
Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction - Lionsion
https://gking.harvard.edu/50c
======
aj7
When the NY Times covered the Chinese robotic moon landing, it was in the top
10 stories for more than a week. In the most space-jaded country on the
planet. The rating was sustained by constant comments by Chinese studying in
the US and burnishing their reps with the Party. You can almost always make
Chinese English, an AI program could be trained to do it. I wrote to their
ombudsman. Down in a day.

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
Very interesting. I always get that uncanny valley feeling even on Hacker
News, especially when the comments concern China. This would explain a lot.

~~~
qiqing
50c party is widely accepted as real a thing as Russian troll farms during the
election, but I'd be skeptical if HN is a target. (I don't think you need an
academic paper to 'prove' it's a real thing.)

The reason you read defensive comments on HN (even from me) is due to how
easily anti-China criticism slides from legitimate policy discussion into raw,
tribal racism. I simply feel it is my duty to call out anti-Chinese racism
when it comes across my path, not just because it makes me mad.

~~~
aaron-lebo
In the interest of productive discussion, what do you perceive as racism?

It's rare that I come across comments about China that are legitimately racist
on HN. I get some people are and some discussion is that, but more than
anything I see genuine concern about how the government is acting and given
how the government controls that nation, that's where the criticism can seem
so wholesale.

But what do you feel is a racist criticism? I ask because I'm a huge critic of
the Chinese government (and many other governments) but don't desire to be
racist or to be perceived as that way.

One of the most stubborn critics of China (and Chinese culture) I know is
Chinese. If I didn't now that I'd perceive him as racist but he just doesn't
like what decades of the Cultural Revolution etc have produced no more than
many Americans don't like what decades of materialism/world domination has
produced.

~~~
qiqing
> It's rare that I come across comments about China that are legitimately
> racist on HN

Perhaps your threshold has a different set-point from mine (and from people
who are the target of similar comments). I include conscious and unconscious
bias, and Chinese people are just as capable of anti-China racism as women are
capable of being sexist.*

The same people who criticize the Chinese government for not allowing Facebook
and Google to operate in China (even after Cambridge Analytica) will defend
not allowing Huawei to be sold by carriers in the U.S. The same people who,
when it is pointed out that Foxconn's suicide rate is lower than the
population average, will say that any non-zero number is too high. Do they
change their tune if it's pointed out that Foxconn is a Taiwanese company and
not a Mainland one? You know the type -- in a later breath, they will just as
easily say that Chinese people can't / won't innovate, and can only copy.

There was a story in Sheryl Sandberg's _Lean In_ about an experiment where 2
resumes were being considered for a police chief: one candidate had more solid
work experience, and the other had more impressive education history. The 2
experimental conditions assigned a male or a female name to each resume, and
most subjects (including female participants) chose the male resume, and
they'd say it was because of work experience or education that they picked it.
If your threshold for sexism includes that, and you adjust your racism
threshold similarly, you'll find that a lot of comments have this ...
_unconscious bias_ for some reason.

* Criticism of what the Cultural Revolution has produced does not fall under the same umbrella. No one likes what it produced, even the leadership currently in power in China, who suffered in their youth.

Edit: comment in threads down below include ">his stupid uneducated bimbo of a
wife" in reference to China's first lady. Here's what CNN has to say about
her:

"Peng is arguably more famous than her husband. She has millions of fans...
She is a major general in the People's Liberation Army and is China's AIDS
ambassador to the United Nations."
[http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/01/20/thursdays-intriguing-
pe...](http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/01/20/thursdays-intriguing-
people-44/?hpt=T2)

~~~
foodislove
I'm sorry. Where were you when your counterparts kept calling Michelle Obama a
"monkey" or Tsai, the President of Taiwan a "old maid", "japanese
collaborator" and other things?

------
pow_pp_-1_v
Interesting. The whole thing is so simple. A government wants to get their
message out quickly and efficiently before negative stories get too much
attention. So, how to do it cost effectively? Simple, ask normal government
employees to write pro-government posts on social media when they get time.
Plus their career prospects improve if they do it. Finally a reminder on
certain days about their duty to spread the good news about the government.

