Title might want to be altered: this is a description of a specific research paper analyzing Chinese online propaganda campaigns, not as general an analysis as the title indicates. Interesting stuff!
Thanks for the excellent link, I've been looking for a documentary on Putin's propaganda regime that I saw a few years ago, but this paper is a much deeper look which will serve the same purpose.
If you want more context on Putin's regime, check out, "Nothing is True and Everything is Possible" by Peter Pomerantsev. It's an inside view of Russian life/propaganda from someone who worked as a TV producer for a Russian network:
I'm not sure what Trump's arm of this kind of propaganda is, but Correct the Record was a very real thing, despite the bogeyman descriptions of it in some online communities.
Interestingly, the original website is now gone, but it used to say essentially that it advocated for Clinton across Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of social media.
The scary thing is just how cheap it would be to pay people to sit in online communities and drive attention to and away from whatever you wanted. Even more interesting is in 10 years it'll be like it never existed. Spread some propaganda, pack up, and go home.
Not sure why you were downvoted, CTR is a perfect example of this phenomenon operating within the USA, albeit in a slightly different context than in China.
As a general rule in democratic societies, if your cause has so little public support you have to actually pay people in online communities to get them to defend it, you tend to lose to the other side whose people are prepared to state their reason, argue or just troll for free (whether they've been encouraged to do it by a slick political campaign or aggressive media personality or not)
A New York billionaire with decades of supporting liberal policies and democratic politicians was elected as a champion of the conservative working middle class. That's a propaganda victory.
If the goal of Correct The Record was to brainwash the public then it failed spectacularly. If the puppetmasters of the world are behind it, they don't seem very effective at all.
>If the goal of Correct The Record was to brainwash the public then it failed spectacularly. If the puppetmasters of the world are behind it, they don't seem very effective at all.
They did brainwash the public, and would have succeeded, if not for the sheer determination and force of will behind the campaign of Donald Trump, whose steadfast commitment to truth and purity of character achieved the impossible and overturned the corrupt established order like Jesus overturning the tables of the moneylenders... is how you're supposed to resolve that paradox.
I'm not sure what's especially revealing about this story. A lot of the content we already knew, except now there's more evidence of it. The marginalrevolution author wrongly suggests that "it has long been assumed that propaganda posts would support the government with praise or criticize critics of the government" and says it's surprising this paper found it wasn't. This is no surprise, others have concluded this before this has been known probably a decade.
Kudos for the authors to write this paper though, it takes courage to do this.
For most people skimming the comment section, this interview here with a paid Chinese "online commentator" is far more revealing than submitted article is:
The commentator estimates 10-20% of posts on Chinese media are by "online commentators" like him, and he also talks about the methods he uses to guide and manipulate the discussion.
Gary King is a pretty prominent political scientist. It's unlikely that this is unoriginal work. Yes, that's an appeal to authority, but I think the methods used are what's novel. And don't discount just having some evidence!
Thank you for the link. The comments of the thought influencer do remind me the distorted discussions in the Economist's comment section I followed a couple of years ago. The topics that were heavily spammed were usually revolving about Chinese politics or economics.
This is really scary, because I do read comments critically, and have seen those sections being flooded with nonsense, or convincing arguments being pushed without evidence. Heck, this even happens on HackerNews, which users are thoughtful hackers and which are secretly trying to push an agenda? Or is there even a line between those?
Now some food for thought, does online anonymity ultimately help the powerful more than the general public?
It's fine for you to push your own agenda. But push an agenda that is honestly yours, not one that you're being paid to push. And push it honestly, not pretending to be something you're not.
I've noticed it, too. It looks like the public has gone mad. (Or perhaps like they're trying to gaslight us.)
But if the Chinese are doing this, and the Russians, and maybe the DNC and the RNC... that would explain why the public conversation has become so weird.
you won't learn this reading news articles online, and especially not from comment sections.
the irony of the term "fake news" is that it creates the false notion that there was once such a thing as "real news". information channel manipulation is a very very very old tradition.
>the irony of the term "fake news" is that it creates the false notion that there was once such a thing as "real news".
I'm friends with a journalist. He has opinions, slants, lenses, and even biases. However, he lives around here, and the stuff he publishes is based on events he has actually witnessed, live, in real-time. There is no equivalence between my friend the journalist (real news), and some teenager in Macedonia getting paid to make up sensational bullshit (fake news).
there is such a thing as reporting and investigation. very little of that survives the editorial process.
if I want to read some reporting, I'll have to go to a source that values it. i.e. not the NYTimes (or equivalent). The entire apparatus of the mass media has become thinly veiled editorial positioning, even in stories that are claimed as "news".
How would you know if you were wrong about this? Maybe NYTimes is actually pretty good, and posts like yours are trying to undermine our faith in actual journalists.
you're right, its hard to know. that's why I linked an example of a reasonably good empirical study examining editorial bias in a NYTimes article.
criticism of this kind is important in revealing those kinds of flaws. in many instances its not actually the journalist doing this, but the editors. NYTimes, for example, has recently begun the practice of making undocumented changes to online articles _after_ initial publication.
so why am I pointing this out? is it to undermine faith? I find it shocking that you would have any faith left at all. What is there to even be undermined?
in other words, who is responsible for convincing you what is true and what isn't? if you take things on faith you are demonstrating an attitude that you are ambivalent about the truth. that attitude displays a preference to have certainty in your dogma and to not be challenged about the trustworthiness of the sources of that dogma.
what is currently being called "fake news" is not the same thing as editorial bias nor do I equate them in the sense that I don't distinguish between the two. I do distinguish between them.
however, fake news and editorial bias are used to accomplish the same thing: disinformation. that is the level which I equate them.
Editorial bias omits some facts and leaves other on the table, thus providing some source of facts. If you had several sources with different editorial biases you could get a good set of facts to work with. This isn't as good as "objective" reporting, if there was ever such a thing, but it's still quite workable. It worked rather well for a long time.
To say "they both accomplish the same thing" is to omit a very important distinction - while both can mislead, one can still be used to advance the discussion and the other cannot.
there's a difference between editorial bias that emerges as an unavoidable artifact of work done by flawed humans, and editorial bias driven by political agenda. the former is expected and forgivable. the latter is disinformation.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines disinformation as "false information deliberately and often covertly spread (as by the planting of rumors) in order to influence public opinion or obscure the truth."
By this definition, editorializing cannot be equated to fake news. The former is the process by which editorial teams introduce bias into the news reports by inserting their own interpretation of the facts. Fake news is the process by which outright lies are fabricated. The former is about adding flavor to food - you may not like the flavor, but you can usually still taste the food underneath. The latter is about serving shit as food - if you eat it, it will make you sick.
No, not really. If that was the relevant clause, the definition would have read, "information that is intended to influence public opinion or obscure the truth." But clearly, based on the actual definition, a piece of information has to also be false in order to count as disinformation.
whose agenda is easy, the true one percent, the politicians. the people in power. in the US they are very adept at manipulation their base and with the cooperation of the media they have control of about every information source save one, the internet. They certainly are trying their best to limit what can happen there, the primary means will be to convince people that speech there must be limited to protect democracy, the election process, and such.
i know many say the rich/super rich are the one percent but in truth they just have more ability to pay the piper, the politicians. when the people go the wrong way politicians of any side will pile on to demagogue it.
beware anyone stating "polls suggest" because that is pure manipulation.
To me, the validity of the communication changes drastically when a comment is being paid for by a larger organization, vs being communicated a human who directly backs an agenda. I'm all for the second, but think we need legally required disclaimers on the first in casual comment forums.
They are trying to gaslight us. Foreign powers want to misinform and distract the public in democracies; a misinformed populace puts pressure on elected governments to govern poorly. If democratic governments flounder because of this, that gives authoritarians an opportunity to get more power and influence over world politics.
Not to say that western nations aren't engaged in their own information operations. Just that it is asymmetric warfare, authoritarian regimes have a lot less to fear from a misinformed or disengaged public.
Authoritarian regimes usually rest on more fragile underpinnings. If anything it's the inverse, authoritarian regimes have a lot MORE to fear from a "misinformed" public.
This is borne out by the fact that we see authoritarian regimes crack down much harder on social media and other forms of free communication.
I don't believe I agree with your contention, either that authoritarian regimes have more to fear from misinformation or that this relationship is borne out of social media.
Social media is neutral in terms of its content: it can broadcast accurate information or it can broadcast inaccurate information. But it allows that information to reach a much larger audience more quickly than calling on the phone or sending a letter or even wandering the streets shouting whatever you want to spread.
The only significant negative aspect of social media for authoritarians that I can think of is that it allows for non-centralized information spreading, whereas controlling the newspapers and TV is more straight-forward.
Statistically over the past 100 years democratic institutions have affected (or is it effected in this case?) the politics of authoritarian regimes dramatically more, as in orders of magnitude more, than the other way around
Historically that is true, but times are changing. Specifically, the Internet makes the flow of information (and therefore propaganda) a lot more symmetric. We saw this with the most recent election. It will only get worse.
Pushing an agenda is one thing if the person is doing it in good faith, even if I think their ideas are bad or not supported by evidence. In all likelihood there are large scale information operations going on with world powers trying to subvert each other's populations.
The really sinister thing is that we have paid, bad faith actors whose full time jobs are to spread misinformation and shape narratives online. There is just no way you and I, amateurs commenting sporadically in our free time, have the resources to combat armies of paid trolls.
