The Chinese government has built up the world’s largest known online disinformation operation and is using it to harass US residents, politicians, and businesses—at times threatening its targets with violence, a CNN review of court documents and public disclosures by social media companies has found.
The onslaught of attacks – often of a vile and deeply personal nature – is part of a well-organized, increasingly brazen Chinese government intimidation campaign targeting people in the United States, documents show.
The US State Department says the tactics are part of a broader multi-billion-dollar effort to shape the world’s information environment and silence critics of Beijing that has expanded under President Xi Jinping. On Wednesday, President Biden is due to meet Xi at a summit in San Francisco.
Victims face a barrage of tens of thousands of social media posts that call them traitors, dogs, and racist and homophobic slurs. They say it’s all part of an effort to drive them into a state of constant fear and paranoia.
From the article…
But Linvill of Clemson University argues that the network uses a unique strategy of “flooding” conversations with so many comments that posts from genuine users receive less attention.
“They are operating thousands of accounts at a time on a given platform, often to drown out conversations, just with sheer volume of messaging,” Linvill said. “When we think of disinformation, we often think of pushing ideas on users and making ideas more salient, whereas what China is doing is the opposite. They are trying to remove conversations from social media.”
This is what’s always concerned me, more than anything else.
If you can’t shape the narrative, you might as well destroy the environment any other narrative that would come from it. An anti-control, basically.
As an analogy, a band at a party that plays it’s music so loud that no one can hear each other to be able to talk to each other.
If we don’t get these bots/shills under control then meaningful conversation will never happen again in any large scale, and any chance for peace at a species level goes with it.
The center will not hold.
Freedom of speech should not extend to foreign adversaries. Give me the ability to geoblock social media just like I can with my router at home. Accurately label any domestic sources that are relaying this disinformation as well so I can block them too.
Yeah, the Chinese and Russians on one side…
and “our” own government on the other.
Victims face a barrage of tens of thousands of social media posts that call them traitors, dogs, and racist and homophobic slurs
What’s the difference between that and the average unhinged MAGA republican? Hell Trump himself could be behind half of those.
Americans don’t need enemies with “friends” like them.
I can’t prove it, but my hunch is a lot of the obnoxious people I argue with online, who seem unable to see reason or resist devolving to insults and twisting my words, are actually foreign operatives tasked with depleting American morale
Weird, my sensation is that everyone online agrees with me and thinks I’m very smart and overall a great guy.
That’s where the psy-op is though. So much of our communication even in our local communities is done online anymore.
So just putting that uncertainty in your head of “I bet a large percentage of people we interact with are just Pooh-bear sock puppets” might be enough subtle false-flagging to heavily polarize entire societies, when we remember China excels at taking bad things and applying them “at scale.”
At a time when we’re deprived of and seeking community and social bonds, it’s isolating, it’s depressing, and it’s doing a ton of potential damage.
Agreed. Assuming bad things is a great slope into playing devil’s advocate
IDK, I think there are a lot of pretentious idiots who refuse to engage in good faith discussions without any direct ties to any foreign governments. People adamantly hold on to all kinds of stupid opinions and argue fervently for them.
So it’s hard to tell who the foreign operatives are if regular people are willing to spread disinformation without any kind of compensation.
I prefer to add a dose of spicey humour or sweet idiocy to my conspiracies to keep the real spies off my tail
True, but the people funding disinformation operations believe they’re making a difference, and anti-disinformation operations like Bellingcat agree with them.
I think a better way to view is that malicious actors have managed to weaponize the “pretentious idiots” you referred to, making them an integral part of their propaganda strategy. They’re useful idiots working for foreign governments without even knowing it, and the way they’re manipulated and amplifying deliberate propaganda makes them far more influential than they would be if they were just spewing their own personal idiocy.
I honestly can’t imagine any other reason why internet leftists would defend an autocratic capitalist nation so vehemently, while also putting so much effort into excluding European social democracy from leftist spaces.
Certainly social democracy would be an improvement for the US people over what the US currently has.
Quick question, though, Wikipedia gives this definition of a communist state:
A communist state is a form of government that combines state leadership of a communist party, Marxist–Leninist political philosophy and an official commitment to construct a communist society.
How does this not apply to China? It sure makes sense to me that a communist forum would support a communist state…
The problem with that is the fact its a descriptor. Basically ever so called communist state since the Soviet Union has in some way been influenced by so called “Marxist-Leninism” due to soviet and now chinese influence. The thing there is a shit-ton of leftists who see MLs as nothing more than fascists with a red paint job, so will thusly argue that china isnt communist.
Plus you could have a communist society which actively lynches MLs which would actively invalidate that qoute you put up.