I guess the only weakness in the whole scheme is people reporting back to an
authority about their work. I am pretty sure they got rid of that after the
leak. The genius of this thing is that if you ask the people who write these
posts if they are doing propaganda, there's a good chance that their initial
genuine response will be to say no.

~~~
yorwba
> if you ask the people who write these posts if they are doing propaganda,
> there's a good chance that their initial genuine response will be to say no.

Actually, they'll probably say yes. Most Chinese do not think of propaganda as
something negative. Every student club at my university has an unironically
named "propaganda department" that manages their social media. "Propaganda"
just never underwent the value shift that happened in other countries, so
although there's a translation of "PR" almost nobody uses the word.

------
pteredactyl
This is great.

Please, please let this concept enter the general public's mind.

~~~
Barrin92
>Please, please let this concept enter the general public's mind.

Especially salient because the idea of censorship in the form of bookburning
or restricting speech is still way too dominant (especially in American
culture).

Information overflow and deflection through a sheer barrage of garbage and
misinformation seems to be the new (and much more effective) MO.

~~~
ss248
>Information overflow and deflection through a sheer barrage of garbage and
misinformation seems to be the new

Nothing new actually. The whole concept is pretty old.

Looks like after trying to follow "guidelines" from Orwell's "1984", we are
just trying Huxley's "Brave New World".

~~~
xster
> Looks like after trying to follow "guidelines" from Orwell's "1984", we are
> just trying Huxley's "Brave New World".

This guy gets it. I absolutely agree that China needs the searing scrutiny of
the world for the sake of its people and the world but China is also still in
absolute infantile stages of propaganda sophistication. Straight up
censorships and news suppressions are things the West did in WWI. Astroturfing
is a step up but operating under the premise of a palatable freedom of
information and political choice while being inundated with what to think
without ever receiving 'literal fake news' is light-years ahead of China.

~~~
pteredactyl
Yea, I'd argue the whole goal of Western government operators is to create a
well-oiled propaganda machine. Everything else is a negotiation.

------
woodandsteel
Xi is a very smart fellow, and he seems to sincerely want what is best for his
country. That said, I think he is making some terrible mistakes. Instead of
helping the population become smarter, better-informed thinkers, he is trying
to turn them into robots.

Xi is creating an illusion of unity, which means if things start to go
seriously wrong, there will be an explosion, as happened so many times in
China's past. Citizens will lack the sort of intelligence and ability to work
together that would be needed to resolve problems, and the country likely will
either fall into chaos or under the rule of a malevolent emperor.

Let me add that Xi claims to be following Confucian principles, but that is
not at all true. Confucianism is a set of principles that everyone from the
top down was required to follow. Xi, in contrast, answers to no one, and is
simply making up his own rules.

To the Chinese out there, let me say that what you need to do is get your
hands on all the information you can from independent sources, and study
political philosophy, so that you will be in a better position to make
intelligent decisions in the future.

~~~
elefanten
I agree with your starting premise about Xi and your concluding advice about
independent (or at least, non-Party filtered) information.

But I don't think it's wise or diplomatic to phrase it as a growing
"intelligence" deficit in Chinese people. That word is tricky enough to define
as it is, but people can hold deeply one-sided views about a lot of things and
still be highly intelligent.

As a counterpoint, browsing social media in open information societies and
liberal democracies these days gives a sense that people can be extremely
biased and polarized even without living in a closed propaganda information
ecosystem.