I spent a lot of time thinking about it this weekend and it sounds bleak. Not only do they spread misinformation, the presence of bad faith actors in social spaces causes a breakdown in trust between all participants, leading to less dialogue and more polarization. Why bother debating me if I might be a paid agent from Belarus? Why bother investigating claims from the other side of an issue if there's a good chance it is paid propaganda? Meanwhile leaving yourself vulnerable to propaganda on your own side that increases group identity and groupthink.
Even worse, bad actors can start trends or spread falsehoods that end up motivating and encouraging good faith actors. There are plenty of people who have been caught up in an information operation, unwittingly propagating and defending someone else's manufactured data. That's scary.
Authoritarian regimes have much less to fear from this. If we disrupt public opinion in China, who cares? They don't really need public consent to do anything. Manipulating the public in democracies will lead to poor decisions and bad governance, giving authoritarian countries ample opportunities to seize more power on the world stage. We can't even fight back effectively.
There is just no way you and I, amateurs commenting sporadically in our free time, have the resources to combat armies of paid trolls.
I think that there are armies of amateurs with tons of free time. However, these are largely manipulated by armies of paid trolls. What's worse, is that the manipulation involves the normalization of non-thinking conformism, social coercion, and hate-filled groupthink. This applies to both sides of the political spectrum.
"Authoritarian regimes have much less to fear from this. If we disrupt public opinion in China, who cares? They don't really need public consent to do anything."
Every government, authoritarian, or not, continues to exist because they have the implicit consent of their subjects. Even in extremely repressive regimes, you'd be surprised at how many people support their leaders. My grandfather remembers people crying upon hearing the news of Stalin's death - and he has strong reasons to doubt that all of them were crocodile tears.
Read Solzhenitzin - even in labour camps, there were people who continued to endorse the state. Them ending up in a camp? That was all just a misunderstanding, that will soon be cleared up, if they make enough appeals to the right people. The GULAG had no shortage of temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
The really sinister thing is that we have paid, bad faith actors whose full time jobs are to spread misinformation and shape narratives online. There is just no way you and I, amateurs commenting sporadically in our free time, have the resources to combat armies of paid trolls.
What's the difference between this and a lot of PR?
Secrecy and deception. Advertising and corporate PR are open about their interests, purveyors of payola and positive-reviews-for-freebies are usually recognisable and the people involved often admit it.
Outright fabrication of big lies by paid PR/psyops operatives who pretend to be "one of us" is a different kettle of fish, and if it is repeated thousandfold, even people who are normally skeptic might at least perceive it as a plausible mainstream view.
Anonymity allows for sockpuppetry, the digital equivalent of ballot stuffing. A dedicated actor can essentially commit a sybil attack against an online community, creating the illusion that a particular point of view is more widespread than in reality.
Most individuals don't have the time or resources to perform this or hire people who can, but state-level actors can and do, as can influence groups, in which case it's either called astroturfing or marketing. Money buys influence. There's a reason why loyalties are still best tested face to face, and why most social progress requires people in a room, people on the street, and a few allies behind the scenes.
Different groups struggle for influence all the time, even within the same state. On the international level, states compete against other states by winning hearts and minds and swaying the public, despite publicly preaching cooperation, trade, and peace. This has always been this way, and the upside is fewer commoners are getting killed in the field of battle at the behest of their king.
For a critical reader, when reading anything, ask yourself, are the points raised plausible? Are the sources believable? Could anyone have an agenda (yes), could anyone have an axe to grind? (maybe) Who does this information benefit or hurt? Could it be genuine, or a false flag? Then consider your existing beliefs. Do they still hold? If yes, you were exposed to some new information and a different point of view and you're enriched for it. But are your views invalidated as a result of this new information? If so, then slow down and repeat these steps until you're satisfied with the conclusion.
(On the other hand, anonymity is a partial countermeasure against reprisal. I'm a sock of a medium volume HN poster, and predictably, I don't know if you'll believe me, and you won't know if I'm being genuine)
> …find a massive government effort, where every year the 50c party writes approximately 448 million social media posts nationwide. About 52.7% of these posts appear on government sites. The remaining 212 million posts are inserted into the stream of approximately 80 billion total posts on commercial social media sites, all in real time. If these estimates are correct, a large proportion of government web site comments, and about one of every 178 social media posts on commercial sites, are fabricated by the government. The posts are not randomly distributed but, as we show in Figure 2, are highly focused and directed, all with specific intent and content.
This is massive. But I am sure Western governments are paying attention as to how to combat online opinion using similar tactics. But I doubt they can match that sort of scale with their economies. Indian freelancers aren't really going to be that convincing to the American public.
In China the government hires people to sway public opinion. In the US, special interests and those with money do it. Is it worse that the Chinese government does it to "keep the peace", while those in the US do it to get your money? Super PACs, political activists, pharmaceutical companies, Reddit power users, brigades and pay-for-votes services... not sure if there's any real difference.
One major difference is how concentrated the special interests are. In the case of the Chinese government, public opinion is being swayed by a single entity. In the US, a large number of interest groups are all competing to try to sway public opinion. In the latter case, I think it's harder (at least in principle) for any one group to have a large effect on its own.
Except, centralization of wealth means that the opinions of a relatively few people control the seeming surface diversity of "influencers" in the USA by holding the purse strings (when the proles resort to crowd funding they can break out of this to an extent, Bernie being an example).
The elites rig the elections and the public sphere, while the proles use the one election where they can still sway the vote to vote for dangerous populists as a protest.
Old republican values are relegated to the dustbin, and a civilization becomes a shadow of its former self. This has happened before, and will happen again.
This seems to play out in practice—in the US, the issues that have the most lobbying and airplay tend to have strong voices on both sides. Sometimes it's companies on one side and activist groups on the other, but often it's a mix of different activists and companies on both sides. They're not always matched evenly, but few things are entirely one-sided.
The really scary lobbying is the sort that stays out of the public opinion and tries to influence the government in niche areas the average person doesn't know or care about (like very specific industry regulations). That's where companies get away with the most egregious things, at least until something finally brings the issue to the public conscience.
The other major differences is that political cultures that place high value on free expression of political views and public political participation generally don't have to bother paying people to reason, brigade or troll for their preferred political cause
Totally disagree, in the US as in China there is a ruling wealthy elite. Both are roughly the same proportion of the population, and both are pushing their agendas.
The one meaningful difference is that in the US they still pay lip service to the idea of free speech.
It's my opinion that attempts to sway public opinion are spitting in the wind, but normally in the same direction as the wind, resulting in an illusion of efficacy. You can see their lack of real impact when they desperately try (and fail) to turn the public. Cf Trump.
Control of ideas is massively oversold by both proponents and opponents, who both have a vested interest in believing it works. The reality is that the public has beliefs which are more cultural than anything else, and so do the "influencers", and so they tend to push in the direction the public was already going. And the opponents find it easier to blame influence rather than a cultural rejection of their ideas.
No, they're not, it is highly effective--I saw it firsthand during the run up to the Gulf War in 2003. I was on a message board and suddenly there would be all these "pro war" type members showing up posting basically propaganda and giving people a hard time and mostly creating chaos.
The latest time I saw this behavior was on Reddit during the just completed 2016 elections. And then my suspicions were validated when Correct The Record was outed as the group doing it.
This is ugly, ugly behavior--propaganda of the nastiest kind.
"I don't know how Nixon won, nobody I know voted for him". People live in bubbles. When you encounter a cultural clique with contrary ideas it can look like a villainous conspiracy simply because it's assumptions are so alien and yet so strongly held. Surely they must be shills, trolls, etc? No, generally not. People actually do have those beliefs and consider them worth grouping up and fighting for. Not the people you hang with, but elections in particular are great puncturers of bubbles; they count the real numbers.
Probably happened on a number of sides, as well as group organising on a voluntary basis to do propaganda, and individuals who were just that motivated, and so on.
My main point being though, black hat or white, pro Trump or pro Hillary, they were all spitting in the wind.
Your point is off the mark, propaganda works, it cost Hillary the election; that last minute FBI story swayed people and secured Trump as the winner despite the story being false.
It made the numbers move, but those are the same numbers that predicted a Hillary win. Clearly those numbers reflected more factors than absolute voting intention. For example: how acceptable it was to oppose Hillary in public.
Nobody gets to rerun the election in a Comey-less alternate universe and see if he changed it all. Pretending you can is self delusion.
The numbers didn't have time to move, that was the point of the late release, and why the polls were off, they didn't have time to adjust to the new information.
> Nobody gets to rerun the election in a Comey-less alternate universe and see if he changed it all. Pretending you can is self delusion.
I'm not pretending anything, you pretending that news didn't change the outcome of a close election is you being delusional.
Polls take time to move, some moved, some weren't re-polled before the election, and no polls aren't just polls; poll are a statistical sampling of the electorate and do allow you to draw a trend line and notice things like hey, that piece of news made a different in the outcome. That elections happen only once is not relevant, it doesn't invalidate the poll data that shows minds were changed.
Whether Comey influenced it or not is also a moot point, since Comey was a high-profile public servant making an official statement to the mainstream media, not a bunch of anyonymous forumites and Tweeters arguing with other anonymous forumites and tweeters across random internet backwaters.
I think it's more than a little unlikely the US government was so obsessed with making the case for war it launched (and successfully concealed from the public) a massive campaign to troll online forums without even being able to do basic stuff like make the official case for war a bit more competently and "discover" some WMDs to vindicate themselves afterwards.
