China Is Perfecting a New Method For Suppressing Dissent On the Internet (vox.com) 151
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vox: The art of suppressing dissent has been perfected over the years by authoritarian governments. For most of human history, the solution was simple: force. Punish people severely enough when they step out of line and you deter potential protesters. But in the age of the internet and "fake news," there are easier ways to tame dissent. A new study by Gary King of Harvard University, Jennifer Pan of Stanford University, and Margaret Roberts of the University of California San Diego suggests that China is the leading innovator on this front. Their paper, titled "How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, Not Engaged Argument," shows how Beijing, with the help of a massive army of government-backed internet commentators, floods the web in China with pro-regime propaganda. What's different about China's approach is the content of the propaganda. The government doesn't refute critics or defend policies; instead, it overwhelms the population with positive news (what the researchers call "cheerleading" content) in order to eclipse bad news and divert attention away from actual problems. This has allowed the Chinese government to manipulate citizens without appearing to do so. It permits just enough criticism to maintain the illusion of dissent and only acts overtly when fears of mass protest or collective action arise.
1984 (Score:1)
George Orwell would have been proud.
Nope. (Score:5, Insightful)
Orwell would've been amazed at the ingenuity of people and technology and the new ways of manipulating society he never thought of. He would admit that Huxley was closer to reality than him.
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1984 - Flood everyone with so much meaningless information that nothing is relevant. Even the structure of language itself so that there are no words for concepts such as "democracy".
Brave New World - Information is on a need to know basis, with the Alphas having access to all information and the Deltas/Epsilons living in ignorance.
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Hell (Score:1)
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Dictatorship - meaning government makes up it's own laws (sanctuary cities) and doesn't follow the laws on the books if they don't like them. (Obama saying he won't following existing immigration law.)
Yeah. You're right we were on the way to a dictatorship.
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Ah yes, moderate levels of compassion for immigrants, a hallmark of dictatorships...
Why would you use such a stupid argument when there's so many better choices for examples? We've got the highest prison population in the world, extensive state surveillance, and the ability to throw away all rights if we shout the word terrorism loud and often enough.
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We have laws and they ought to be followed. The hallmark of dictatorships is not following the laws or making them up as they go along. So. We have immigration laws. Change them or follow them. We the people can petition it to be changed. Federal agencies need to follow these laws until changed.
Re prison. Yes. Let's get rid of war on drugs and use imprisonment only for violent offenders.
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The hallmark of dictatorships is concentration of unchecked power. Sanctuary cities are undermining the power of the federal government, which makes the US less like a dictatorship. Likewise, Obama not enforcing immigration laws is prudent discretion in enforcement, which is again, a less powerful government, and thus further away from a dictatorship. Some degree of discretion in enforcement is necessary, otherwise the system would collapse, and I'm far more concerned that he didn't jail bankers who cras
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We have a constitution which has delegated some powers to the Federal Government and left the rest for the state along with individual rights.
Immigration is within the province of the Federal government. Not the states.
Undermining the rule of law is the first step to tyranny as at that point the only standard is force.
You want to role back Imperial Washington? Good. Roll back its powers.
You want government provided health care? Good. Do it at the state level.
You want gove
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Obama was part of the federal government, and he exercised completely sane discretion in immigration enforcement (in that particular area). Sanctuary cities are just NOT helping the federal government, the same as states are not helping the DEA. This is government INACTION, which is the polar opposite of what tyranny entails.
For goddamn fucking sakes, Obama signed a law (NDAA) that overturned the MAGNA MOTHERFUCKING CARTA, and your stupid ass is whining about him not wasting money catering to fear of br
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He did not exercise sane discretion he did not follow said law. In this case the President is like a contractor who has discretion about whether to paint the molding first or the walls. He doesn't have the discretion to say that he will
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I would agree that enforcing an unconstitutional law would be tyranny, but not enforcing a constitutional law is not the same thing. Obama also did something similar in regards to federal marijuana enforcement in states with legal weed. That was "willfully not enforcing Constituti
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1. A law is passed by Congress.
