 RMB per tweet per account." "Fantastic! You get the contract!" "Oh shit we need to find 100,000 accounts fast and cheap."
- taneq 7y ago
  "I met this girl on the internet, she said she'd do anything for 1.25 RMB. Anything? Really?! ...So I got her to post tweets supporting the Chinese government."
  - outofmymind 7y ago
    Two girls, one umbrella.
  - tossAfterUsing 7y ago
    It's china... the rates are actually less than half that (5 Jiao, where 10Jiao = 1Yuan) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party here's some images for folks who like pictures: http://www.chinatoday.com/fin/mon/ http://www.chinatoday.com/fin/mon/
totaldude87 7y ago
With all that happening in Hong Kong, i wonder why UK and US are not at all involved?
- luckylion 7y ago
  Who says they aren't?
- gambiting 7y ago
  UK government is in the middle of collapsing in on itself, so anything non-brexit related has been pushed far on the backburner. I think even if you had an emergency legislation to feed the orphans or something it would still be ignored for the next few weeks.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
    Weeks? Everything has been on hold for 3 years at this point.
- jswizzy 7y ago
  The UK downsized their Navy so much that they cannot even keep their oil tankers safe from Iran.
  - mytailorisrich 7y ago
    Whatever the size of the Royal Navy, this isn't 1839 anymore and they wouldn't be able to send the gunboats, anyway... China is simply a much bigger power than the UK these days (in fairness, as it should be).
  - jhanschoo 7y ago
    In all fairness, the UK no longer has the economy of a maritime empire to fund a navy that projects power.
- RavlaAlvar 7y ago
  Why should they? Chinese money is just too juicy to give up... until they realize what kind of influence CCP have on their country, it will be too late by then anyway.
s_Hogg 7y ago
I've seen a few of these, they appear in the replies to threads created by BBC journos saying things like (in translation): "support the central government" These accounts were pretty perplexing until this article spelled out what should have been obvious to me.
- alfromspace 7y ago
  Who's being convinced by statements like that?
  - delecti 7y ago
    It's not really an argument, but it could make people think they're more of an outlier in doubting the government. Once you doubt your convictions you might start to reconsider the arguments you've already been exposed to.
    - bouncycastle 7y ago
      Indeed. This is known as "Gaslighting". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting
  - sandworm101 7y ago
    >> Who's being convinced by statements like that? CNN/MSNBC/Fox news. They are all looking for easy stories with numbers they can quote. Twitter provides that justification. I hear their talking heads say things like "X has been tweeted 10,000 times" as if that means anything. They rely on twitter because they don't do real reporting anymore. I'd bet good money they don't have anyone on staff fluent in the relevant languages. Twitter+Google translate has replaced all the actual reporters.
  - PavlovsCat 7y ago
    Such statements are not in isolation though. Violence and murder come first, then come fear and obedience, and then it's up to the obedient to find rationalizations for whatever words they get fed, or keep their mind off what doesn't make sense. A single such statement doesn't put you in line, but if you already are in line, then it's just one of the thousands of little bricks that keep you in line, and your brain on autopilot. Why realize you've been fooled and exploited by people who don't really care about you, have excused their crimes, and then feel shitty because you don't dare to oppose them -- when you can just project all that on those who do oppose them? Then not seeing a silly and cheap slogan as silly and cheap becomes just another test of obedience, to excel at and be proud of. The Naked Emperor isn't just a story, it happens all the time. Identification with aggressors and projection of their bad qualities on their victims and those who oppose them is very common, or as Arno Gruen wrote, "the ubiquity of this phenomenon determines the course of human history". https://www.reddit.com/r/FreeHongKongNow/comments/cya5z9/bastard_police_explain_why_they_did_terrorism/ https://www.reddit.com/r/FreeHongKongNow/comments/cya5z9/bas... Who with a pulse would buy that? Those who are afraid of the responsibilities that come with not buying it. The continued violence is the lifeblood, not the propaganda; minus the movement, it all seems very banal and ridiculous, like Eichmann on trial. Likewise, who would be so silly to think a downvote is an argument? Yet it's religiously done, and I wouldn't be suprised if to some people something being greyed out signals that it is not an okay opinion to have. Done consistently, it helps. It still needs to violence and the lies, the destruction of facts, but it's a useful addition to them.