It's not like there's any reason to believe that the millions of US citizens who passionately believed in the necessity of bringing down the "Axis of Evil" or just enjoy trolling liberals would recuse themselves from online debate in the build up to the war
Paying enough people to troll enough web forums for there to be a non-trivial possibility the OP was interacting with several of them without being rumbled doesn't really seem orders of magnitude more difficult than paying a couple of "weapons experts" to lie for you, or getting some material your military possesses into a territory your military controls.
They tried that mate. But it turns out it's hard to find credible weapons experts that are total hacks with no qualms about lying. When it became clear that their chosen expert was going to expose the fact that there were indeed NO WMD's, he promptly died shortly before his report was due to be published:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_(weapons_expert)
By comparison, posting on online forums can be done very easily by anyone of any character.
>Not the people you hang with, but elections in particular are great puncturers of bubbles; they count the real numbers.
An "election" that just "counts" which propaganda campaigns were more effective is worthless. You're really going to have to do better than just claiming that it's all bubbles and there are no propaganda campaigns.
I think the burden of proof lies on people making extraordinary claims like "people that disagreed with me in 2003 did so only because they were part of an enormous, undiscovered government conspiracy"
I remember the gulf war, I remember long established members of the boards I inhabited at the time, usually but not always with a right-wing lean, going absolutely bananas at the time. And even the more reasonable ones basically lost the plot. If you really want a conspiracy theory, I'd point to the government and Fox news being desperate to pivot from 9/11 to one of the wars they'd been planning.
I also remember Reddit during the last election. Political sub-reddits that only had Bernie fans and internet libertarians during non-election years suddenly got swamped by "normal" people, and the regulars started conspiracy theories about who all these people were with their "weird" opinions.
The fact is, reddit's demographics skew young & educated, any outside observer would expect them to be more liberal than the average American, and they mostly are, even accounting for the male skew and the pockets of reactionaries that make their home there.
The whole Correct the Record thing is on a par with pizzagate. I'm always saddened that I can't tell the difference between those who've been naively sucked in and those who repeat these things out of a political motive. I used to assume they were mostly in-the-know, but my faith in humanity has ebbed and I can no longer attribute to malice what is adequately explained by them mostly being brainwashed by the most feeble of conspiracy theories.
>The whole Correct the Record thing is on a par with pizzagate.
Do you mind clarifying in what respects they were similar to you? I haven't heard much in the way of specifics re CtR, but pizzagate was just... zero percent true. Was CtR similarly untruthful, or were they similar in some other dimension you find relevant?
Was it now :) Boy, are you in for nasty surprises once the truth hits the fan for real. It didn't bother you a tiny bit that the whole stinking pile of bullshit peddlers went into panic mode to cover everything up asap?
As the name suggests, they thought that trolls spreading lies was a problem, and they tried to "correct the record".
In the darker corners of Reddit on the other hand, every opinion that disagrees with them is written by a shill funded by George Soros, who in their version is a Nazi collaborator, rather than a victim of the Nazis.
The fact is that the average American is fairly "liberal" by many measures. Lots of Democrat policies have broad support. Democrats have been winning the popular vote for a while. Elections with high turnouts favor Democrats etc. etc. Republicans win via the standard political strategies rather than by reflecting the will of the people.
And that's all Americans. Reddit is obviously going to have even more liberal voices due to the demographics. We don't need to invoke a conspiracy theory to figure out why someone would call out a false right-wing talking point on Reddit.
An important part of the political theory behind pluralism is to do with managing certain realities beyond just individuals. You will have multiple power centres within societies (corporations, universities, trade unions, NGOs etc.). Allowing them a free voice has many benefits. Particularly it helps keep the peace, it makes power structures more obvious and it allows legitimate concerns to be surfaced more quickly and reliably.
Just because it's not the weakest member of society controlling things in either system doesn't make both systems the same.
In the UK, the government hires people, via the GCHQ, to sway public opinion.
"Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. "
I wouldn't feel so safe from US Gov't backed propaganda either. The US recently enacted the "Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act," which, in following recent bill naming history in the US, seems to be more about the opposite of its title: setting up the gov't infrastructure to push it's own propoganda and controlling speech it deems as sourced from "enemies".
That all sounds like fear mongering hyperbole. I just read over the text of the bill here (https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/5181...) and nothing in it suggests that would happen. Most of it is purely about identifying foreign propaganda.
I see the directive "to develop, plan, and synchronize, in coordination with the Secretary of Defense, the Director of National Intelligence, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, and other relevant departments and agencies, to ... proactively advance fact-based narratives that support United States allies and interests"
I see no reporting requirements for public oversight of exactly what narratives are advanced, nor does the cast of officers listed particularly hint that such information would be forthcoming, nor are there requirements to identify that its the government doing the pushing when a particular narrative is being advanced to the American public.
While there is value in countering foreign propaganda, I feel that to do it in secret is US propaganda and of less lasting value than doing it in the open.
And as the stories spread, Coler makes money from the ads on his websites. He wouldn't give exact figures, but he says stories about other fake-news proprietors making between $10,000 and $30,000 a month apply to him.
Here's a great example of the effect these stories can have:
He was amazed at how quickly fake news could spread and how easily people believe it. He wrote one fake story for NationalReport.net about how customers in Colorado marijuana shops were using food stamps to buy pot. "What that turned into was a state representative in the House in Colorado proposing actual legislation to prevent people from using their food stamps to buy marijuana based on something that had just never happened," Coler says.
As much as that author may wish to take all the credit, "Poor/Black people using food stamps to buy things that anger conservatives" is a long established genre in certain media circles, and it's clear he just put a small twist on it.
The most recent one I saw was people using food stamps to buy food from Amazon. I don't even understand why that's a bad thing, but someone wrote a story trying to gin up some outrage over it.
I think the difference is that we can choose not to buy products, but we can't choose a different government. So one stifles competition but the other stifles reform.
This reminds me of the storyline from Newsroom where Neal tries to infiltrate the troll underground. The scary thing is how effective this kind of manipulation can be. I often check the comments on HN before reading the article to see if it's going to be worth my time. With sports or controversial news articles I love to jump to the comments to see what the debate is. I like to think of myself as a critical thinker, but I often find myself getting swept up in my own confirmation bias. Upvoting the comments I agree with and downvoting those I don't, almost mindlessly without really evaluating the arguments. It's the more modern version of the cable news network shows where they put a Republican on one side and a Democrat on the other and let them yell their talking points at each other while the host interjects every so often to stir the pot. I hate that it appeals to me, but something about my base nature is attracted to it like a moth to a flame.
As you note, this level of self-awareness may not be sufficient, but is probably at least necessary for information sources to provide the kind of value we expect from them.
This makes me wonder more at the pro-Chinese position of a lot of western media, particularly the New York Times. Its fairly telling that Taiwan is most often described as a "renegade province" as opposed to a "peaceful high-income democracy", for example.
Having talked to a lot of English speaking, wealthy, educated, overseas Chinese people I am always disturbed at how many of them take communist party positions, despite being able to google "Tiananmen Square". More disturbing when they weren't even born in China.
I do not get the same impression of "renegade province" when western media talks about Taiwan. I usually get the impression that they're talking about a normal Asian democracy, and then they need to remind the reader about the truly bizarre relationship they have with China.
Can you share some examples which demonstrate what you mean?
I should be more precise. I'm trying to say that much Western writing is not critical of the decisions the Chinese political system has made about how society is organized there, despite its costs for the country. (E.g., the fast building of roads, trains, and infrastructure; the responsiveness of its electronics industry -- these things have costs for the people of China, but their benefits are very unequally distributed.)
I didn't mean to suggest that there is widespread Western cheerleading for China's political system, especially recently as Xi Jinpeng has consolidated power. What I was trying to capture is Western willingness to overlook the costs.
And plenty more critical of govt decisions (ghost city, pollution, food safety) from this particular Facebook page which is quite popular for news in China:
Find an article about Kosovo. It's never referred to as a renegade province. They will simply state that Serbia doesn't recognise its independence. The position that is at odds with the facts on the ground is never given credibility.
> This makes me wonder more at the pro-Chinese position of a lot of western media, particularly the New York Times. Its fairly telling that Taiwan is most often described as a "renegade province" as opposed to a "peaceful high-income democracy", for example.
The original article is usually something like this "China considers Taiwan to be a renegade province, while the self-governing island Ms. Tsai leads traces its roots to the formation of the Republic of China in 1911 that overthrew the last Chinese dynasty, only to lose the Chinese civil war to the Communists in 1949."
This is pretty standard description covering both side that I see in various news media (BBC usually calls it break-away province).
> Having talked to a lot of English speaking, wealthy, educated, overseas Chinese people I am always disturbed at how many of them take communist party positions, despite being able to google "Tiananmen Square". More disturbing when they weren't even born in China.
That's an entirely different issue all together. I think part of the reason is that they (myself included) are sick of seeing all the negative coverage of China 24/7 so they are just trying to balance things out. I myself recently did this on Hacker News:
Also I read from some research that this is quite a common phenomenon among overseas Chinese to defend China because they boost their national pride and at the same time have nothing to lose anyway since they are not living in China.
The original article is usually something like this "China considers Taiwan to be a renegade province, while the self-governing island Ms. Tsai leads traces its roots to the formation of the Republic of China in 1911 that overthrew the last Chinese dynasty, only to lose the Chinese civil war to the Communists in 1949."