2. It was not vetoed by the President.
3. It was not challenged in court (or if it was it was upheld by the courts)
It is now the Executive Branch's responsibility to execute said law. It is not up to the President whether or not to act on this law. By not enforcing the law he is, in effect, vetoing the law and abrogating his constitutional responsibilities. Imagine if Eisenhower did not enforce Brown v Board of Ed?
Unlike Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower possessed, at most, a tepid commitment to human rights, ... ...
The real problem for the administration came in the form of the civil rights movement domestically
A clearly distressed Eisenhower was compelled to call in the National Guard to enforce the court's decision and to protect from mob violence the African American students who were scheduled to attend the high school.
Read more: http://www.americanforeignrela... [americanfo...ations.com]
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If the Legislative Branch passes a law then the law needs to be followed. If one disagrees with the law then change it, or persuade others to change it by voting people out of / into office (as the case may be).
I am for the
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I will at least applaud your consistency, but when it comes to enforcement, it's not a bug, it's a feature. Our system has many checks against tyranny, and separation of powers is one of the biggest. The executive branch can choose to not enforce laws, provided there isn't some kind of systematic selective enforcement of the law. However, the executive branch cannot enforce laws that Congress did not pass. Thus, the net result is that laws are only carried out when there is support from all three branc
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Haven't time to do an in depth search proving why not - but here is a series of answers to that very question:
https://politics.stackexchange... [stackexchange.com]
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The president doesn't have a hard power to prevent the enforcement of the law. But he's got plenty of soft influence, and all law enforcement agencies have enough work to prioritize. As long as those in other powerful positions are cooperative, they can basically set the priority of a particular law or scenario low enough that it's never enforced. Other than a few things explicitly mentioned in the constitution, the government doesn't really HAVE to do very much. So, in practice, an executive branch in
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B'cos he's not a Leftist. Doesn't look at prison population as a function of a dictatorship, but rather, a function of the amount of crime. And who doesn't suddenly scream 'civil liberties' when people have sane reactions to Muslims being Muslims
Re: fr0sted (Score:1)
It is in your best interests to find new friends. Your current ones are filling you with misinformation.
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Please reconsider. To outsiders, that actually makes America look worse.
If you were "just" a carceral state where non-violent crimes draw long sentences, that could be fixed with a change of leaders and a some legal reforms.
But if you have the highest incarceration rate in the world *legitimately*, it means that Americans *as a people* are criminal, violent, lying, untrustworthy scum. If that much of the population needs to be in concrete boxes, your whole bell curve must be left-shifted. Everybody must
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Trump is not happy being president. He apparently wants to be a dictator. ...
So, you were happy when Obama unilaterally changed ACA deadline dates [washingtonpost.com], despite the laws mandated dates?
Facebook, Google, Twitter ... starts fact-checking (Score:2)
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However, our public education system is ...?!
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However, our public education system is ...?!
...run by Democrats?
Seriously? The current head of the DoE is a god-bothering, slack-jawed, single-digit IQ, cuntsack of a Republican. And the Republicans have made no secret at all of wanting to destroy public education in this country in order to continue spreading unquestioning religious idiocy. So yeah... there's that.
I don't care much for the Democrats either, but at least they see the value in a decent, secular educated population.
Sounds like a pretty good idea, actually (Score:2, Interesting)
In the age where commercial journalism is driven by profit into an ever deepening cycle of selling fear, positive news is a pretty darn good thing. I am not sure how to counterbalance that with the negative news properly, but I am sure that when left fully to "market forces", news cycle is not at all balanced or fair.
As a humorous aside, in a recent meetup in Shanghai I met a guy whose job is "social media censor". Pleasant fella, speaks good English, and assured everyone that "he's a bad censor and never a
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You seem to be suggesting that this is a new thing. Try reading newspapers from the eighteen-nineties sometime.....