With that criticism lodged, I agree with the spirit of your argument that a
more filtered public discourse very likely makes it monotonically
incrementally harder to patch any present or future social discord.

~~~
woodandsteel
>But I don't think it's wise or diplomatic to phrase it as a growing
"intelligence" deficit in Chinese people. That word is tricky enough to define
as it is, but people can hold deeply one-sided views about a lot of things and
still be highly intelligent.

I think the term "intelligent" has more than one meaning, and one of them is
what I was trying to get at, something like "able to act in an effective
manner." But perhaps you can suggest a less ambiguous term.

------
johnchristopher
> Many academics, and most journalists and activists, claim that these so-
> called 50c party posts vociferously argue for the government’s side in
> political and policy debates. As we show, this is also true of most posts
> openly accused on social media of being 50c.

I am not a native speaker. I can't parse that sentence :/.

Why is this `also` true ? In addition to what ? Wouldn't it follow that posts
arguing in favour of the government's side are tagged as `50c` since `50c`
seems to be defined by being `pro government` ?

And then:

> [..] we show that the Chinese regime’s strategy is to avoid arguing with
> skeptics of the party and the government, and to not even discuss
> controversial issues.

If I ignore the `also` word in the first quote it all makes sense.

~~~
elefanten
I read those two sentences to describe an existing misconception among BOTH
(sentence 1) academics/journalists/activists AND (sentence 2) people posting
on social media. The misconception is that the strategy of 50c party posters
is to argue loudly from the perspective of the CCP.

The following sentence in the abstract helps put it in context: "Yet, almost
no systematic empirical evidence exists for this claim, or, more importantly,
for the Chinese regime's strategic objective in pursuing this activity. "

This third sentence presents the paper's challenge to the supposed
misconception.

Therefore, the concluding quote you highlight makes perfect sense as the
paper's thesis for what strategy drives 50c party posts.

Edit: I agree those sentence are a bit awkward. To help parse them, eliminate
some of the connecting words:

1: "Academics/journalists/activists claim 50c posts argue for government's
side."

2: "This is also true of posts accused on social media of being 50c" (this =
argue for government's side)

3: "Yet, no evidence exists for this claim"

~~~
kolpa
I still don't get it. To me, they are saying that the general online public
thinks "pro-CCP" and "50c" are the same thing, just as everyone says pro-
HillaryClinton people are "Correct the Record" troops, and all pro-Trump
people were Russian trolls, and all pro-Israel posters are AIPAC troops, and
all shitposters are 4channers

------
mindfulhack
I love it when we have moments like this where truth comes out (in the form of
scientific research if need be) that previously was moronically dismissed (by
people including government shills I'm sure) as 'conspiracy theory'.

Snowden and NSA spying was another one. Truth is not as boring as they may
make you want to believe. The world is very, VERY interesting and you just
have to discover it.

------
JumpCrisscross
"In contrast to prior claims, we show that the Chinese regime's strategy is to
avoid arguing with skeptics of the party and the government, and to not even
discuss controversial issues. We show that the goal of this massive secretive
operation is instead to distract the public and change the subject, as most of
the these posts involve cheerleading for China, the revolutionary history of
the Communist Party, or other symbols of the regime."

Sensible. Cuts, however, against my mental caricature of an astroturfing
shill.

~~~
reaperducer
Kind of makes you wonder how many of these operatives on here on HN.

There are certainly blocs of people who downvote certain topics en masse.

~~~
rdlecler1
The more influential HN is perceived the greater the problem will be.

------
kevintb
great food for thought that applies to any public forum, whether it's infected
with these massive secret governmental operations or not.

------
vthallam
T - 30 mins before this post gets buried. I don't understand despite the high
upvote count, why do articles critical of China are not able to be in the
first page for more than a couple hours.

Also, China is the new Saudi Arabia. With the economic power, they can get
away with anything and actually, you can't do anything to stop that. Even
Trump who was so critical wanted to help ZTE as soon as the Chinese asked for
interference.

~~~
yorwba
1 hour later and this story is #6 on the front page. I get it, complaining
about perceived censorship is fun, but this submission hasn't quite gone full
flame war yet, so I think it will stay for a while.

~~~
Lionsion
I think this one will stay, but mainly because the content is an inoculation
against the kind of trolling that usually leads to China threads getting
buried.

I do have an irrational hope that the inoculation will last for more than a
single thread though.

------
xster
This is literally and exactly what Correct The Record
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record))
is and is as standard as it gets in American political discourse online
[https://www.fec.gov/data/disbursements/?two_year_transaction...](https://www.fec.gov/data/disbursements/?two_year_transaction_period=2016&disbursement_purpose_categories=other&data_type=processed&committee_id=C00578997&min_date=01%2F01%2F2015&max_date=08%2F05%2F2016).