dirtyid 7y ago
Full report: https://www.aspi.org.au/report/tweeting-through-great-firewall https://www.aspi.org.au/report/tweeting-through-great-firewa... >Researchers from the International Cyber Policy Centre (ICPC) at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute have conducted a preliminary analysis of the dataset. Our research indicates that the information operation targeted at the protests appears to have been a relatively small and hastily assembled operation rather than a sophisticated information campaign planned well in advance. >However, our research has also found that the accounts included in the information operation identified by Twitter were active in earlier information operations targeting political opponents of the Chinese government, including an exiled billionaire, a human rights lawyer, a bookseller and protestors in mainland China. The earliest of these operations date back to April 2017. >This is significant because—if the attribution to state-backed actors made by Twitter is correct—it indicates that actors linked to the Chinese government may have been running covert information operations on Western social media platforms for at least two years. >Research limitations: ICPC does not have access to the relevant data to independently verify that these accounts are linked to the Chinese government; this research proceeds on the assumption that Twitter’s attribution is correct. It is also important to note that Twitter has not released the methodology by which this dataset was selected, and the dataset may not represent a complete picture of Chinese state-linked information operations on Twitter. Chinese foreign propaganda has been typically bad, but it's a little wild it's still this bad especially after two years. Almost makes attribution harder to believe.
- b_tterc_p 7y ago
  This jumped out at me too. It’s pretty garbage, but it may be that garbage works
  - dirtyid 7y ago
    The data set relevant to HK comprised of 112 accounts and 1600 tweets, only significantly active during mid June to mid July before activity stopped. https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/ad-aspi/2019-09/chiTweet_HK_tweets_per_day.png https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/ad-aspi/2019-09/chiT...? Very anemic effort, but I think Twitter also proactively suspended 200,000 accounts as well. The operation probably pivoted following the crackdown. Still it's a little difficult reconciling how low effort this is with the Chinese influence everywhere narrative. >The ICPC’s preliminary research indicates that the information operation targeting the Hong Kong protests, as reflected in this dataset, was relatively small hastily constructed, and relatively unsophisticated. This suggests that the operation, which Twitter has identified as linked to state-backed actors, is likely to have been a rapid response to the unanticipated size and power of the Hong Kong protests rather than a campaign planned well in advance. The unsophisticated nature of the campaign suggests a crude understanding of information operations and rudimentary tradecraft that is a long way from the skill level demonstrated by other state actors. This may be because the campaigns were outsourced to a contractor, or may reflect a lack of familiarity on the part of Chinese state-backed actors when it comes to information operations on open social media platforms such as Twitter, as opposed to the highly proficient levels of control demonstrated by the Chinese government over heavily censored platforms such as WeChat or Weibo. I'm really curious how Twitter attributed the campaign was state backed, something Facebook and Google did not claim. Were these accounts transparently VPNing from the mainland or was there something more sophisticated happening.
sidthekid 7y ago
I've seen something similar in some extremist bot accounts, where the tweet picture and text has a titillating and sexual tone (like catfishing) but includes an unrelated political hashtag at the end. These bots try to get certain hashtags trending without the users who fav the tweets realizing that.
vectorEQ 7y ago
more alarming news is that people still let tweets form their opinion on public matters.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  I must disagree slightly. It is a sensible let tweets influence opinion in the sense of "what do many think about it?". Also to some minute degree it shapes just from "normalization" as it turns "unheard of idea" to "commonly proposed idea". Said ideas could still be horrible and foolish but they get more attention but it isn't viewed as bizzare, horrible, and foolish anymore. Of course people should also apply enough critical thinking to realize when the norm is utterly messed up, the masses are being a bunch of idiots or it starts to look very astroturfy.