Re: Sounds like a pretty good idea, actually (Score:5, Interesting)
>As a humorous aside, in a recent meetup in Shanghai I met a guy whose job is "social media censor". Pleasant fella, speaks good English, and assured everyone that "he's a bad censor and never actually suppresses any posts" :)
It might be a surprise to some, but Chinese municipalities do recruit foreigners for work in propaganda departments quite enthusiastically
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[citation needed]
You can't be a foreigner and be in the Communist Party. They had a few back in the 50s, but they were all arrested and imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution for being dirty capitalist spies.
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I think ugen's point is, and I agree, not that this is a good thing, but a "good idea" as in an effective tactic, and that the reason it is an effective tactic is because people seem to be pre-inclined to fill their information bubbles with the most outrageous, negative news they can find. This makes the market for real good news unprofitable, and so none is produced, despite there being plenty of people doing lots of really good things all the time. Then when people get exhausted from the online dystopia
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We don't need China's help to distrust the government. They take care of fostering that distrust all by themselves.
LOL. Watch when bots are smart enough to to this.. (Score:5, Insightful)
... errrm, wait, they are already. Ok, scratch that.
Basically we're all living in a bubble already, it's only getting bigger and thicker, and China only is ahead a little bit because they have huge amounts of expendable labour to do this sort of thing manually and are a little more on the "single party" side of things that, for instance, the US. But to think that the society of the US is any free'er than that of China (it may be for a privileged group but that's about it) is almost absurd. Same goes for the bubbling void or reality that is the intarweb and it's surroundings here in Europe. Someone at Google just has to turn a few knobs and 2 weeks in a new belief will spread throughout society. This isn't really news.
The interesting thing is that this just emphasiszes what we all know already: The internet isn't the real world and reality in society happens where people meet in RL and interact with one another. No amount of internent communication (manipulated or otherwise) will change that.
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It changed the U.S. presidential election. Where the rubber meets the road is the voting booth. If people are voting based on bad information, then bad candidates are elected to bad things with the public weal.
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The internet isn't the real world and reality in society happens where people meet in RL and interact with one another. No amount of internent communication (manipulated or otherwise) will change that.
Fortunately they invented safe spaces to prevent that. You can't let all those years of carefully manipulated student thought get destroyed too easily.
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But to think that the society of the US is any free'er than that of China (it may be for a privileged group but that's about it) is almost absurd.
This is absolutely not correct. In the US, there is indeed constant propaganda that overwhelms our senses, but there are multiple, conflicting streams from a diverse range of sources covering the entire spectrum, and many of those streams directly attack and criticize the government and specific leaders with impunity. This situation does not exist in China. The actual set of ideas that flow through the US system may not be any more true or desirable than the in the Chinese system, but the US is absolutel
They may have perfected it, but... (Score:2, Informative)
...the Democrats and the institutional media in the US have been playing this game for years and frankly N. Korea has essentially made the Kim family gods using this strategy. It's not really novel to blow smoke up people's asses for the gain of political power, just the methodology has gone digital for the internet age.
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Yes, definitely - look at what inevitably happens when one side has to adopt the tactics that the other side has been so successful with for the past 40 years.
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...the Democrats and the institutional media in the US have been playing this game for years
Because the alternative media is SO much more truthful...
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Really? [youtube.com] (Alex Jones: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver)
Although based on the phrase "African American" it sound to me like you have strong us-vs-them "enemy" point of view that you have incorporated into your identity and are unable and unwilling to change.
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"The Democrats and the institutional media" is a strange way to say "Fox News."
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North Korea got there first (Score:2)
Best internet dissent suppression possible: no internet at all. And btw, NK already perfected that cheerleading strat; the Chinese are just applying it to the internet in larger numbers.
The US way is way more efficient (Score:5, Interesting)
And insidious, too.
Just make sure you have enough crackpots to spread bullshit about. The more insane the conspiracy theory, the better. From Chemtrails to Flat Earth, from Reptiloids to Hitler's base on the dark side of the moon, just make sure you flood everything that people could possibly use to get non-approved news with enough bullshit that nobody would want to wade through the pits of steaming shit in the vain search for tangible information.