~~~
dragonwriter
> This is literally and exactly what Correct The Record [...] is

No, it's not. Propaganda by competing domestic partisan interest groups
seeking to influence elections in their own country is not “literally and
exactly” the same thing as state sponsored propaganda.

~~~
xster
Ah, I see where we might disagree on.

I think you would argue that from the perspective of the propaganda targets,
the CCP is the establishment vying to influence public opinion and American
political parties are not. They're simply political instruments in a machinery
that then determines what becomes the establishment.

I'm not saying it's a binary dichotomy but I'm more leaning on the side that
<oversimplification> there are no American 'political parties' in the sense
that the Green Party will never be like the Canadian NDP etc
</oversimplification> and the 'parties' is just an established, acceptable
non-real-power-threatening Overton Window that directs shared class concerns
and energy into a black hole of oxygen draining wedge issue arena.

The establishment is the establishment and money is the establishment and from
that perspective, I would argue CTR is a class interest group rather than a
partisan interest group.

Anyway. I think we disagree but I think it's the context we disagree on.

------
equalunique
Political entities linked to the US government do this too.

------
mike_n
as if we don't have our own Wag-the-Dog-ish distractions also?

~~~
alexandercrohde
This itself is a distraction. There is no "us," "we," or "them"

------
malshe
I can't access it on Harvard website any more. Luckily the paper is already
published so if you have access to the journal, download it here:
[https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-
political-s...](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-
science-review/article/how-the-chinese-government-fabricates-social-media-
posts-for-strategic-distraction-not-engaged-
argument/4662DB26E2685BAF1485F14369BD137C)

~~~
Lionsion
This link doesn't work for you?

[https://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/how_the_chinese_...](https://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/how_the_chinese_government_fabricates_social_media_posts_for_strategic_distraction_not_engaged_argument.pdf)

It's the "article" link on the page, and it works for me right now.

~~~
malshe
Now it is working!

------
foodislove
The Chinese global trollism is getting worse. From Airlines who don't label
Taiwan under China to kids in primary school in Australia who paint a
Taiwanese flag on a bull, the Chinese are really becoming more and more
belligerent. The Chinese internet army of "hurt feelings" and stupid
whataboutism and fake moral equivalence is entering HN as well.

Whenver there is any negative story about china, the downvotes happen
immediately and "defends of the honor of china" pop up magically throwing dirt
everywhere.

I'm sure when PG made this, having nationalistic Chinese trolls degrade the
forum with their "China is always right" bs was probably not on the top of his
mind.

I wonder if we can ask the mods. Is there a pattern of downvotes whenver there
isa negative story about China? I wonder if a bunch of Tencent/Alibaba
"patriotic chinese" simply created lots of accounts and upvoted themselves to
get to the point they can downvote across their accounts to "keep the internet
clean" of anything that embarasses Xi Jinping and his stupid uneducated bimbo
of a wife

~~~
reaperducer
On HN it's not unique to China. Anything negative about India is downvoted
into oblivion. You can almost time it to the rising of the sun in India
Standard Time.

I'm not saying that it's being orchestrated by the Indian government, but it
does happen.