No mention of the dramatically different standards of living (Taiwan has a higher PPP per capita than any PRC province, including Tianjin). No mention of the fact that the ROC declared the civil war over in the 1991. There is one aggressor and agitator here.
That's an entirely different issue all together. I think part of the reason is that they (myself included) are sick of seeing all the negative coverage of China 24/7 so they are just trying to balance things out. I myself recently did this on Hacker News:
Might I suggest voting with your feet and repatriating yourself back to the motherland? Wealthy chinese are often upset at hearing criticism of a communist dictatorship with an atrocious human rights record - but they don't want to live there themselves if they can avoid it. Clearly the benefits of western civilisation are wasted on them. They can go back to the unfairly slandered land they love, and the rest of us might be able to afford a house in our own country again.
> Wealthy chinese are often upset at hearing criticism of a communist dictatorship with an atrocious human rights record - but they don't want to live there themselves if they can avoid it.
Yes. I agree with this part. I try not to "waste benefits of western civilization" by engaging in meaningful discussions on topics like this. Unfortunately I have my own circumstances that forbid me from going back. Also, I find your tone quite intimating. Since you already figured out that these "wealthy Chinese" people are hypocrites, why not accept the fact for what it is and move on with your own life. It is not like they are going to follow your call to action.
Why is wealthy chinese in scare quotes? You have to be very wealthy by PRC standards to relocate in a western country to study or work. Think about what percentage of Americans (3.5-4 times the GDP per capita of china) could afford to relocate to relocate to a country with a much higher cost of living like Australia.
My call to action is not intended for overseas chinese. It is to make westerners think about the reality of the situation.
I don't know. There are many here who continue to take a pro-government pro-surveillance position inspite of the Snowden revelations. Many in the country and the mainstream media seem to think of him as a 'traitor'. That would seem to be equally disturbing, if not more?
i'd say our political machine in the US has done a great job for the last 35 years at distracting us from the biggest social threat of our times: wealth disparity. instead, the public conversations revolve around terrorism, who uses which bathroom, twitter, celebrities, and even health insurance.
if recent political movements (tea party, the 99%) and national elections have taught us anything, it's that this is increasingly on the minds of americans (and seemingly others, but i won't speak for them), yet politicians seem to want to talk about anything but that, lest they lose the financial backing of the economic elite.
at its core, this is about fairness, which is one of those fundamental psychological forces we can't and shouldn't ignore. game theory studies show time and again that we are willing to play into lose-lose situations if it means maintaining a semblance of fairness among participants. the trump election seems to be an example of that. the arab spring uprisings seem to be larger, more international examples.
we should be relentless about leading our politicians back to the topic of wealth disparity every single time they try to distract us with something else (particularly terrorism, which has killed far fewer people in the last 15 years than a single year of car accidents has, yet we have sacrificed so much monetarily and psychologically trying to battle that phantom).
You are right. Unfortunately the american electorate is easy to manipulate so they will blame their problems on other groups that are suffering the same problems. Instead of asking why salaries don't go up anymore while the company makes record profits people start attacking each other. The last election was a classical example of distraction. there was almost no discussion of things that would make people's lifes better but instead the propaganda machine talked about e-mail servers, infidelity and "he said, she said".
I think more of it had to do with a systemic and institutional plan of action to prevent any politician who gave voice to those concerns from achieving success in the primaries
It may not be unique to America (for example, the Brits seem equally easy to manipulate, based on the recent Brexit vote), but the populace being easy to manipulate is definitely not a "feature of democracy."
The fact of the matter is that there are many democracies in the world where the level of discourse is much more advanced. There are many reasons for this, but the primary factor seems to be that the average level of education in those countries tends to be higher.
It's a little condescending to blame this on the educational level. I know plenty of very educated people in the US who are fanatics and don't listen to others. I think it has to do with the obsession with winning, competition and binary thinking the US has.
It's pretty unique to America. I can't imagine any German to be as fervently for against Merkel or the CDU like Americans are for or against their party. In many countries I can have spirited political discussions over a wide range of topics without people feeling personally offended. That's simply not possible in the US.
Like most things in life there is a wide range of levels of tribalism. American politics is on a very high level of tribalism, more than a lot of other countries.
To quote you: If you are not noticing that, that's probably a bad sign (for what? Can you explain that?)
Bad sign that you may be deeply within one side or another which can blind you to the bigger picture.
From cursory observation of various political engagements around the world, it's all very similarly tribalistic - whether it be over the top rhetoric that appeal to emotion - or in some cases violent. Heck look at the rise of the far right support in various EU states. Politics is very often personal, so people will take it personally.
The only real difference is America takes up all the media oxygen given it's position in the world stage.
I think it's a feature of having a populous and very geographically large country. There's simply too much politics going on for any individual or even bureaucratic control to track and keep sane. Most politics in the mass of issues always swilling around doesn't really affect you, being targeting to specific industries or localities, though they have messy long tail effects as they're constantly over-applied.
I recall seeing a snippet of the Prime Minister of the UK being asked about a mail box on some particular street corner in London, in an open forum. He knew exactly what was being discussed. Smaller countries have their politicians more tangibly connected to people, as opposed to local representatives being seated thousands of miles away as is the case in the US.
People also forget that the US is set up kind of more like the EU, rather than most other countries. It's a federation of independent states, with deference of law to those states, except for those powers specifically granted to the federal government (at least on paper). This is a yet another abstraction level layered on top of politics that many people in other countries don't conceive.
So propaganda easily overwhelms people's natural gleaning of what's going on.
distracting us from the biggest social threat of our times: wealth disparity. instead, the public conversations revolve around terrorism, who uses which bathroom, twitter, celebrities, and even health insurance.
It is, although the discussion of health insurance centers about various approaches to rearranging deckchairs (When, instead, the entire system should be torn up, and replaced with single player. It's not clear if even doing that will be enough to really save it.)
it's certainly related, but the current political theater to repeal and replace the ACA seems to be an effort to take credit rather than make meaningful improvements. as citizens we shouldn't reward such unproductive behavior with our attention, much less our support.
This comment contains a couple of strong and unsubstantiated assertions.
1. Wealth disparity is an issue -- this needs to be justified beyond an appeal to fairness. Why is this an issue at all? Is the real issue the decline of the middle class? Is that necessarily connected to increasing wealth in the upper class?
2. The election of Donald Trump is a 'lose-lose' scenario. How? What, specifically, about his proposed policies has a demonstrably negative impact on the quality of life for American citizens and the United States' geopolitical influence?
>2. The election of Donald Trump is a 'lose-lose' scenario. How? What, specifically, about his proposed policies has a demonstrably negative impact on the quality of life for American citizens and the United States' geopolitical influence?
There's more to a president than their proposed policies. Trump's bigoted rhetoric is already having a demonstrably negative impact on the quality of life for many minorities in the USA (and he's not even in office yet)
1. Wealth disparity is an issue because wealth in America correlates very strongly with political power, which wealthy people in turn use to amass even more wealth and political power.
2. Oh man, where to even begin?
a. Repeal of ACA is the most obvious one. According to the recently released report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office[1], 18 million Americans will lose their health insurance in the first year when ACA is repealed. Over ten years, this number will increase to 32 million. In other words, by 2026, one in ten Americans will be without health insurance.
b. Trump wants to strip FCC of consumer protection laws[2]. It's pretty obvious why this will be horrendous for the average American.
c. He proposed pulling out of NATO. This one should also be pretty obvious: NATO is the major force that is keeping Russia in check. Without America there would be a NATO, and without NATO, Russian geopolitical influence would expand massively, reducing America's influence as a result.
d. His cabinet picks are a major disaster. Department of Labor headed by a guy who has fought against labor protection laws all his life. Department of Education headed by a woman who wants to abolish it. Department of Energy headed by a guy who has a degree in animal science. Department of Housing and Urban development headed by a guy whose only "qualification" for the job is having grown up in a poor neighborhood. Environmental Protection Agency headed by a guy who is a close ally of the fossil fuel industry. It gets worse and worse.
why is wealth disparity the biggest social threat?
Economic rent I can see being concern, especially when regulatory capture is involved, but there are many reasons for increasing wealth disparity that are completely fair.
Many of those being rewarded with wealth have built and led companies that have improved productivity and allowed many of those on the other side of the wealth divide to do more with less. Is it not fair to compensate them accordingly for the ways they have improved general welfare?
No. It may be fair to compensate people for greater effort. But the person who was born tall does not deserve a greater share of the coconuts just because only he can reach them.
Our system not only greatly rewards/punishes circumstance of birth, it further rewards those who leverage their luck to secure more even advantage, while the unlucky are forced to compete with each other in a race to the bottom for the scraps.
My version:
Republican party platform does not believe in the "veil of ignorance" at all whatsoever. They support neo-feudalism and aristocracy. Equality is fake, people are in fact different, those differences should be rewarded and punished in a free market, it is considered unfair to force equality to be true. Even equality under the law is negotiable, where those who can afford better lawyers get better justice.
Democrats are tone deaf, and suck at marketing their own policy successes. They'd rather convince people to vote for them on the basis of a smug liberalism which says if only people had the facts they'd vote Democrat. Ergo if you vote Republican you're either stupid or evil. This is not a winning strategy, obviously.
Considering how much pulp fiction consists of a kid discovering (s)he is royalty, it's surprising so many people think the average person dislikes aristocrats. We love celebrities. Heck, the UK still has a monarchy.