blondie9x 7y ago
Come on China. Let Hong Kong be free. Let them vote and let them choose their government. 讓他們選他們自己的政府。
karl_schlagenfu 7y ago
The west should have just let Japan take over China in WW2. Maybe then they'd have moved in to the 21st century properly like Japan did.
- NotSammyHagar 7y ago
  During the WW2 era, Japan had horrible atrocities against China and other countries, they were no modernizing power. One example is the Nanking or Nanjing Massacre where 50-300k people were murdered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre. That's a pretty inflammatory suggestion.
- nobody0 7y ago
  You should definitely have some history and humanity lessons. Japan was not simply taking over China, it was doing live human expriements, massive raping & killing to the civilians. By the way, your comment shows exactly something you are probably going against (having seen some indirected reports contain ideology indication, then started to hate the target as a whole).
- dang 7y ago
  This sort of political and national flamebait will get you banned here. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended.
duguxu 7y ago
Just some personal observations, maybe relevant to recent misinformation topics, or maybe not. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. are all blocked in mainland China. Many people, especially those young and well-educated, use VPN to access them, have an account and follow world news and foreign celebrities sometimes. There are popular and feature-rich counterparts in mainland, and most people prefer to have their daily sharing and discussion (including domestic politics) there instead of on social media based in US. Therefore most of the time, their accounts on Facebook or Twitter are mainly for reading rather than sharing and posting. However, they might comment (register a new account if needed) on topics conveying a message related to China they strongly disagree (you could argue they are brainwashed), in a short period and coordinated way (they read repost from the same domestic website), through a few common IP addresses (the same VPN), with bad-written English (seldom practice writing before). But they are not bots and it's inappropriate to label these as the typical state-run misinformation campaign. If you speak Chinese, you could find many discussions where ordinary people complain their accounts get blocked because of pro-China comments. e.g. https://weibo.com/1401527553/I32ryx2cu https://weibo.com/1401527553/I32ryx2cu Of course, these observations aren't necessarily contradictory with recent reports blaming China propaganda. I just want to show how some false positivity could happen, since there's some difference of the behaviour of China's users. Maybe a better algorithm is needed to distinguish them from government-backed activities.
- koonsolo 7y ago
  About the "brainwashing", how do most Chinese people look at their government? What about the people of the autonomous regions? From what I know about the soviet satellite states, most people hated the soviets, but none would be stupid enough to say it in public. I wonder how much is the same in China.
  - duguxu 7y ago
    In the comments of the link in my original posts, besides condemning western hypocrisy, there are also a lot of people criticizing the firewall and information control. People express different opinions. I think it's hard to describe how they look in a few words.
linyu0219 7y ago
me one of them
dredmorbius 7y ago
The irony here seems to be that the Chinese government seems to have discovered (or long known and recently harnessed) the power of celebrity culture for advertising. George Monbiot on that theme (outside China) recently: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/20/celebrity-corporate-machine-fame-big-business-donald-trump-kim-kardashian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/20/celebr... As for the lack of sophistication: we tend to presume evil super-geniuses. What in fact makes for audacious acts (evil or otherwise) is disinhibition. The ability to act with immunity or impunity, or acting without regard or knowledge for possible consequences, is what tends to distinguish normal from both evil and heroic acts. When doing evil, the consequence is harm done to others, heroism and bravery are disregard to help others. Ignorance, ideology, and legal shields are all forms of providing that immunity or impunity.