~~~
vthallam
This is the distraction the linked study was talking about. I'm not sure if it
happens about articles related to India, but since we are on the topic about
China's article getting down-voted (anecdotally I have seen multiple times), I
think we should focus on that atm.

~~~
reaperducer
Agreed. Not trying to divert attention from the topic at hand (like the people
cited in the Harvard study do).

------
jonathanyc
We should definitely be wary of attempts by the Chinese government to distract
from meaningful discussion. It’s worth remembering that leftist organizations
in the US and around the world during the Cold War were sometimes funded by
the Soviet Union.

At the same time, I am reminded of how organizations that in hindsight we know
were definitely not funded by the Soviet Union were accused of exactly that
during the 50s and 60s. For example, we now know that at one point the KGB and
the FBI were concurrently running smear campaigns against MLK.

In that light, I’m skeptical of Lionsion’s motives in posting this. Yesterday
he was rightfully called out by some including me for writing of Chinese
internment camps in Xinjiang that

> These camps appear to be the result of high-level Chinese government policy
> that explicitly targets this ethic group. There are no contemporary
> parallels in the US. If you think there are, do you think Obama was in on
> it? The US situation is unfortunate, but it's more the result of poverty and
> lower-level racism, not a policy to imprison blacks.

The whataboutism in his last statement of course goes against the consensus of
US academics studying criminal justice issues, the consensus of criminal
justice advocates, as well as what (again, thanks to the passage of time) we
now know about the deliberate decisions of politicians leading up to the War
on Drugs:

[https://www.aclu.org/other/race-war-drugs](https://www.aclu.org/other/race-
war-drugs) [https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-
rich...](https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-
nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html)

I think Hacker News should place where we can have a civil discussions about
issues. Thanks to the wonders of technology, we are able to have multiple (not
just one!) threads and thus to discuss multiple topics. And as I have said
previously, most of us can both walk and chew gum at the same time; if someone
is unable to even read comments discussing US education reform on an article
by an American looking at the Swedish education system, for example, without
being “distracted,” I think that’s more of an issue for the easily-distracted
person than for the discussants.

But the strange trend of accusing everyone who would like to discuss the
relevance of an issue to the US of being funded by the Chinese government is
as intellectually demeaning as it should be rhetorically suspect.

I’d be happy to prove that I’m an American citizen not funded by the Chinese
or any other government, but I think that might be relatively hard to prove in
a fair and respectful way over the Internet. On the other hand, it is much
easier to look at someone’s public comment history and to see the unsettling
trends there.

More generally, I’m getting tired of having to battle this recent uptick in
China scaremongering on what used to be a much more reasonable forum.
Lionsion’s account is very new, and I wonder if they are part of the recent
influx of new users who have arrived with their own bad habits. Seriously,
check the account creation date for users who post things that seem to be
weird pro-China or anti-China propaganda. They seem to mostly have been made
around 2016.

~~~
rdlecler1
Perhaps ones karma score should be displayed with the username on post flagged
as political.

~~~
jonathanyc
I think it'd be neat if we could also separate karma out by the type of post,
somehow. For example, although my account is relatively old, most of my karma
is just from a series of comments about the Uber autonomous car crash. I'm not
sure that my karma accurately reflects that I'm primarily a lurker.

------
xmly
How do you know it is not Russia? Maybe Russia is manipulating China and USA
at the same time!

------
rajacombinator
American govt fabricates wars for social distraction, China needs to step
their game up!

------
pixelpp
So does the US with it's media machine.

~~~
alexandercrohde
Nobody is saying it doesn't, but the two things are entirely independent from
each other. It's not a competition between countries, it's a question of how
people of earth can get the best lives for themselves.

------
meko
I'm inclined not to trust an article that uses propaganda-rhetoric like
'regime'.

~~~
fermienrico
Right, so you're ignoring peer-reviewed article with hard data, analysis and
conclusions in the favor of propaganda-rhetoric use of the word "regime".
You're doing a disservice to yourself.

------
notadoc
Does anyone think this does not happen in other countries? Maybe even in your
own country (but not ours, obviously)? And not just by governments, but by
political parties, foreign entities, corporations, lobbying groups, interest
groups, etc, any entity with an interest in distracting, muddying, defining a
narrative, or swaying opinion?

And once you consider that, consider the numerous potential reasons why social
media companies appear to do nothing about the huge numbers of obvious bots,
astroturfers, sockpuppets, trollfarms, etc on their services.

Interesting times we live in!

~~~
pmlnr
Hungary doesn't need it. The government simply mangled any opposition media.

