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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 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.

CmdrShepard ,

So CNN finally discovered Hexbear?

crystalmerchant ,

Get the fuck off social media, people!! Don’t you get it. For this and so many other reasons

YeetPics ,
@YeetPics@mander.xyz avatar

Cannacheques ,

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

CosmicCleric ,
@CosmicCleric@lemmy.world avatar

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.

shirro , (edited )

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.

ThatFembyWho ,

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.

crackajack ,

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.

davel ,
@davel@lemmy.ml avatar

Good thing this instance isn’t federated with lemmygrad.ml & hexbear.net, protecting everyone from https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/e07fa03a-75f8-4d09-aa10-6c3e06268090.png

crackajack ,

They still leak into here.

Serinus ,

Wow, what made you think of them?

Scew ,
@Scew@lemmy.world avatar

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?"

Maggoty ,

What? Shocked! Shocked I am to find out the second you go after the CCP an army of trolls shows up!

hark ,
@hark@lemmy.world avatar

After the army of CIA trolls had their circlejerk. Were you all directed to reply when the post dropped?

Quadhammer ,

Neither thing anyone here is surprised about brother

hark ,
@hark@lemmy.world avatar

Based on downvotes, some people certainly are angry it’s being pointed out.

Krauerking ,

No you are just being reactionary with a WhatAboutism. It’s about tone. It absolutely does deserve to be called out but like it can be pointed out for similarities or because you just want to shout that “they do it too!” And people don’t care much for that. It just doesn’t work to change minds, but shrink them against your statement because people are also reactionary.

hark ,
@hark@lemmy.world avatar

Ah yes, the classic claim of “whataboutism”. You may not be aware of this, but whataboutism means pointing out something irrelevant to counter criticism e.g. the US pointing at breadlines in Soviet Russia and Soviet Russia saying “well what about lack of civil rights for black people in the US?”

People bringing up the US’s disinformation campaign in response to China’s disinformation campaign is not whataboutism. CNN, being a propaganda outlet for the US, is making the claim that China is using the world’s largest known online disinformation operation. That’s a point of comparison right there, so bringing up the US is perfectly valid.

What’s also funny is the cries about a supposed CCP army of trolls while all pro-US posts get overwhelming upvotes while any disagreement gets overwhelming downvotes. Speaking of reactionary…

Krauerking ,

No a WhatAboutism is when you don’t respond to the initial conversation and bring up a different point. Say like

Yeah China sure does have a lot of bots.
Well What about US’s bot use?!?

But you don’t care you just want to be right which is why you get downvotes.

Like no one is going to engage with the rest of your argument when you are just trying to prove yourself right at an argument you want to have instead of the conversation happening.
Whatever dude. This is an important discussion but I ain’t having it with you.

hark ,
@hark@lemmy.world avatar

Again, CNN is making the claim of “world’s known largest disinformation operation” so pointing out the US is valid because it’s a comparison from the beginning. The word “known” is a key word here because they can claim ignorance on the US bot operation, even though it is likely much larger. I did respond to the initial conversation by bringing up the point that the US disinformation operation exists as well i.e. this is called information warfare and all countries are engaging in it. You’d be stupid to think that wasn’t the case.

You were never actually engaging in this conversation because all you wanted anyone to talk about was “China bad” and anything beyond that you consider wHaTaBoUtIsM. Like, what else is there to discuss? That China should stop it? Yeah, I also wish we could get rid of nukes, but they’re a tool of nations that simply won’t be eliminated because they serve a purpose to further a nation’s agenda.

Anyway, you and you posse can continue mindlessly upvoting your posts while mindlessly downvoting my posts if it’ll help you folks sleep better. Just don’t engage, don’t think, only emphasize points your propaganda pals at CNN want you to emphasize.

Scew ,
@Scew@lemmy.world avatar

@hark can think for themselves! Take 'em down boyz!

Serinus ,

China bad.

Cannacheques ,

Hey man, at least the Western spy movies are good

hark ,
@hark@lemmy.world avatar

Everyone, I am so scared!!! What we should do is cut up the internet and create a great firewall of the west to protect us from the foreign trickster hordes!!!

Cannacheques ,

Builds great wall but with tunnel holes and gates for the lolz

AphoticDev ,
@AphoticDev@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Damn, all this time Hexbear was actually getting paid?

Cannacheques ,

Imagine that, getting paid to cast hexes

BlackSkinnedJew ,

What about the NWO CIA mindcontrol projects? MK-Ultra and Stargate? It have years working all over the world but American elite don’t wanna talk about it…

ElBarto ,
@ElBarto@sh.itjust.works avatar

America is that kid who throws water balloons at random people, but cries to their mum when someone throws one back.

Onfire ,

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.

Aolley ,

There is an idea that may help this, if it were built and then also used. it’s a form of group decision making based on fluid data that solidifies as more data comes in.

One of the main aspects is that comments and things are compared to others to find how similar they are, something may present itself differently but be the same discussion. This method of identifying each ‘argument’ and ‘rebuttal’ goes hand in hand with declaring definitions so that conversations can’t be flipped around by a bad actor. There’s a big write up of the way it can be used to combat disinformation but as far as I know it’s just the outline of how such a system would work, no one has built the system.

It’s kind of similar to voting sites like reddit but goes a lot farther in defining ways things work, and works so ostracize trolls and the like. but as it would require something no one online would ever go for, being in one way ‘tied’ to your offline person, that I don’t see it ever being a mainstream thing. Of course the accounts people would be using would be in no way identifiable unless selfdoxed they would still be like voter registration in that a real person had to be there once, and all things that person does online are here tied to them so that trolls and things show clearly over time. It’s really designed to be mostly a niche discussion platform engine for people in the same hobby or interest.

crackajack , (edited )

My experience with Chinese trolls on Reddit is that they are not discreet. They do not hide that they’re actively propagandising. Whereas Russian trolls are more effective and subtle by pretending to be local of other countries and sowing division. Although with the Ukrainian invasion, I see that Russian trolls became less discreet. Creative, in fact, with putting interesting spins into how the war in Ukraine is unfolding. My favourite is when a Russian troll asked “was Stalin a necessary evil?”. The poster reasoned that Stalin may have killed people, but he industrialised the Soviet Union. And Stalin may have blundered during the first phase of the invasion of Nazi Germany, but he won in the end. The poster then projected the history to support Putin and the war in Ukraine. An interesting spin but Putin has no competent military command and there is no one near enough to competently lead. Someone made a point that Putin has no Zhukov.

Edit: spelling

Serinus ,

Discreet, just for the record. Had to look it up after a bit of confusion.

crackajack ,

Corrected.

goldenlocks ,

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.

billwashere ,

So the article about misinformation is itself misinformation?!? I feel like I’m in a cross between Oceans 11 and Inception.

goldenlocks ,

Yeah pretty much lol, I don’t know why people believe this without any sort of technical data to prove these accounts are Chinese, shouldn’t be hard to do that, then you have to prove they’re actually working for the government and not just some of the 1.4 billion people there that can use VPNs

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