12 ms·
How China Unleashed Twitter Trolls to Discredit Hong Kong’s Protesters
- wait-a-minute 7y agoI guess this explains where all the communism apologists on Twitter/Reddit/HN came from.
- yostrovs 7y agoWe manufacture enough on our own thanks to the implicitly Marxist nature of our higher education.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Synaesthesia 7y agoIt was the ~~Russians!~~ Chinese!
- machbio 7y agoAm starting to feel this trolling is an industry (like troll farm) of its own - there are people or bots dedicated to trolling and reporting people who raise voice against the discrimination.. I recently had to report an unfair service by virgin atlantic staff after an emergency landing - I tweeted the pictures and video of the incident.. I was immediately trolled by twitter accounts about how i should be happy that I am alive - I was complaining about how the staff handled the issues after the emergency landing .. wish the social media companies could raise voice against companies or countries that use their platform to discredit real concern - guess people do not matter anymore
- windsurfer 7y agoFor those looking for context: https://twitter.com/machbio/status/1146954308086317056 https://twitter.com/machbio/status/1146954308086317056
- noja 7y agoI'm not so sure... looking at your twitter thread it seems like the usual twitter responses from people who ignore context and detail.
- danso 7y agoI'll have to second this. None of the accounts who belligerently responded look to be obvious bots or otherwise committed trolls. It looks like your account caught the attention of several news organizations, which means their tweets to you would have been seen by their followers. Or anyone checking out the "vs138" hashtag.
- naringas 7y ago> guess people do not matter anymore I agree with this sentiment. only groups of people seem relevant nowadays. makes me really wonder about the philosophy and history of individualism.
- foldr 7y agoWhat's the point in complaining on twitter about it? The situation sucks, but the airline was most likely doing its best to resolve it. It's probably not possible to plan ahead much for unexpected diversions.
- AFascistWorld 7y agoYou may not believe it, the vast majority of Chinese actually love the CCP and the system, they only just hate that a few corrupt low-level officials who are the bad apples fucking up leaders' glorious visions. These "bots" are mostly spontaneous people, they are not even government-sponsored Wumao, they genuinely love China and defend it, their reason being it may have some flaws but any other country has too and is worse than China, and them being either students or comfortable middle-class help.
- zachguo 7y agoWhoever has been living in China knows this is true, too bad you are downvoted. I always laugh at report like this, because in reality probably such 'coordinated effort' is simply done by people from a random forum online.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- walshemj 7y agoThat's pretty common in dictatorships, if you read Alex Kershaw's two volume Bio of Hitler he gives some examples. The response to corruption by local Nazi party members, was along the line of "if only the Fuhrer knew"
- UnFleshedOne 7y agoThis goes much further back, Russian peasants often expressed similar sentiments towards their tsars. Even Robin Hood stories feature benevolent king who would come in and fix everything, if only he knew.
- jknz 7y agoThe examples given in the article are hardly "genuine, spontaneous citizens". Of course, the important question is to quantify bots vs. genuine--though the following examples are pretty clear-cut. Quotes from the article: > The accounts posted in Indonesian, Arabic, Portuguese and other languages. They promoted hookup services, posted about Korean boy bands and retweeted messages about pop-punk music. > “As a Hong Kong person who loves Hong Kong, I really miss the Hong Kong of before, which was developed and ruled by law,” @derrickmcnabbx wrote in Chinese on June 15. The account’s location was described as “Georgia, USA.” Before this year, nearly all of its tweets were links to pornography.
- shmerl 7y agoIt is industrialized in case of dictatorships pushing propaganda. Normal people don't do it on such scale.
- ben_jones 7y agoIt is an industry that goes way beyond Twitter and PR companies. It's incredibly popular for US businesses to pay firms in Asia, Africa, etc. to trawl social media and collect data using various automaton tools for BI and other purposes. That said I also believe a lot of trolls and political posters are just normal people voicing their malignant opinions to the point where it is nearly impossible to identify astroturfing as long as the accounts are "tenured" enough (real pictures, some age, etc.).