>biggest social threat of our times: wealth disparity
Serious question, not trolling: why does wealth disparity matter?
Let's say you start the year barely having enough to eat and are living in a cardboard box and you end the year with plenty of food and a small house, why would it matter if your neighbor gets to eat steak once a week and has a slightly nicer house? Surely the absolute fact that your are better off than you were previously is more important than the relative distribution of goods?
A quick way to reduce wealth disparity is to burn down every home that costs more than the median house price. That doesn't mean it's a good idea.
So why is relative wealth more important than absolute wealth again?
Maybe a slightly bigger house is tolerable, but if my neighbor is making 10 times more than me and is able to buy his way out of legal trouble while I have to abide by the rule of law, I'm one of three things: lazy, inferior, or getting screwed. To maintain my faith in capitalist democracy in the face of large wealth inequality you have to convince me that one of these three options is acceptable.
Most poor people I know wouldn't consider themselves lazy, so that one is out. With some serious social engineering and propaganda you may be able to convince the poor that they are inherently inferior, but the trend in most of the world seems to be against this sticking. So in most cases wealth disparity means that the poor people feel like they are getting screwed, i.e. they feel entitled to a better life, and they feel that their institutions have failed them.
Look at any country with a high Gini Coefficient and you can see what this leads to. The rich end up corralled into compounds surrounded by razor wire and electric fences, kidnapping runs rampant, political corruption is the rule. With no reason to believe that the government is working for the underclass, you can't really expect the underclass to abide by the government's laws.
At some basic level, it depends on what you want to optimize for in society.
If you want to optimize for "someone can own everything" then wealth disparity is not and will never be bad.
If you want to optimize for a wide host of other things, such as the health of the people in a society, crime rates in a society, class mobility or personal freedom, or other stuff, then you're already motivated to keep wealth disparity in check, because enough of it negatively affects all the rest.
Because it isn't simply about material wealth. Money is power. People with money have a far greater say in shaping our world, and have more freedom. Conversely those with little have little say and little freedom. Even the part of our society that is supposed to be egalitarian regardless of wealth or station, our government, is ruled by those with money. "One person, one vote" means nothing in a society where money buys elections and elected officials.
It's about having a fair and free society. Would you rather have a gourmet dinner every night in prison, or a PB&J in a free and egalitarian community?
They didn't manage to do anything. We did that for ourself.
Often I'm told "I know about issue x, but I can't do anything". To which I reply "well, yes you can. First dump your TV. Use the spare time to read books and choose a hobby than make you gather with others. Start trying to spend your money like every note is a voting buletin. Then get involved in any social/political activity at your local level".
Of course this has no impact. Most people do want TV. They want drama. They don't want to spend time and energy learning, thinking or taking responsibilities of their life.
If you let a cookie jar open in your garden and ants come to eat it, it's not the ants fault. ants are just ants. They see sugar, they try to get it. It's sucks, but you are the giant and they are the ants. You are responsible to understand the situation and make proper choices.
Last 35 years? The US has been arguing about and getting distracted from inequality since it was just colonies. In 1773, Boston merchants (smugglers) started complaining about liberty when all they really wanted was to keep the price of tea a bit higher. [0]
If you're serious about wanting change, you should appeal to the values of the capitalists. Don't complain about inequality, complain about inefficiency. A capitalist economy is supposedly (and probably) more efficient than a command economy, because a centralized bureaucracy is worse at allocating resources than a decentralized market. The central tenet of the free market is that decentralization is more efficient.
So what happens when a capitalist accrues more wealth, as is natural for some to do with luck or skill? Eventually, the most skilled or most lucky have most of the wealth. Wealth forms a log-normal or power-law distribution. It's natural and nothing to whine about. Unfortunately, this is an unstable system. As the wealth distribution becomes ever more long-tailed, what once was a free market becomes more and more like a centralized bureaucracy with a handfull of capitalists allocating resources instead of a handfull of bureaucrats.
Redistributing wealth, fairness aside, is simply the most efficient way to keep the market growing. It closes the loop of decentralization. Think of a Bayesian Meta-Bandit, a Bayesian Bandit [1] that selects a Bandit according to the probability that Bandit is best. No matter the history we've observed, the probability of our best Bandit in fact being best never reaches 100% and we always choose the lesser (according to our observations) with some non-zero probability. In the same way, the best societal strategy is to redistribute according to the probability that our best allocators (our wealthiest capitalists) might make a mistake or get unlucky.
Too much redistribution and we lose efficiency, because we're not giving the bulk of our resources to our best allocators. Too little redistribution and we lose efficiency, because our observed-best might either (1) just have gotten lucky in the past and aren't actually better or (2) might get unlucky in the future and we need a hedge against random failure.
Aaaanyway. Anyone who argues against redistribution needs to do some thinking about why capitalism works.
"Colonial merchants, some of them smugglers, played a significant role in the protests. Because the Tea Act made legally imported tea cheaper, it threatened to put smugglers of Dutch tea out of business."
By that I mean the two - wealth disparity and Diarrhea - are outcomes, not causes. Diarrhea is the outcome of poor infrastructure (food and water) and poverty that lead to weaker, susceptible immune systems.
Wealth disparity is the outcome of a bunch of things, like automation, a better ability to detect good workers, a greater desire to be rewarded for good work (if two people provide X and 10X performance and are rewarded as such... disparity), the DECREASE in wealth distribution globally (China is richer than in 1980, as is all of Asia), that geographically set people have global wealth, e.g. Gates, Zuckerberg, Page, Brin et al are top not of the US, but a world economy, whereas many people still earn a percentage of local money (trades people, waitresses etc) and probably many more elements I don't know about.
The problem is we live locally, so the disparity looks worse, even as globally it is coming down.
That is why there is more LOCAL choice than ever - in say beers - as we get imports, but LESS global variety, as we all get the best X of something, rather than having a vast array of isolated areas with their own unique elements. It is why Sydney, Australia is home to some of the best Thai food in the world, and the UK home to some of the best Indian.
> we should be relentless about leading our politicians back to the topic of wealth disparity
But towards what policy? Basic Income? Higher taxes? Less automation? Open borders? What is the policy prescription for this issue?
It's a cultural problem. There's always been these two styles of communication - one where you communicate to honestly express your views, and another where you communicate to put across an impression that is useful for your agenda. We're in an age now where the second style is making a huge comeback, from state-sponsored propaganda to social media trolling.
There is no doubt that memes and social media have been militarized for propaganda use. This presentation from a consulting agency to many U.S. TLAs and defense contractors outlines the strategies and contains numerous references to DoD work in the area. It gives models, tells what metrics to use, identifies roles, etc.
There is something new going on in the social network realm that can undermine trolling efforts as they exist today.
Social networks started appearing when tech adoption was relatively scarce. They predate the smartphone revolution. As such they had to bend out of shape to produce as much public or semi-public content in order to attract and engage enough users to sustain the network effects. The direct side effect of this approach is transparency of the discussion. People who disagree would butt heads because the feel the need to defend "their side" in "public". A manipulation agent can assess the current state of discussion as well as the immediate outcome of his actions, so that he can fine-tune his campaigns.
Now that the smartphone adoption is basically 100%, it becomes possible to build private social networks without making everything public or semi-public. The ones where content is only posted/shared in a close group and is not observable by trolls. No shares, no reposts, no likes, no "people are talking". Nothing. How would you use Snapchat to assess and manipulate the public opinion? The best you can do is check the hits on your web site. What if you lost even that to some sort of caching? Now you're flying completely blind.
Pretty much every popular messenger app has the potential to mutate into an opaque social network. Perhaps many already did.
It correlates with my theory of Endless September someday having an end. The problem of Endless September was growth - too much growth, too quickly. When that stops, and unless we experience an AI personhood event, it has to, because we only have so many people on the planet and so much data they can transmit - the network settles into a place where it can focus on quality instead of sheer scale. In the developed world we are likely already entering this phase, with online access surpassing 80%, and the rest of the world is not that far behind.
So then what happens? The business model changes. Social network technologies will re-commoditize and the value will return to communities. Privacy takes a bigger role, as you note. And the world, for better or worse(but probably better), becomes even weirder and harder to assess or manipulate top-down.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 211 ms ] threadThe Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model Why It Might Work and Options to Counter It http://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html
https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-True-Everything-Possible-Surr...
If you want an impartial analysis, you're not going to find it from war-mongering "think tank" imbeciles.
I'm not sure what Trump's arm of this kind of propaganda is, but Correct the Record was a very real thing, despite the bogeyman descriptions of it in some online communities.
https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00578997
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record
Interestingly, the original website is now gone, but it used to say essentially that it advocated for Clinton across Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of social media.
http://www.correctrecord.org/
The scary thing is just how cheap it would be to pay people to sit in online communities and drive attention to and away from whatever you wanted. Even more interesting is in 10 years it'll be like it never existed. Spread some propaganda, pack up, and go home.
The US government likely has similar programs going on here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JTRIG
In all seriousness - it's /pol/. See also /r/The_Donald, gab.ai, and a handful of niche forums.
As an aside, I'm sad that gab.ai hasn't seen adoption outside that political group. It's really got a lot of potential as a platform.
I'm not saying it's paid, I'm saying it's his propaganda arm. They serve the function, officially or not.
If the goal of Correct The Record was to brainwash the public then it failed spectacularly. If the puppetmasters of the world are behind it, they don't seem very effective at all.