Its a bad definition, itd be like making a definition for republics based solely on the the Commonwealth of England.
Fair, I’m not saying it’s a definition. This is Wikipedia we’re talking about. My point was more that a “communist state” (although the term is misleading) is really in active usage referring to a country with MLs in power that are working for the benefit of their citizens to achieve communism. That’s not an exact definition either, but it should convey the point well enough in terms of currently existing countries.
Nono tankies aren’t Chinese operators, they’re CIA, tasked to discredit the left. That’s important because they’d be proud of the former but are enraged by the latter.
tasked to discredit the left
Ah, yes, of course, the classic strategy of discrediting the left by using the viewpoints of the definitely not left wing movement of … checks notes communism?
The strategy of equating a classless, stateless, and moneyless society with brutal, authoritarian, oligarchy-run, very much statist, state capitalism. Just paint all means of oppression red and it’s going to be fine, amirite?
Marxist-Leninists do not argue that when you have a communist revolution that you’ll just magically end up with communism. Look into the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Just paint all means of oppression red and it’s going to be fine, amirite?
No, of course not. China has a strategy of democratic centralism, which actually seems to be a quite effective implementation of a democracy. Unlike in countries like the US, Chinese citizens are quite satisfied with their government.
Get the fuck off social media, people!! Don’t you get it. For this and so many other reasons
Damn, all this time Hexbear was actually getting paid?
Imagine that, getting paid to cast hexes
Obviously a lot of state actors are involved in forms of information warfare including China and they certainly have the resources to be very effective in that area.
You follow the money and a lot of the time it is going to end up the same place as a disproportionate amount of the world’s capital which is in the USA and the west in general. The amount of damage the fossil fuel industry has done to the world is immeasurable and makes China insignificant by comparison. They funded anyone who would take their side and supported many forms of extremism in the process, all to prolong the value of their investments at the cost of leaving a horrendous legacy for future generations.
I am concerned about China’s massive military expansion and their impact on regional stability, but dealing with that is on a whole different level of concern to some of the other influences on our media and politics.
Obligatory fuck the CCP, but also they aren’t going anywhere unless the Chinese population fights for democracy and we aren’t setting a great example for them while we refuse to participate in and improve the democracy we have.
Hit em with that “Taiwan number 1” to send em back to the shadow realm
Good thing this instance isn’t federated with lemmygrad.ml & hexbear.net, protecting everyone from
They still leak into here.
Wow, what made you think of them?
Absolutely, we might have to deal with the sheer terror of alternative viewpoints. It’s like wearing a raincoat in the desert – better safe than sorry, right?"
#NoShit
The tall end of this entire article is the obtuse question of how much money is really in the game and how much is the service really worth in terms of providing real value?
How much do these disinformation campaign people get, who are they and how do they operate their systems? Let’s imagine that they’re paying small groups of guys to carry four phones and to search for a topic online on Reddit or Facebook and post n number of comments on the thread every time they get the opportunity to from each of the four phones, with another four accounts per phone, then using a script to monitor every account.
All that an adversary hacker would need is a hunter bot to detect the phones all by geolocation, microphone to see how many people are there, then block the phones. The reality is that even if you had multiple bots hacking someone’s phones to do the job, the real value provided simply cannot outweigh the investment costs in the long run. Disinformation and propaganda as a weapon is more blurry in outcomes than simply building a bridge. Hell even sex work arguably works better for most than to spam their newsfeed
So CNN finally discovered Hexbear?
Fuck the CCP, fuck any Chinese citizen participating in this, fuck your mudda, fuck your whole ancesta, like a someboody fuck you bic, Taiwan numba wun
Note the devolving into casual racism with the mocking accent.
Found the astroturfer for west Taiwan
You say, as you write the most derivative astroturfer post including “found the” and “west Taiwan” like a stupid parrot. Polly want a cracker?
Yes I also read this in a funny accent
It’s called tik tok isn’t it?
They’re all over, here it’s called hexbear.
Tik-Tok’s only problem is capitalism. /s
I’d bet I’m not the first person to write that sentence on Lemmy, Hexbear and elsewhere. The problem is right here and everywhere.
who is actually suffering from this? like honestly. there are so many systems in place to block, remove or redirect content that’s obtuse like this, it seems like a total waste of money.
i only have facebook and it’s taken some time, but I’ve managed to remove and block enough advertisers that my feed is mostly what i want it to be, a way to keep in touch with my family and friends from afar without going through the hassle of reaching out to everyone individually.
that’s it. i feel like if you’re being fed this content it’s because you are engaging with it. i could be wrong.