- TearsInTheRain 7y agoI feel like those responses to your tweets were pretty organic. Are you suggesting they were paid to discredit you?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- swiley 7y agoLast summer I remember a coworker telling me he was writting bots to counteract what he belived to be bots employed by republican polititions. I already felt like the signal to noise ratio on twitter had gotten pretty bad but at that point I realised there isn't enough left to ever justify exposing myself to it again.
- josefresco 7y agoA lot more data here, which was referenced in the article: https://medium.com/digintel/welcome-to-the-party-a-data-analysis-of-chinese-information-operations-6d48ee186939 https://medium.com/digintel/welcome-to-the-party-a-data-anal...
- president 7y agoThere needs to be some sort of internet sanction where the offending country's internet access to the world is cut off until they start acting like good global citizens.
- hujun 7y agomost time, and most people always believe what they want to believe
- hktruth 7y agoWhy would anyone trust the NYTimes which has just discredited itself over the weekend with its latest (botched) hatchet job on Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh? There are genuine voices out there who disagree with the protestors political aims and who completely reject the violence employed by a radical minority of the protestors. Not everyone is a "wumao" or "5 cent" paid troll or bot. It would be nice if there were more critical analysis of the Hong Kong protests. For example, why do prominent faces of the movement such as Joshua Wong frequently use the phrase "God Bless Hong Kong" for Western media interviews (and in a congressional hearing yesterday)? It's a phrase completely alien to Hong Kong and Chinese culture and clearly pandering to a target audience.
- mullingitover 7y agoLooks like China unleashed their bots on HN as well?
- hktruth 7y agoThis is the typical Pavlovian response which has infected social media and HN. If you disagree with the "narrative" you're either a China bot or a Russian troll.
- mullingitover 7y agoI mean, your account has zero history and is strongly advocating a pro-China position. If it walks like a duck...
- vkou 7y agoFrequently, people have political opinions that are incredibly nationalistic, to the point of sounding like complete gibberish to anyone outside their bubble. I generally don't assume that they are bots, shills, or trolls, even if they sound like them. I need only look at the outcome of elections to know that those positions have incredibly broad grassroots support.
- bernierocks 7y agoChina has been using armies of bots for many years to sway public opinion. Much scarier than Russia, because they have 10X the resources.
- 55436throw 7y agoWell they’ve been doing a pretty bad job then, considering how often they are bashed on HN, Reddit, Imgur, etc.
- llIIlIlIllIIlIl 7y agoIt's incredibly funny to me how concerned western netizens seem to be about Chinese astroturfing... as if it's an actual problem they need to worry about. 99.9999% of comments you'll find online are highly critical of China. The most upvoted submissions on Reddit and HN are often those critical of China. Most Americans (60% last time I checked) already have a negative view of China and their knee-jerk reaction is to support anything or anyone who speaks out against the CCP. Does anyone really think 17 bots on Twitter tweeting messages in Chinese is going to change this?
- bernierocks 7y ago"Does anyone really think 17 bots on Twitter tweeting messages in Chinese is going to change this?" Try 17 thousand or 17 million bots, Tweeting in English. This is also only a small fraction of what they are actually doing. If you take a look at many new movies coming out in the US, many are financed by a Chinese company. They have also started buying major stakes in media companies, like Reddit. The strange thing about the Hong Kong protests is that I can't seem to find any balanced coverage of it and I almost saw no coverage of it here on major US television networks.
- cylinder714 7y agoTry 17 thousand or 17 million bots, Tweeting in English And now they've got Reddit covered with /r/Sino but I'm unsure if that's new or not.