They did brainwash the public, and would have succeeded, if not for the sheer determination and force of will behind the campaign of Donald Trump, whose steadfast commitment to truth and purity of character achieved the impossible and overturned the corrupt established order like Jesus overturning the tables of the moneylenders... is how you're supposed to resolve that paradox.
Kudos for the authors to write this paper though, it takes courage to do this.
For most people skimming the comment section, this interview here with a paid Chinese "online commentator" is far more revealing than submitted article is:
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2012/10/china%...
The commentator estimates 10-20% of posts on Chinese media are by "online commentators" like him, and he also talks about the methods he uses to guide and manipulate the discussion.
Here's the article:
http://gking.harvard.edu/50c
edit: it's also in the apsr, which is one of the poli sci journals.
There are a lot less people doing this kind of analysis in an academic setting than one might expect.
Now some food for thought, does online anonymity ultimately help the powerful more than the general public?
I don't think there is a line. Each of us pushes an agenda (our own). That's never going to change, and I wouldn't want it to.
> does online anonymity ultimately help the powerful more than the general public?
I don't do online anonymity :)
But if the Chinese are doing this, and the Russians, and maybe the DNC and the RNC... that would explain why the public conversation has become so weird.
We also know thanks to Snowden that the US government has long had operational programs to influence and subvert online discussion.
At this point I'd estimate a minimum of 30% of all posts online, including HN, are done by people with an agenda whether political or financial.
you won't learn this reading news articles online, and especially not from comment sections.
the irony of the term "fake news" is that it creates the false notion that there was once such a thing as "real news". information channel manipulation is a very very very old tradition.
I'm friends with a journalist. He has opinions, slants, lenses, and even biases. However, he lives around here, and the stuff he publishes is based on events he has actually witnessed, live, in real-time. There is no equivalence between my friend the journalist (real news), and some teenager in Macedonia getting paid to make up sensational bullshit (fake news).
if I want to read some reporting, I'll have to go to a source that values it. i.e. not the NYTimes (or equivalent). The entire apparatus of the mass media has become thinly veiled editorial positioning, even in stories that are claimed as "news".
a recent example of this effect: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/01/17/another-followup-to-eco...
my point is that the work of actual investigators is no longer the primary interest of mass media, and it hasn't been for a long time.
criticism of this kind is important in revealing those kinds of flaws. in many instances its not actually the journalist doing this, but the editors. NYTimes, for example, has recently begun the practice of making undocumented changes to online articles _after_ initial publication.
here is a recent example of that practice:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-the-new-york-t...
and the times public editor's response to the controversy
https://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/17/new-york-t...
so why am I pointing this out? is it to undermine faith? I find it shocking that you would have any faith left at all. What is there to even be undermined?
in other words, who is responsible for convincing you what is true and what isn't? if you take things on faith you are demonstrating an attitude that you are ambivalent about the truth. that attitude displays a preference to have certainty in your dogma and to not be challenged about the trustworthiness of the sources of that dogma.
however, fake news and editorial bias are used to accomplish the same thing: disinformation. that is the level which I equate them.
To say "they both accomplish the same thing" is to omit a very important distinction - while both can mislead, one can still be used to advance the discussion and the other cannot.
By this definition, editorializing cannot be equated to fake news. The former is the process by which editorial teams introduce bias into the news reports by inserting their own interpretation of the facts. Fake news is the process by which outright lies are fabricated. The former is about adding flavor to food - you may not like the flavor, but you can usually still taste the food underneath. The latter is about serving shit as food - if you eat it, it will make you sick.
this is the relevant clause of the definition
i know many say the rich/super rich are the one percent but in truth they just have more ability to pay the piper, the politicians. when the people go the wrong way politicians of any side will pile on to demagogue it.
beware anyone stating "polls suggest" because that is pure manipulation.
100% of all communication by humans is done by people with an agenda.
Not to say that western nations aren't engaged in their own information operations. Just that it is asymmetric warfare, authoritarian regimes have a lot less to fear from a misinformed or disengaged public.
This is borne out by the fact that we see authoritarian regimes crack down much harder on social media and other forms of free communication.
Social media is neutral in terms of its content: it can broadcast accurate information or it can broadcast inaccurate information. But it allows that information to reach a much larger audience more quickly than calling on the phone or sending a letter or even wandering the streets shouting whatever you want to spread.
The only significant negative aspect of social media for authoritarians that I can think of is that it allows for non-centralized information spreading, whereas controlling the newspapers and TV is more straight-forward.
Worse than a misinformed populace is a populace that can't think. The latter might well get real information and dismiss it.
The really sinister thing is that we have paid, bad faith actors whose full time jobs are to spread misinformation and shape narratives online. There is just no way you and I, amateurs commenting sporadically in our free time, have the resources to combat armies of paid trolls.
I spent a lot of time thinking about it this weekend and it sounds bleak. Not only do they spread misinformation, the presence of bad faith actors in social spaces causes a breakdown in trust between all participants, leading to less dialogue and more polarization. Why bother debating me if I might be a paid agent from Belarus? Why bother investigating claims from the other side of an issue if there's a good chance it is paid propaganda? Meanwhile leaving yourself vulnerable to propaganda on your own side that increases group identity and groupthink.
Even worse, bad actors can start trends or spread falsehoods that end up motivating and encouraging good faith actors. There are plenty of people who have been caught up in an information operation, unwittingly propagating and defending someone else's manufactured data. That's scary.
Authoritarian regimes have much less to fear from this. If we disrupt public opinion in China, who cares? They don't really need public consent to do anything. Manipulating the public in democracies will lead to poor decisions and bad governance, giving authoritarian countries ample opportunities to seize more power on the world stage. We can't even fight back effectively.
I think that there are armies of amateurs with tons of free time. However, these are largely manipulated by armies of paid trolls. What's worse, is that the manipulation involves the normalization of non-thinking conformism, social coercion, and hate-filled groupthink. This applies to both sides of the political spectrum.
Every government, authoritarian, or not, continues to exist because they have the implicit consent of their subjects. Even in extremely repressive regimes, you'd be surprised at how many people support their leaders. My grandfather remembers people crying upon hearing the news of Stalin's death - and he has strong reasons to doubt that all of them were crocodile tears.
Read Solzhenitzin - even in labour camps, there were people who continued to endorse the state. Them ending up in a camp? That was all just a misunderstanding, that will soon be cleared up, if they make enough appeals to the right people. The GULAG had no shortage of temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
What's the difference between this and a lot of PR?
Outright fabrication of big lies by paid PR/psyops operatives who pretend to be "one of us" is a different kettle of fish, and if it is repeated thousandfold, even people who are normally skeptic might at least perceive it as a plausible mainstream view.
Most individuals don't have the time or resources to perform this or hire people who can, but state-level actors can and do, as can influence groups, in which case it's either called astroturfing or marketing. Money buys influence. There's a reason why loyalties are still best tested face to face, and why most social progress requires people in a room, people on the street, and a few allies behind the scenes.
Different groups struggle for influence all the time, even within the same state. On the international level, states compete against other states by winning hearts and minds and swaying the public, despite publicly preaching cooperation, trade, and peace. This has always been this way, and the upside is fewer commoners are getting killed in the field of battle at the behest of their king.
For a critical reader, when reading anything, ask yourself, are the points raised plausible? Are the sources believable? Could anyone have an agenda (yes), could anyone have an axe to grind? (maybe) Who does this information benefit or hurt? Could it be genuine, or a false flag? Then consider your existing beliefs. Do they still hold? If yes, you were exposed to some new information and a different point of view and you're enriched for it. But are your views invalidated as a result of this new information? If so, then slow down and repeat these steps until you're satisfied with the conclusion.
(On the other hand, anonymity is a partial countermeasure against reprisal. I'm a sock of a medium volume HN poster, and predictably, I don't know if you'll believe me, and you won't know if I'm being genuine)
This is massive. But I am sure Western governments are paying attention as to how to combat online opinion using similar tactics. But I doubt they can match that sort of scale with their economies. Indian freelancers aren't really going to be that convincing to the American public.
Chatbots scale much easier than manual astroturfing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trrqslUpfdw
Old republican values are relegated to the dustbin, and a civilization becomes a shadow of its former self. This has happened before, and will happen again.
The really scary lobbying is the sort that stays out of the public opinion and tries to influence the government in niche areas the average person doesn't know or care about (like very specific industry regulations). That's where companies get away with the most egregious things, at least until something finally brings the issue to the public conscience.
The one meaningful difference is that in the US they still pay lip service to the idea of free speech.
Control of ideas is massively oversold by both proponents and opponents, who both have a vested interest in believing it works. The reality is that the public has beliefs which are more cultural than anything else, and so do the "influencers", and so they tend to push in the direction the public was already going. And the opponents find it easier to blame influence rather than a cultural rejection of their ideas.
The latest time I saw this behavior was on Reddit during the just completed 2016 elections. And then my suspicions were validated when Correct The Record was outed as the group doing it.
This is ugly, ugly behavior--propaganda of the nastiest kind.
My main point being though, black hat or white, pro Trump or pro Hillary, they were all spitting in the wind.
Nobody gets to rerun the election in a Comey-less alternate universe and see if he changed it all. Pretending you can is self delusion.
> Nobody gets to rerun the election in a Comey-less alternate universe and see if he changed it all. Pretending you can is self delusion.
I'm not pretending anything, you pretending that news didn't change the outcome of a close election is you being delusional.