224 points by hardmaru 7y ago

I don't understand it. So there are bots that have been posting "porn" for a bunch of years. And now they post political messages. How does that influence anybody? Who subscribes to porn bots? I would have thought only other porn bots follow porn bots? Can somebody link to an example of such a bot?

goatinaboat 7y ago
The concept is that an account that is years old and has thousands of followers seems more plausible than one that was just created
- GrumpyNl 7y ago
  99% change , those followers are bots to.
- gruez 7y ago
  Great idea, poor execution. It's going to be suspicious that these accounts suddenly go from NSFW posts to pro-china posts.
  - shawnz 7y ago
    If you look at the tweet history and not just the numbers. What percentage of people that see the tweets will do that?
simias 7y ago
>Who subscribes to porn bots? I would have thought only other porn bots follow porn bots? Clearly if they exist they must have some marginal use. It's like saying "who falls for nigerian prince scams?" or "who is influenced by ads?". Clearly some people are, otherwise they wouldn't be quite as popular. I'm sure some real people follow porn bots in order to... see porn. As for the influence I think in isolation it's probably negligible, but if people get flooded by propaganda on social networks it may be quite efficient. "Everybody says it, it can't be completely wrong". The echo-chamber nature of many social networks probably plays into that too. Many people would probably be more likely to follow an obvious bot spamming propaganda that aligns with their beliefs than a real person holding a different opinion. For instance an obviously biased propaganda outlet like Prager U has 2 million followers on Youtube, I doubt all of those are bots.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  PragerU isn't obvious to most people that's what's insidious about it. It's a fake "university" for people who are too ignorant or low intelligent to know what a real one looks like. Compare PragerU to "A People's History of the United States" book. Both are highly politically biased, both oppose "mainstream" education, but one is intellectually much better than the other. Discerning which requires higher level thinking many people lack.
  - simias 7y ago
    I think you're wrong to assume that it only works with people who are "too ignorant or low intelligent". Confirmation bias is not limited to dumb people. It's always more pleasant and comforting to listen to people agreeing with you (even if what they're saying isn't super insightful) rather than people arguing against your values (even if what they're saying is very interesting). Searching for contradictory viewpoints and actually managing to listen to the argument with an open mind takes effort. That's the big problem with most social media currently, they amplify this bias to the extreme. You can hold a fringe belief like "earth is flat" and still manage to find thousand of people agreeing with you, spending hours every day consuming flat earth content and avoiding any dissenting voice.
- b_tterc_p 7y ago
  Well they’re clearly being marketed as having actual use. Whether it’s true... could go either way
lijogdfljk 7y ago
Google, perhaps? I've been obsessing about (creating) a federated information store recently, and this was one of my points to address. In my view bad actors don't have to just misinform, but make it more difficult to locate. Doing that seems shockingly easy, as much of our ability to locate data online is limited to brittle keywords. Not to deviate, but in case anyone is curious: One of my attempts at mitigating this problem is via content hashes. Building a UX where the content hashes are often the point of reference and indexed by search engines might allow us to locate data and related data based on content hashes, rather than easily flooded semantic keys. Metadata pertaining to the hashes would also have to be provided for them to be useful, eg "related:04136e24". Lots of to discuss, but I'm trying to limit my off-topic, despite it being related to [dis|mis]information. edit: I don't understand the downvote - can someone explain? Not sure exactly if something I said is factually incorrect? To be clear I wasn't saying Google was the thing running the bots, but that Google / search engines might be the point.
Numberwang 7y ago
China uses them to paint a picture of westerners as being decadent and animal like.
wastedhours 7y ago
Not sure if it's 100% the case here, but a lot of bots respond to popular threads from legitimate people, either countering or supporting their position. Less about the credibility of the account, and more about creating a lot of buzz or, well, counter-buzz around another thread.
opencl 7y ago
Nobody has to subscribe to them, they just search for relevant terms and reply to anyone talking about the protests.
rgoulter 7y ago
"So there are bots that have been posting "porn" for a bunch of years. And now they post political messages." The article says accounts like this can be purchased cheaply from resellers. "How does that influence anybody?" I think the most effective use is in replies to other tweets. All the replies to a tweet are shown if you look at a tweet. You might look at the profile of some user who makes a tweet, but perhaps won't take such a deep look at their profile to see the earlier porn tweets. High number of tweets, high number of followers, long time on the site would indicate 'actual person' rather than bot, or so you'd think without scrolling down far enough to see it filled with spam posts.
Nasrudith 7y ago
Perhaps it is SEO algorithmic gaming to try to get it trending and it wasn't meant to influence in itself but make others more visible?
usrusr 7y ago
They are a stepping stone, not intended to directly influence anyone: hashtags appearing en masse on "influential" (due to bulk porn subscribers) but utterly unrelated accounts will add weight to on-topic posts using the same tags elsewhere. Not much different from the link farms of the early days of SEO which were never meant for human eyes.