- dirtyid 7y agoWhat is stopping Twitter from releasing server logs for others to independently authenticate attribution? Facebook, Google have not declared. The ASPI analysis proceeds on assumption that Twitters attribution is correct. The startup Digital Intelligence concludes confidently "China has made its debut as a confirmed information operations actor" because the bots coordinated behavior "emulat[es] divisive disinformation tactics seen in other disinformation campaigns from Russia and Iran". That said, the take away from both analysis is that 30 (DI) - 112 (ASPI) of the ~900 accounts have high likelihood of being an disinformation network... that operated for over 2 years, using many re-purposed spam/dating/escort/porn accounts that was never sanitized to preserve cover. Evaluate the scale and operational rigor of this network and it's hard to conclude this is state-level tradecraft than some independent agent/contractor with limited resources and basic scripting knowledge. Leave it to NYT to sneak in balance at the end with inflammatory headline. >Elise Thomas, one of the authors of the Australian report, said that the low level of professionalism suggested that the campaign was not the work of the People’s Liberation Army or the Ministry of State Security, which have previously been linked to Chinese cyberespionage and information campaigns. >“I would be surprised if the P.L.A. was responsible because I would expect they would be more competent than this,” Ms. Thomas said. Yeah. Look, China is bad at foreign influence campaigns, but this is insultingly bad. I'm completely willing to believe China has expanded propaganda efforts abroad, but this doesn't feel like it. E: unsurprisingly people are already using the article to accusing others of being bots. Because humans writing and replying unique responses are equivalent to automated bots that copy and base tweets on a schedule.
- RobertRoberts 7y agoI watched a few videos of a western man living in China (married to a Chinese woman). Their views on propaganda, information, privacy, leadership, marketing, power structures, etc... are all so vastly different from ours that it's almost unbelievable until you hear about it first hand. China's propaganda style is unabashedly similar to "Baghdad Bob". [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Saeed_al-Sahhaf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Saeed_al-Sahhaf
- dirtyid 7y ago
- chillacy 7y agoAnyone else a bit freaked out at how effective social influence is? What does that say about how we form opinions?
- cwkoss 7y agoI think 95%+ of opinions are directly regurgitated from others, but we humans mistake our own novelty with the idea for the idea actually being original. Thinking about my teenage years, I'd often see a documentary and then "come up" with concepts it covered a week or two later. Similarly, I think one of the biggest issues with "bot influencers" is that the average human is not good at thinking for themselves and regurgitates whatever they agree with/protects the ego. The online activity of many technology-naive middle aged users gradually becomes indistinguishable from the bots they follow.
- Kifot 7y agoWhat do you think is the best approach to make sure one's opinion is independent without spending a massive amount of time on getting an expertise in the subject?
- krapp 7y agoYou can't. Independent opinion doesn't exist - you would have to validate every datum you're presented with starting from first principles, which is impossible. Accept that most of your opinions will be informed by the opinions of others, likely directly, and your method for judging truth will instinctively be biased more towards emotion, social status and ego-preservation than than logic and fact, because humans are social animals and that's just how we're wired.
- repolfx 7y agoAre you talking about Twitter accounts here, or the influence of journalists? ;)
- no_opinions 7y agoThey go by the name 50 Cent party: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party This is purely something that's pushing a political agenda. In China, there's a single party, so disagreement is perceived as sabotage. While in other countries, its accepted as part of the system. In US we have a house/senate minority leader: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_leader https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_leader In Westminster-based systems (Australia, Canada, UK), they call them opposition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_opposition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_opposition So if China lacks this representation, what is there to counterbalance? Wouldn't it lead to viewpoint discrimination? There are things that need a more direct form a democracy to fix. Rent control, tighter restrictions on who does business/runs for election there. For instance, should agents of Beijing be fit to represent the people of HK and craft laws? If you'd like to see what happens when foreign governments sabotage legislature, Poland's first legislative councils were rampant with it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Poland_in_the_Early_Modern_era_(1569%E2%80%931795) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Poland_in_the_Early... What other outlet is there but giving control to HK citizens have total and complete sovereignty to handle their own localized issues?
- artsyca 7y agoWe gotta stop blaming `China` -- The China brand has been tarnished unfairly in my view as we use it to be synonymous with the so-called `Communist Party of China`
- artsyca 7y agoAs usual, with the downvotes, allow us to clarify: At present there are still people just like us being saddled with some mandarin fever dream of the social credit system while we're treating the whole continent of China like a troll brigade pumping fake news on twitter and suppressing Hong Kong video clips on TikTok We've gotta understand that fighting totalitarianism with prejudice and stereotypes plays right into the hands of the puppet masters and doubly victimizes the innocent people caught in the crossfire, who could very well be us in another life
- phil248 7y agoIt's a good time to remember that the vast majority of people never use Twitter. The media has had a fixation with the platform for as long as I can remember, which has helped it gain an unearned reputation as being relevant. It's not relevant. It's the trash heap of the internet. I can't understand why anyone would continue to spend time on it when it's become universally known that bots and trolls run the show.