It's not like there's any reason to believe that the millions of US citizens who passionately believed in the necessity of bringing down the "Axis of Evil" or just enjoy trolling liberals would recuse themselves from online debate in the build up to the war
By comparison, posting on online forums can be done very easily by anyone of any character.
An "election" that just "counts" which propaganda campaigns were more effective is worthless. You're really going to have to do better than just claiming that it's all bubbles and there are no propaganda campaigns.
I also remember Reddit during the last election. Political sub-reddits that only had Bernie fans and internet libertarians during non-election years suddenly got swamped by "normal" people, and the regulars started conspiracy theories about who all these people were with their "weird" opinions.
The fact is, reddit's demographics skew young & educated, any outside observer would expect them to be more liberal than the average American, and they mostly are, even accounting for the male skew and the pockets of reactionaries that make their home there.
The whole Correct the Record thing is on a par with pizzagate. I'm always saddened that I can't tell the difference between those who've been naively sucked in and those who repeat these things out of a political motive. I used to assume they were mostly in-the-know, but my faith in humanity has ebbed and I can no longer attribute to malice what is adequately explained by them mostly being brainwashed by the most feeble of conspiracy theories.
Do you mind clarifying in what respects they were similar to you? I haven't heard much in the way of specifics re CtR, but pizzagate was just... zero percent true. Was CtR similarly untruthful, or were they similar in some other dimension you find relevant?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record
As the name suggests, they thought that trolls spreading lies was a problem, and they tried to "correct the record".
In the darker corners of Reddit on the other hand, every opinion that disagrees with them is written by a shill funded by George Soros, who in their version is a Nazi collaborator, rather than a victim of the Nazis.
The fact is that the average American is fairly "liberal" by many measures. Lots of Democrat policies have broad support. Democrats have been winning the popular vote for a while. Elections with high turnouts favor Democrats etc. etc. Republicans win via the standard political strategies rather than by reflecting the will of the people.
And that's all Americans. Reddit is obviously going to have even more liberal voices due to the demographics. We don't need to invoke a conspiracy theory to figure out why someone would call out a false right-wing talking point on Reddit.
Just because it's not the weakest member of society controlling things in either system doesn't make both systems the same.
"Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. "
https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
I see no reporting requirements for public oversight of exactly what narratives are advanced, nor does the cast of officers listed particularly hint that such information would be forthcoming, nor are there requirements to identify that its the government doing the pushing when a particular narrative is being advanced to the American public.
While there is value in countering foreign propaganda, I feel that to do it in secret is US propaganda and of less lasting value than doing it in the open.
And as the stories spread, Coler makes money from the ads on his websites. He wouldn't give exact figures, but he says stories about other fake-news proprietors making between $10,000 and $30,000 a month apply to him.
Here's a great example of the effect these stories can have:
He was amazed at how quickly fake news could spread and how easily people believe it. He wrote one fake story for NationalReport.net about how customers in Colorado marijuana shops were using food stamps to buy pot. "What that turned into was a state representative in the House in Colorado proposing actual legislation to prevent people from using their food stamps to buy marijuana based on something that had just never happened," Coler says.
Longer (audio) version of the story here: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/12/02/504155809/episo...
The most recent one I saw was people using food stamps to buy food from Amazon. I don't even understand why that's a bad thing, but someone wrote a story trying to gin up some outrage over it.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/01/16/amazon-be...
http://www.infowars.com/amazon-to-accept-food-stamps-under-n...
(Internet access still being seen as a luxury rather than a necessity to participate in modern society/economy.)
But we have proof that they lie about these things preventatively as well as reactively.
I imagine that in China as well as here, their shills are skilled at disruption and redirection.
It's still encouraging to see, though.
Having talked to a lot of English speaking, wealthy, educated, overseas Chinese people I am always disturbed at how many of them take communist party positions, despite being able to google "Tiananmen Square". More disturbing when they weren't even born in China.
Can you share some examples which demonstrate what you mean?
I do agree with your larger point that a lot of stories in Western media are uncritical of the shortcomings and risks of the Chinese political system.
I didn't mean to suggest that there is widespread Western cheerleading for China's political system, especially recently as Xi Jinpeng has consolidated power. What I was trying to capture is Western willingness to overlook the costs.
http://www.economist.com/news/china/21714383-and-theres-lot-...
And plenty more critical of govt decisions (ghost city, pollution, food safety) from this particular Facebook page which is quite popular for news in China:
https://www.facebook.com/shanghaiist/
The original article is usually something like this "China considers Taiwan to be a renegade province, while the self-governing island Ms. Tsai leads traces its roots to the formation of the Republic of China in 1911 that overthrew the last Chinese dynasty, only to lose the Chinese civil war to the Communists in 1949."
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/11/world/asia/taiwan-tsai-ch...
This is pretty standard description covering both side that I see in various news media (BBC usually calls it break-away province).
> Having talked to a lot of English speaking, wealthy, educated, overseas Chinese people I am always disturbed at how many of them take communist party positions, despite being able to google "Tiananmen Square". More disturbing when they weren't even born in China.
That's an entirely different issue all together. I think part of the reason is that they (myself included) are sick of seeing all the negative coverage of China 24/7 so they are just trying to balance things out. I myself recently did this on Hacker News:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13398849
Also I read from some research that this is quite a common phenomenon among overseas Chinese to defend China because they boost their national pride and at the same time have nothing to lose anyway since they are not living in China.
No mention of the dramatically different standards of living (Taiwan has a higher PPP per capita than any PRC province, including Tianjin). No mention of the fact that the ROC declared the civil war over in the 1991. There is one aggressor and agitator here.
That's an entirely different issue all together. I think part of the reason is that they (myself included) are sick of seeing all the negative coverage of China 24/7 so they are just trying to balance things out. I myself recently did this on Hacker News:
Might I suggest voting with your feet and repatriating yourself back to the motherland? Wealthy chinese are often upset at hearing criticism of a communist dictatorship with an atrocious human rights record - but they don't want to live there themselves if they can avoid it. Clearly the benefits of western civilisation are wasted on them. They can go back to the unfairly slandered land they love, and the rest of us might be able to afford a house in our own country again.
Yes. I agree with this part. I try not to "waste benefits of western civilization" by engaging in meaningful discussions on topics like this. Unfortunately I have my own circumstances that forbid me from going back. Also, I find your tone quite intimating. Since you already figured out that these "wealthy Chinese" people are hypocrites, why not accept the fact for what it is and move on with your own life. It is not like they are going to follow your call to action.
My call to action is not intended for overseas chinese. It is to make westerners think about the reality of the situation.
if recent political movements (tea party, the 99%) and national elections have taught us anything, it's that this is increasingly on the minds of americans (and seemingly others, but i won't speak for them), yet politicians seem to want to talk about anything but that, lest they lose the financial backing of the economic elite.
at its core, this is about fairness, which is one of those fundamental psychological forces we can't and shouldn't ignore. game theory studies show time and again that we are willing to play into lose-lose situations if it means maintaining a semblance of fairness among participants. the trump election seems to be an example of that. the arab spring uprisings seem to be larger, more international examples.
we should be relentless about leading our politicians back to the topic of wealth disparity every single time they try to distract us with something else (particularly terrorism, which has killed far fewer people in the last 15 years than a single year of car accidents has, yet we have sacrificed so much monetarily and psychologically trying to battle that phantom).
that is a feature of democracy not unique to America
The fact of the matter is that there are many democracies in the world where the level of discourse is much more advanced. There are many reasons for this, but the primary factor seems to be that the average level of education in those countries tends to be higher.
To quote you: If you are not noticing that, that's probably a bad sign (for what? Can you explain that?)
From cursory observation of various political engagements around the world, it's all very similarly tribalistic - whether it be over the top rhetoric that appeal to emotion - or in some cases violent. Heck look at the rise of the far right support in various EU states. Politics is very often personal, so people will take it personally.
The only real difference is America takes up all the media oxygen given it's position in the world stage.
I recall seeing a snippet of the Prime Minister of the UK being asked about a mail box on some particular street corner in London, in an open forum. He knew exactly what was being discussed. Smaller countries have their politicians more tangibly connected to people, as opposed to local representatives being seated thousands of miles away as is the case in the US.
People also forget that the US is set up kind of more like the EU, rather than most other countries. It's a federation of independent states, with deference of law to those states, except for those powers specifically granted to the federal government (at least on paper). This is a yet another abstraction level layered on top of politics that many people in other countries don't conceive.
So propaganda easily overwhelms people's natural gleaning of what's going on.
Isn't health insurance a wealth disparity issue?
1. Wealth disparity is an issue -- this needs to be justified beyond an appeal to fairness. Why is this an issue at all? Is the real issue the decline of the middle class? Is that necessarily connected to increasing wealth in the upper class?
2. The election of Donald Trump is a 'lose-lose' scenario. How? What, specifically, about his proposed policies has a demonstrably negative impact on the quality of life for American citizens and the United States' geopolitical influence?