lallysingh 7y ago

Sounds like a classic lowest-bidder government contractor situation. "Sure, we have 100,000 accounts, and we'll charge 1.25 RMB per tweet per account." "Fantastic! You get the contract!" "Oh shit we need to find 100,000 accounts fast and cheap."

taneq 7y ago
"I met this girl on the internet, she said she'd do anything for 1.25 RMB. Anything? Really?! ...So I got her to post tweets supporting the Chinese government."
- outofmymind 7y ago
  Two girls, one umbrella.
- tossAfterUsing 7y ago
  It's china... the rates are actually less than half that (5 Jiao, where 10Jiao = 1Yuan) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party here's some images for folks who like pictures: http://www.chinatoday.com/fin/mon/ http://www.chinatoday.com/fin/mon/

totaldude87 7y ago

With all that happening in Hong Kong, i wonder why UK and US are not at all involved?

luckylion 7y ago
Who says they aren't?
gambiting 7y ago
UK government is in the middle of collapsing in on itself, so anything non-brexit related has been pushed far on the backburner. I think even if you had an emergency legislation to feed the orphans or something it would still be ignored for the next few weeks.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
  Weeks? Everything has been on hold for 3 years at this point.
jswizzy 7y ago
The UK downsized their Navy so much that they cannot even keep their oil tankers safe from Iran.
- mytailorisrich 7y ago
  Whatever the size of the Royal Navy, this isn't 1839 anymore and they wouldn't be able to send the gunboats, anyway... China is simply a much bigger power than the UK these days (in fairness, as it should be).
- jhanschoo 7y ago
  In all fairness, the UK no longer has the economy of a maritime empire to fund a navy that projects power.
RavlaAlvar 7y ago
Why should they? Chinese money is just too juicy to give up... until they realize what kind of influence CCP have on their country, it will be too late by then anyway.

s_Hogg 7y ago

I've seen a few of these, they appear in the replies to threads created by BBC journos saying things like (in translation): "support the central government" These accounts were pretty perplexing until this article spelled out what should have been obvious to me.

alfromspace 7y ago
Who's being convinced by statements like that?
- delecti 7y ago
  It's not really an argument, but it could make people think they're more of an outlier in doubting the government. Once you doubt your convictions you might start to reconsider the arguments you've already been exposed to.
  - bouncycastle 7y ago
    Indeed. This is known as "Gaslighting". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting
- sandworm101 7y ago
  >> Who's being convinced by statements like that? CNN/MSNBC/Fox news. They are all looking for easy stories with numbers they can quote. Twitter provides that justification. I hear their talking heads say things like "X has been tweeted 10,000 times" as if that means anything. They rely on twitter because they don't do real reporting anymore. I'd bet good money they don't have anyone on staff fluent in the relevant languages. Twitter+Google translate has replaced all the actual reporters.
- PavlovsCat 7y ago
  Such statements are not in isolation though. Violence and murder come first, then come fear and obedience, and then it's up to the obedient to find rationalizations for whatever words they get fed, or keep their mind off what doesn't make sense. A single such statement doesn't put you in line, but if you already are in line, then it's just one of the thousands of little bricks that keep you in line, and your brain on autopilot. Why realize you've been fooled and exploited by people who don't really care about you, have excused their crimes, and then feel shitty because you don't dare to oppose them -- when you can just project all that on those who do oppose them? Then not seeing a silly and cheap slogan as silly and cheap becomes just another test of obedience, to excel at and be proud of. The Naked Emperor isn't just a story, it happens all the time. Identification with aggressors and projection of their bad qualities on their victims and those who oppose them is very common, or as Arno Gruen wrote, "the ubiquity of this phenomenon determines the course of human history". https://www.reddit.com/r/FreeHongKongNow/comments/cya5z9/bastard_police_explain_why_they_did_terrorism/ https://www.reddit.com/r/FreeHongKongNow/comments/cya5z9/bas... Who with a pulse would buy that? Those who are afraid of the responsibilities that come with not buying it. The continued violence is the lifeblood, not the propaganda; minus the movement, it all seems very banal and ridiculous, like Eichmann on trial. Likewise, who would be so silly to think a downvote is an argument? Yet it's religiously done, and I wouldn't be suprised if to some people something being greyed out signals that it is not an okay opinion to have. Done consistently, it helps. It still needs to violence and the lies, the destruction of facts, but it's a useful addition to them.