- mieseratte 7y ago> It's not relevant. It's the trash heap of the internet. It's got heads of state, leaders of enterprise, and myriad celebrity on the platform. As much as I'd like to see Twitter, Facebook, et. al. nuked from orbit, they're very much relevant.
- dmix 7y agoAgreed, it may still be a trash heap, but it's still very relevant culturally. It's also a lazy source for headlines and (occasionally) breaking news so it gets far more relevance media-wise than it warrants in terms of quality.
- growlist 7y agoI'd broaden that out. The entire MSM is now largely a low-truth information source. I can't find the exact quote now, but one of the leading media execs in the UK was just a few weeks ago openly advocating that media organisations should consider reporting the truth lower down their priorities than advancing their own agenda. Personally judging on how things have gone down in the past I don't think that have a media cleaned of inconvenient truths can end well - at all - but folk seem, depressingly, ever more intent on regurgitating what they are fed instead of questioning it, and living in a dumbed-down, disempowered fantasy world of pointless interests and meaningless pursuits. If this doesn't sound too emo.
- zachguo 7y agoChina should scrap the GFW and unleash them all, I guess the English-speaking world would have to build a GFW to fend off all Chinese netizens then.
- dmix 7y agoThey don't even need to. It's not like they are having any problems doing what they want currently and their power is so far from being threatened that it's not even worthing monitoring.
- devbyte 7y agotwitter is just a cesspit now. I have watched this happen to my own country (the UK) with trolls and bots constantly pumping out anything which gets an emotional reaction of outrage.
- freeflight 7y agoI really hate how inherently biased and subjective most reporting about "social bots" seems to be. For these last years headlines about all kinds of "bot armies" are constantly making the rounds, getting blamed for pretty much everything from Trump's election to Brexit. Often based on some research that defines the parameters for a user being a "social bot", that they have extremely high false-positive rates, but still end up only identifying hundreds, maybe thousands of accounts, on platforms that have total user numbers in the hundreds of millions or even over a billion. That is already enough to cause widespread paranoia about Chinese/Russian/Iranian trolls supposedly being everywhere. So anybody on Twitter, Facebook or Reddit who's opinions and views don't align with a certain Overton window, are quickly labeled as being "foreign influencers", regardless of any arguments or facts whatsoever, in a purely ideological reaction of "What, you do not agree that <insert country> is evil?! How dare you!". Meanwhile, barely anybody talks about the reality that these kinds of games are played by pretty much everybody [0] [1], but I guess it would be weird for a US American platform to ban users for spreading pro-US propaganda. Tho, it's still scary how completely oblivious most people seem to be about that, while seeing the Chinese/Russian/Iranian version everywhere. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit_has_removed_their_blog_post_identifying/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit...
- plausibilities 7y agoWe've all already been successfully trolled. The well has already been poisoned. Paranoia has now been compounded. Clarity regarding contemporary domestic political landscape has now been further muddled. Effective astroturfing was always a secondary objective.
- slacka 7y agoFor anyone paywalled: http://archive.is/Blzuk http://archive.is/Blzuk
- mrtweetyhack 7y agoNot wrong about #spieseverywhere. China spies are everywhere
- diedyesterday 7y agoIn a few years the Chinese economy will experience much slower growth rate (similar to the West) and people will get out of the this 30-year hypnotic state of fast-moving and dehumanizing economic development and quest for money (which the CCP has used to consolidate its grip) and with the growing corruption at increasingly higher levels of the government, the people will eventually demand what is theirs: The right to rule and appoint their rulers and then the CCP will be in trouble, and there won't be a blazingly fast economic growth to hide behind.
- ospider 7y agoI stopped trusting any New York Times article since the report of Lanxiang[1], which became a popular meme on Chinese social networks. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/22/technology/22cyber.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/22/technology/22cyber.html
- droidist2 7y agoI see this in YouTube comments a lot on Hong Kong-related videos. Also they flag videos. A Cantonese language YouTuber I follow posted one video with her opinions and got flagged and hit with a strike on her account.