General Board Discussion - Is Red China's Troll Army Here?

[Legion]

China’s government has unleashed a global online campaign to burnish its image and undercut accusations of human rights abuses, among other aims.

Much of the effort takes place in the shadows, behind the guise of bot networks that generate automatic posts and hard-to-trace online personas.

Now, a new set of documents reviewed by the failing New York Times reveals in stark detail how Chinese officials tap private businesses to generate content on demand, track critics and provide other services for disinformation campaigns.

That operation increasingly plays out on international platforms which the Chinese government blocks at home.

The documents, which were part of a request for bids from contractors, offer a rare glimpse into how China’s vast bureaucracy works to spread propaganda and to sculpt opinion on global social media.

They were taken offline after the Times contacted the Chinese government about them.

English translation by the failing New York Times from original Chinese document text: "Flood global social media with fake accounts used to advance an authoritarian agenda. Make them look real. Seek out online critics of the state — and find out who they are and where they live."

A notice posted online in May calling for bids from contractors: "Disguise and maintain overseas social media accounts. Suppliers should package a portion of the overseas accounts into a group of premium accounts, that is, accounts that survive for a long period of time, have a certain number of fans, and can be used to promote information. Each month on each platform three accounts must be maintained, and an increase in fans must be guaranteed each month. Note: this project has intermediate time sensitivity. Each week, the number of posts and survival rate of accounts will be calculated. If an account is suspended, it needs to be fixed in a timely fashion.”

The request suggested that officials understood the need for strong engagement with the public through these profiles-for-hire. The deeper engagement lends the fake personas credibility at a time when social media companies are increasingly taking down accounts that seem inauthentic or coordinated.

Bot networks that have been linked to China’s government can be used to troll others...



More @ link:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/20/technology/china-facebook-twitter-influence-manipulation.html

[Jack]

I think Anatta is on the Russian payroll.

[Legion]

Some sling personal insults; others come bearing GIFs. With eclectic names like “gemini104104” and “Cloud9,” they aren’t exactly hard to spot.

But for all their obvious tells, China’s internet trolls are a more potent force than most analysts give them credit for—and remain a core part of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) strategy to seize international discourse power.

As the CCP pivots to more aggressively pushing propaganda on foreign networks, its trolls are beginning to pose serious threats.

The fact is that Party-backed trolls have become more than a nuisance, and the magnitude and frequency of their attacks will likely continue to increase. Formulating an effective response will require understanding their size, tactics, and mission as the CCP widens the scope of its public opinion war to include foreign audiences.

First, the scale of the CCP’s effort to manage online public opinion within China is much larger than previously reported. The most detailed study of China’s internet trolls to date estimates that they number two million people and fabricate 450 million pieces of content each year. But as I recently noted in a study for the Jamestown Foundation, in addition to two million paid commentators, the CCP has raised an army of more than twenty million part-time “network civilization volunteers”.

The plurality of volunteers are university students, trained by censorship bureaus and asked to combat “negative” information in their spare time, to include reporting on feminist activism, the COVID-19 outbreak,etc. Averaging just nineteen years old, they are young and willing to defend the Party’s worldview against those who would speak against it.

What’s more, the CCP has created a command structure to manage its millions of full- and part-time trolls.

Cyberspace Affairs Commissions and Propaganda Departments retain ultimate authority over the country’s internet ecology, but they call upon “squadrons,” “brigades,” and “detachments” of volunteers at colleges and universities to keep tabs on day-to-day activities in each locality. This dual-track system of professionalized and grassroots internet commentators enables the CCP to tap into the organic nationalism of some young Chinese netizens while granting paid censors visibility and authority over content.


https://www.cfr.org/blog/chinas-internet-trolls-go-global








Ryan Fedasiuk is a research analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

[Legion]

I think ...

[Legion]

https://www.justplainpolitics.com/sh...ech-brought-us

[Legion]

https://www.justplainpolitics.com/sh...-banned-cloud9

[Hawkeye10]

The Empire is very thorough, almost certainly yes. THeir job is to drive down morale and to create confusion.

[Hawkeye10]

It is worth noting that it is common for JPP posters to act exactly like the Chinese internet supervisors do. Whether they are servicing the EMpire on purpose or not almost does not matter, the effect is the same.

[Legion]

A May 17 paper written by professors at Harvard, Stanford, and the University of California, San Diego provides the most detailed and ambitious description of China’s "50-centers" available to date.

It confirms the existence of a massive secret operation in China pumping out an estimated 488 million fabricated posts per year, part of an effort to “regularly distract the public and change the subject” from any policy-related issues.

The path to unmasking the "50-cent" group began with a December 2014 leak of emails emanating from the Internet Information Office of Zhanggong district in Ganzhou, a small city in the southeastern province of Jiangxi.


https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/05/19/meet-the-chinese-internet-trolls-pumping-488-million-posts-harvard-stanford-ucsd-research/

[Legion]

The Empire is very thorough, almost certainly yes. THeir job is to drive down morale and to create confusion.

They appear to have successfully driven your morale down. Just sayin'.

[Legion]

China — A troll farm or troll factory is an institutionalized group of internet trolls that seeks to interfere in political opinions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_farm

[Hawkeye10]

They appear to have successfully driven your morale down. Just sayin'.

Bullshit.....I am living my best life.....and I routinely give pointers on how I can live so well even as America and the West die.

That's what the education was for.

[Legion]

Bullshit.....I am living my best life.....and I routinely give pointers on how I can live so well even as America and the West die. That's what the education was for.

So you say. Start acting like a man, then.

[Hawkeye10]

So you say. Start acting like a man, then.

Telling the truth and trying to lead the charge against Evil is what men do.

[Legion]

China draws on millions of its citizens to monitor the internet and influence public opinion on a massive scale online. These recruits are known as the "50 cent army" - so named because of reports that they were paid 0.5 yuan per post.

This "keyboard army" has long been active on. Its aim has been to aggressively defend and protect China's image overseas.

When posting in English, the messages are aimed at a Western audience. To the unsuspecting reader, they might appear as patriotic citizens acting independently, but frequently they are taking directions from Chinese authorities.

A BBC investigation in May 2020 found hundreds of fake or hijacked accounts promoting pro-China messages. It also resembled another network dubbed "Spamouflage Dragon", which pumped out pro-China posts and attacked critics with spam, which was uncovered by the social analytics firm Graphika.

https://www.bbc.com/news/56364952