China is using the world's largest known online disinformation operation to harass Americans, a CNN review finds
China is using the world's largest known online disinformation operation to harass Americans, a CNN review finds
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 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.
It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if Lemmy is rife with these trolls. And I'm not just talking about the tankies.
I will never understand people who advocate for communism as opposed to democratic socialism. Every major country that has ever gone down the communist road has ended up a dictatorship. That's not a bug of communism, it's a feature. I get the criticism of capitalism, I really do, but we can enact socialist laws that rein in the excesses and extremes of capitalism without sacrificing our democracies for one-party governments.
I've been on reddit for over a decade. There were clear signs of Russian trolls on reddit during the 2016 election. What I witnessed was that people in general were very easily deceived.
No longer on reddit so i cant tell of they are there, but the Chinese spam and disinformation bots/accounts are quite active on Twitter(X). I follow dozens of Chinese dissidents on Twitter and each time they tweet something, there are 5-10 bots tweeting sexual contents. It's ridiculous.
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.
I don't think I've heard/read somebody getting called a "dog" much before (unless they're referring to the other name somebody might use "b****"), isn't that more a foreign and/or rural insult? I don't remember ever getting hit with any of these myself, so maybe it stings more in that context, but that list of insults is almost comical and reads like words somebody would say that didn't speak English as their primary language.
I mean, just look at the comments section on X or Instagram and you'll see this playing out in real time.
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.
Good thing this instance isn’t federated with lemmygrad.ml & hexbear.net, protecting everyone from
Get the fuck off social media, people!! Don't you get it. For this and so many other reasons
Pub G
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.
#NoShit
Mmm i feel so harassed
So CNN finally discovered Hexbear?
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.
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
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.
The article presents no evidence of this. The report they linked here: https://www.mandiant.com/resources/blog/dragonbridge-targets-rare-earths-mining-companies also presented literally no evidence. Just some screen shots. No IP Addresses? No actual proof?
I'm glad the CIA has run out of ideas, it's getting pathetic at this point.
I've no love for the CCP, but how do we know CIA or other Western psyops aren't involved on this too? We're going back to the Cold war again.