
Why China Silenced a Clickbait Queen in Its Battle for Information Control - danso
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/16/world/asia/china-bloggers-internet.html
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threatofrain
> But late last month, Ma Ling, a blogger who commanded an audience of more
> than 16 million people, went conspicuously silent.

> In the battle for control of the Chinese internet, the authorities had
> designated Ms. Ma a threat to social stability, pointing to an article she
> published about a young man with cancer whose talent and virtue were not
> enough to overcome problems like corruption and inequality.

~~~
throwaway8864e
> Soon, however, internet users pointed to factual errors and said the piece
> had been invented.

> Ms. Ma had to apologize.

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woodandsteel
I feel sorry for the Chinese people. Xi Jinping wants to suppress all
discourse doesn't praise him and the government's policies. That might have
worked in ancient China, but it simply doesn't work in the modern industrial
era. Society is too complicated and so you need free discourse to find out
what is going on and discuss policy alternatives. Xi's policies may work for a
while, but in the long term they are going to make things more and more
dysfunctional.

~~~
naniwaduni
Ancient China _does_ have a pretty interesting interpretation of its
occasional revolutions...

~~~
woodandsteel
Quite true. Confucianism was a remarkably successful political philosophy, and
it even included a positive place for revolutions. The problem with
Confucianism today is that it was designed for an earlier technological era.

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zachguo
Is there any discussion on HN about how to handle these kinds of for-profit
fake news factories?

Edit: I found one here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16774129](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16774129)

~~~
tgragnato
Please don't do this: criticism and false information are different things.

> But the government did not relent. People’s Daily, the flagship newspaper of
> the Communist Party, accused Ms. Ma of manipulating public opinion. Her
> social accounts were deleted on Feb. 21.

The overlapping of the concepts of misinformation and false news are already
quite worrying without censorship being confused with "policing the internet".

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chillacy
Can you elaborate? This seems like a fake news operation: you make up a story
and people share it because it resonates with some truism they believe in.

> The article was widely circulated online and prompted debate about China’s
> wealth gap, surging medical costs and the value of education — common
> complaints of China’s middle class. Soon, however, internet users pointed to
> factual errors and said the piece had been invented.

I remember awhile ago someone got criticized for doing the same thing, getting
people riled up over some fake immigrant violence or something.

~~~
tgragnato
see answer to the OP

