

Author warns of Russia's and China's 'Spinternet' - alphadoggs
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/011011-author-warns-of-spinternet.html

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badwetter
Unfortunately I agree with much of what this author says, to wit; "The border
between cyber-utopianism and cyber-naivete is a blurring one," he writes in
"The Net Delusion." "In fact, the reason why so many politicians and
journalists believe in the power of the Internet is because they have not
given this subject much thought. Their faith is not a result of the careful
examination of how the Internet is being used by dictators or how it is
changing the culture of resistance and dissent."

Makes me sad.

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bediger
What I want to know is how can we tell? How can we tell if some topic is
totally spun by a larger entity?

Just as an example, most folks who read Linux-related web sites firmly believe
that Microsoft and/or Wagg-Ed have paid shills that disrupt Linux
conversations. There's the obvious pro-Windows entities, like "Loverock
Davidson" in the ZDNet forums, but at least some folks beleive that most or
all of the radically pro-Linux ultra-fanboys are planted too, to discredit the
more moderate and logical Linux fans.

There's not a single shred of evidence to support this, except maybe
Microsoft's history of paying for pro-Microsoft studies, but still people
believe.

How am I to tell that a government has set its propaganda agencies on a topic?

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ZeroMinx
If you're in London, The London School of Economics and Political Science is
having a public lecture next week with this author, Evgeny Morozov. I believe
it'll be available as a podcast after the fact, for anyone who can't get
there.

[http://www2.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/events/2011/20110119t1830...](http://www2.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/events/2011/20110119t1830vSZT.aspx)

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motters
The good news from the propogandists point of view is that it seems you only
need to pay people very small amounts of money (50 cents) to encourage them to
engage in propaganda. With the budgets available to governments this should
permit them to scale their human operations quite well.

In a totally unscientific sampling, I've seen plenty of stuff in the last few
years in terms of news articles and YouTube videos which certainly look like
explicit propaganda. The problem is that propaganda may often be subtle, with
no easy method to clearly identify astroturfers from genuine opinions.

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jokermatt999
You can even find the propaganda bloggers on HN, at least it appears:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jojogogo>

Luckily, the astroturfing is...not so good in most cases from what I've seen
of the Chinese bloggers. There's a few times where I've noticed oddly pro-
Chinese opinions that were well formed and articulated, but I think some of
those are indeed genuine.

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guscost
Individuals are still responsible for using the tools that are available to
them, the evolution from broadcast media to open internet won't change that.