dirtyid 7y ago

Full report: https://www.aspi.org.au/report/tweeting-through-great-firewall https://www.aspi.org.au/report/tweeting-through-great-firewa... >Researchers from the International Cyber Policy Centre (ICPC) at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute have conducted a preliminary analysis of the dataset. Our research indicates that the information operation targeted at the protests appears to have been a relatively small and hastily assembled operation rather than a sophisticated information campaign planned well in advance. >However, our research has also found that the accounts included in the information operation identified by Twitter were active in earlier information operations targeting political opponents of the Chinese government, including an exiled billionaire, a human rights lawyer, a bookseller and protestors in mainland China. The earliest of these operations date back to April 2017. >This is significant because—if the attribution to state-backed actors made by Twitter is correct—it indicates that actors linked to the Chinese government may have been running covert information operations on Western social media platforms for at least two years. >Research limitations: ICPC does not have access to the relevant data to independently verify that these accounts are linked to the Chinese government; this research proceeds on the assumption that Twitter’s attribution is correct. It is also important to note that Twitter has not released the methodology by which this dataset was selected, and the dataset may not represent a complete picture of Chinese state-linked information operations on Twitter. Chinese foreign propaganda has been typically bad, but it's a little wild it's still this bad especially after two years. Almost makes attribution harder to believe.

b_tterc_p 7y ago
This jumped out at me too. It’s pretty garbage, but it may be that garbage works
- dirtyid 7y ago
  The data set relevant to HK comprised of 112 accounts and 1600 tweets, only significantly active during mid June to mid July before activity stopped. https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/ad-aspi/2019-09/chiTweet_HK_tweets_per_day.png https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/ad-aspi/2019-09/chiT...? Very anemic effort, but I think Twitter also proactively suspended 200,000 accounts as well. The operation probably pivoted following the crackdown. Still it's a little difficult reconciling how low effort this is with the Chinese influence everywhere narrative. >The ICPC’s preliminary research indicates that the information operation targeting the Hong Kong protests, as reflected in this dataset, was relatively small hastily constructed, and relatively unsophisticated. This suggests that the operation, which Twitter has identified as linked to state-backed actors, is likely to have been a rapid response to the unanticipated size and power of the Hong Kong protests rather than a campaign planned well in advance. The unsophisticated nature of the campaign suggests a crude understanding of information operations and rudimentary tradecraft that is a long way from the skill level demonstrated by other state actors. This may be because the campaigns were outsourced to a contractor, or may reflect a lack of familiarity on the part of Chinese state-backed actors when it comes to information operations on open social media platforms such as Twitter, as opposed to the highly proficient levels of control demonstrated by the Chinese government over heavily censored platforms such as WeChat or Weibo. I'm really curious how Twitter attributed the campaign was state backed, something Facebook and Google did not claim. Were these accounts transparently VPNing from the mainland or was there something more sophisticated happening.

sidthekid 7y ago

I've seen something similar in some extremist bot accounts, where the tweet picture and text has a titillating and sexual tone (like catfishing) but includes an unrelated political hashtag at the end. These bots try to get certain hashtags trending without the users who fav the tweets realizing that.

vectorEQ 7y ago

more alarming news is that people still let tweets form their opinion on public matters.