There's more to a president than their proposed policies. Trump's bigoted rhetoric is already having a demonstrably negative impact on the quality of life for many minorities in the USA (and he's not even in office yet)
https://twitter.com/i/moments/796417517157830656?lang=en
2. Oh man, where to even begin?
a. Repeal of ACA is the most obvious one. According to the recently released report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office[1], 18 million Americans will lose their health insurance in the first year when ACA is repealed. Over ten years, this number will increase to 32 million. In other words, by 2026, one in ten Americans will be without health insurance.
b. Trump wants to strip FCC of consumer protection laws[2]. It's pretty obvious why this will be horrendous for the average American.
c. He proposed pulling out of NATO. This one should also be pretty obvious: NATO is the major force that is keeping Russia in check. Without America there would be a NATO, and without NATO, Russian geopolitical influence would expand massively, reducing America's influence as a result.
d. His cabinet picks are a major disaster. Department of Labor headed by a guy who has fought against labor protection laws all his life. Department of Education headed by a woman who wants to abolish it. Department of Energy headed by a guy who has a degree in animal science. Department of Housing and Urban development headed by a guy whose only "qualification" for the job is having grown up in a poor neighborhood. Environmental Protection Agency headed by a guy who is a close ally of the fossil fuel industry. It gets worse and worse.
[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/01/17/...
[2]http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/01/trump-team-report...
Economic rent I can see being concern, especially when regulatory capture is involved, but there are many reasons for increasing wealth disparity that are completely fair.
Many of those being rewarded with wealth have built and led companies that have improved productivity and allowed many of those on the other side of the wealth divide to do more with less. Is it not fair to compensate them accordingly for the ways they have improved general welfare?
Our system not only greatly rewards/punishes circumstance of birth, it further rewards those who leverage their luck to secure more even advantage, while the unlucky are forced to compete with each other in a race to the bottom for the scraps.
Hillbilly Elegy https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/11/books/review-in-hillbilly...
My version: Republican party platform does not believe in the "veil of ignorance" at all whatsoever. They support neo-feudalism and aristocracy. Equality is fake, people are in fact different, those differences should be rewarded and punished in a free market, it is considered unfair to force equality to be true. Even equality under the law is negotiable, where those who can afford better lawyers get better justice.
Democrats are tone deaf, and suck at marketing their own policy successes. They'd rather convince people to vote for them on the basis of a smug liberalism which says if only people had the facts they'd vote Democrat. Ergo if you vote Republican you're either stupid or evil. This is not a winning strategy, obviously.
Serious question, not trolling: why does wealth disparity matter?
Let's say you start the year barely having enough to eat and are living in a cardboard box and you end the year with plenty of food and a small house, why would it matter if your neighbor gets to eat steak once a week and has a slightly nicer house? Surely the absolute fact that your are better off than you were previously is more important than the relative distribution of goods?
A quick way to reduce wealth disparity is to burn down every home that costs more than the median house price. That doesn't mean it's a good idea.
So why is relative wealth more important than absolute wealth again?
Most poor people I know wouldn't consider themselves lazy, so that one is out. With some serious social engineering and propaganda you may be able to convince the poor that they are inherently inferior, but the trend in most of the world seems to be against this sticking. So in most cases wealth disparity means that the poor people feel like they are getting screwed, i.e. they feel entitled to a better life, and they feel that their institutions have failed them.
Look at any country with a high Gini Coefficient and you can see what this leads to. The rich end up corralled into compounds surrounded by razor wire and electric fences, kidnapping runs rampant, political corruption is the rule. With no reason to believe that the government is working for the underclass, you can't really expect the underclass to abide by the government's laws.
If you want to optimize for "someone can own everything" then wealth disparity is not and will never be bad.
If you want to optimize for a wide host of other things, such as the health of the people in a society, crime rates in a society, class mobility or personal freedom, or other stuff, then you're already motivated to keep wealth disparity in check, because enough of it negatively affects all the rest.
There are some good thoughts here: https://www.quora.com/Is-wealth-inequality-bad
But really, a google search for "why is wealth inequality bad" will give you a lot of stuff.
Please, if you're genuinely curious, read some of that and decide what you think society should be optimized for.
It's about having a fair and free society. Would you rather have a gourmet dinner every night in prison, or a PB&J in a free and egalitarian community?
Often I'm told "I know about issue x, but I can't do anything". To which I reply "well, yes you can. First dump your TV. Use the spare time to read books and choose a hobby than make you gather with others. Start trying to spend your money like every note is a voting buletin. Then get involved in any social/political activity at your local level".
Of course this has no impact. Most people do want TV. They want drama. They don't want to spend time and energy learning, thinking or taking responsibilities of their life.
If you let a cookie jar open in your garden and ants come to eat it, it's not the ants fault. ants are just ants. They see sugar, they try to get it. It's sucks, but you are the giant and they are the ants. You are responsible to understand the situation and make proper choices.
If you're serious about wanting change, you should appeal to the values of the capitalists. Don't complain about inequality, complain about inefficiency. A capitalist economy is supposedly (and probably) more efficient than a command economy, because a centralized bureaucracy is worse at allocating resources than a decentralized market. The central tenet of the free market is that decentralization is more efficient.
So what happens when a capitalist accrues more wealth, as is natural for some to do with luck or skill? Eventually, the most skilled or most lucky have most of the wealth. Wealth forms a log-normal or power-law distribution. It's natural and nothing to whine about. Unfortunately, this is an unstable system. As the wealth distribution becomes ever more long-tailed, what once was a free market becomes more and more like a centralized bureaucracy with a handfull of capitalists allocating resources instead of a handfull of bureaucrats.
Redistributing wealth, fairness aside, is simply the most efficient way to keep the market growing. It closes the loop of decentralization. Think of a Bayesian Meta-Bandit, a Bayesian Bandit [1] that selects a Bandit according to the probability that Bandit is best. No matter the history we've observed, the probability of our best Bandit in fact being best never reaches 100% and we always choose the lesser (according to our observations) with some non-zero probability. In the same way, the best societal strategy is to redistribute according to the probability that our best allocators (our wealthiest capitalists) might make a mistake or get unlucky.
Too much redistribution and we lose efficiency, because we're not giving the bulk of our resources to our best allocators. Too little redistribution and we lose efficiency, because our observed-best might either (1) just have gotten lucky in the past and aren't actually better or (2) might get unlucky in the future and we need a hedge against random failure.
Aaaanyway. Anyone who argues against redistribution needs to do some thinking about why capitalism works.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party#Resisting_the...
"Colonial merchants, some of them smugglers, played a significant role in the protests. Because the Tea Act made legally imported tea cheaper, it threatened to put smugglers of Dutch tea out of business."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit#Probability...
A Bayesian Bandit chooses actions according to the Bayesian probability that the action is best.
That's not the biggest threat, any more than Diarrhea is a bigger threat than other health issues, despite Diarrhea killing more people: https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/global/diarrhea-burden.html
By that I mean the two - wealth disparity and Diarrhea - are outcomes, not causes. Diarrhea is the outcome of poor infrastructure (food and water) and poverty that lead to weaker, susceptible immune systems.
Wealth disparity is the outcome of a bunch of things, like automation, a better ability to detect good workers, a greater desire to be rewarded for good work (if two people provide X and 10X performance and are rewarded as such... disparity), the DECREASE in wealth distribution globally (China is richer than in 1980, as is all of Asia), that geographically set people have global wealth, e.g. Gates, Zuckerberg, Page, Brin et al are top not of the US, but a world economy, whereas many people still earn a percentage of local money (trades people, waitresses etc) and probably many more elements I don't know about.
The problem is we live locally, so the disparity looks worse, even as globally it is coming down.
That is why there is more LOCAL choice than ever - in say beers - as we get imports, but LESS global variety, as we all get the best X of something, rather than having a vast array of isolated areas with their own unique elements. It is why Sydney, Australia is home to some of the best Thai food in the world, and the UK home to some of the best Indian.
> we should be relentless about leading our politicians back to the topic of wealth disparity
But towards what policy? Basic Income? Higher taxes? Less automation? Open borders? What is the policy prescription for this issue?
We've known this for a few millenia.
And the top comment is from a 4 day old account that somehow gained 17 karma for the one post.
So yes, something seems to be broken.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13414527
http://robotictechnologyinc.com/index.php/military-memetics
Either find the PDF halfway down, or just go here: http://robotictechnologyinc.com/images/upload/file/Presentat...
And here is their 1,680 page compendium of ~100 papers on the subject which they used as references: http://robotictechnologyinc.com/images/upload/file/Memetics%...
Distraction is a tactic, but it's only a single tool in the strategy. It's also relevant when to distract, when to counter, when to ignore, etc.
Social networks started appearing when tech adoption was relatively scarce. They predate the smartphone revolution. As such they had to bend out of shape to produce as much public or semi-public content in order to attract and engage enough users to sustain the network effects. The direct side effect of this approach is transparency of the discussion. People who disagree would butt heads because the feel the need to defend "their side" in "public". A manipulation agent can assess the current state of discussion as well as the immediate outcome of his actions, so that he can fine-tune his campaigns.
Now that the smartphone adoption is basically 100%, it becomes possible to build private social networks without making everything public or semi-public. The ones where content is only posted/shared in a close group and is not observable by trolls. No shares, no reposts, no likes, no "people are talking". Nothing. How would you use Snapchat to assess and manipulate the public opinion? The best you can do is check the hits on your web site. What if you lost even that to some sort of caching? Now you're flying completely blind.
Pretty much every popular messenger app has the potential to mutate into an opaque social network. Perhaps many already did.
So then what happens? The business model changes. Social network technologies will re-commoditize and the value will return to communities. Privacy takes a bigger role, as you note. And the world, for better or worse(but probably better), becomes even weirder and harder to assess or manipulate top-down.
> "I saw your comment, it’s really inspiring, I want to ask, do you have any public opinion guidance management, or online commenting experience?"
After tallying up, 19% of the people who post online answered yes.