It is way more efficient than trying to suppress non-approved information. Because if you try to suppress it, every little bit of leaked info can be scrutinized by the people wanting to see for themselves what the world has in store for them and what really happens. But when you make sure that anything that could threaten your narrative is drowned in the noise of utter bullshit, people will not even bother trying.
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Ok, what the fuck has one to do with the other?
Re: The US way is way more efficient (Score:2)
Stop trying to fool us, lizard man.
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OMG, a tiny dot moves across the screen. UFOs confirmed!
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You're shitting me, right? Some sci-fi geeks who like a bit of conspiracy theory are not what this is about. This is about sites like reddit.
Ignorant shitlord bullies are created by compromising the public education system with sports, religion, and unfunded mandates.
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Actually, ignorant bullies are created by subverting the educational system with moral relativism, unworkable Marxist ideologies, identity politics (itself a re-purposing of Marxist ideas), destruction of competitive spirit and meritocracies. Just listen to the nonsense coming out of "educated" university kids' mouths.
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??? Are YOU a plebe pouring out "crap"?
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Free speech is a great idea. But too many people confuse the right to speak the truth with the obligation to do so. Just because the media have the right to tell you something doesn't mean that it has to be right.
What you need for this to work out are highly educated people, but why would anyone that has the power to provide this want that?
Fake News is pre-internet (Score:2, Insightful)
If there's anything the internet has shown us, is that Fake News has been occurring ever since there was a media, and especially since the media became operating arms of weapons manufacturers.
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"especially since the media became operating arms of weapons manufacturers."
AND, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democrat Party, which is a shell corporation for the Communist Party.
https://youtu.be/PblVo9y735k?t... [youtu.be]
Reddit is way ahead of them (Score:2)
Positive news worhtless without substance. (Score:1)
> overwhelms the population with positive news
The problem emerges is when there is no substance behind positive news. If you say the mini-plenty chocolate allowance (or whatever it's called in Orwell's english original) has been augmented to 25 grams per week, instead of the previous 30, few people will cheer.
On the other hand, in a country where the guvmint can sincerely announce that 5 new hospitals have been built last quarter, 10 panda families saved, three more counties are getting linked by autobah
It's not a novel concept (Score:4, Interesting)
Both my apartment complex AND my company regularly spam review sites with "good newz everyone!" reviews. Like multiple 5 star ratings in a day after weeks of bad reviews.
Even on Amazon the review system is notoriously gamed - so it shouldn't be surprising that nations have adopted the same strategies.
You can probably even point to early newspapers that were funded by political cronies as an aspect of the same thing
On the bright side at least the dissenting voices are being heard in China instead of the usual state-run monolithic media.
Not just old news, but old /. news!!! (Score:4, Informative)
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/17/06/23/1442206/chinese-government-fabricates-social-media-posts-for-strategic-distraction-not-engaged-argument [slashdot.org]
In contrast to prior claims, we show that the Chinese regime's strategy is to avoid arguing with skeptics of the party and the government, and to not even discuss controversial issues.
This is what India does as well (Score:2)
This is exactly the approach that the present Indian government is also using. Their intent is to use propaganda, lies and an army of trolls to control dissent, distract people from what is really happening and also to suppress any hint of an opposition.
One of the former members of this huge paid army even released a book on it:
http://www.amazon.in/Am-Troll-... [amazon.in]
The Prime Minister Modi himself follows some of the worst members of this troll army who use rape threats, murder threats and whatever else against a
Artificial Inanity (Score:2)
I am reminded of this passage from Neal Stephenson's novel Anathem:
Here in the US, it's called "Fox News" (Score:2)
I've seen it before (Score:2)
It's exactly what the MNM did during the Obama administration to cover up its dozen scandals, and the exact opposite of what they are doing now to the Trump administration with fake news.
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Wow, perfect timing (Score:2)
Tyrants of a feather and all that
Ends justify the means (Score:2)
Hey man, if it avoids civil unrest of a billion people it might be justified.
Similar in the West. (Score:1)
The only difference is that they use the "hate speech" smear to silence people.
Why does every /. article about paid trolling only (Score:2)
Is the U.S. any different? (Score:1)