Nasrudith 7y ago
I must disagree slightly. It is a sensible let tweets influence opinion in the sense of "what do many think about it?". Also to some minute degree it shapes just from "normalization" as it turns "unheard of idea" to "commonly proposed idea". Said ideas could still be horrible and foolish but they get more attention but it isn't viewed as bizzare, horrible, and foolish anymore. Of course people should also apply enough critical thinking to realize when the norm is utterly messed up, the masses are being a bunch of idiots or it starts to look very astroturfy.

blondie9x 7y ago

Come on China. Let Hong Kong be free. Let them vote and let them choose their government. 讓他們選他們自己的政府。

karl_schlagenfu 7y ago

The west should have just let Japan take over China in WW2. Maybe then they'd have moved in to the 21st century properly like Japan did.

NotSammyHagar 7y ago
During the WW2 era, Japan had horrible atrocities against China and other countries, they were no modernizing power. One example is the Nanking or Nanjing Massacre where 50-300k people were murdered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre. That's a pretty inflammatory suggestion.
nobody0 7y ago
You should definitely have some history and humanity lessons. Japan was not simply taking over China, it was doing live human expriements, massive raping & killing to the civilians. By the way, your comment shows exactly something you are probably going against (having seen some indirected reports contain ideology indication, then started to hate the target as a whole).
dang 7y ago
This sort of political and national flamebait will get you banned here. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended.

duguxu 7y ago

Just some personal observations, maybe relevant to recent misinformation topics, or maybe not. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. are all blocked in mainland China. Many people, especially those young and well-educated, use VPN to access them, have an account and follow world news and foreign celebrities sometimes. There are popular and feature-rich counterparts in mainland, and most people prefer to have their daily sharing and discussion (including domestic politics) there instead of on social media based in US. Therefore most of the time, their accounts on Facebook or Twitter are mainly for reading rather than sharing and posting. However, they might comment (register a new account if needed) on topics conveying a message related to China they strongly disagree (you could argue they are brainwashed), in a short period and coordinated way (they read repost from the same domestic website), through a few common IP addresses (the same VPN), with bad-written English (seldom practice writing before). But they are not bots and it's inappropriate to label these as the typical state-run misinformation campaign. If you speak Chinese, you could find many discussions where ordinary people complain their accounts get blocked because of pro-China comments. e.g. https://weibo.com/1401527553/I32ryx2cu https://weibo.com/1401527553/I32ryx2cu Of course, these observations aren't necessarily contradictory with recent reports blaming China propaganda. I just want to show how some false positivity could happen, since there's some difference of the behaviour of China's users. Maybe a better algorithm is needed to distinguish them from government-backed activities.

koonsolo 7y ago
About the "brainwashing", how do most Chinese people look at their government? What about the people of the autonomous regions? From what I know about the soviet satellite states, most people hated the soviets, but none would be stupid enough to say it in public. I wonder how much is the same in China.
- duguxu 7y ago
  In the comments of the link in my original posts, besides condemning western hypocrisy, there are also a lot of people criticizing the firewall and information control. People express different opinions. I think it's hard to describe how they look in a few words.

linyu0219 7y ago

me one of them

dredmorbius 7y ago

The irony here seems to be that the Chinese government seems to have discovered (or long known and recently harnessed) the power of celebrity culture for advertising. George Monbiot on that theme (outside China) recently: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/20/celebrity-corporate-machine-fame-big-business-donald-trump-kim-kardashian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/20/celebr... As for the lack of sophistication: we tend to presume evil super-geniuses. What in fact makes for audacious acts (evil or otherwise) is disinhibition. The ability to act with immunity or impunity, or acting without regard or knowledge for possible consequences, is what tends to distinguish normal from both evil and heroic acts. When doing evil, the consequence is harm done to others, heroism and bravery are disregard to help others. Ignorance, ideology, and legal shields are all forms of providing that immunity or impunity.