amused
- 2016-05-22
OP, this topic is clearly "uncomfortable" for this outlet and the handful of followers
The behavior of government employees in any country is hardly a disturbing topic.
The Pakistani government hid Bin Laden. Israeli and French government officials seem mostly focused on sexual escapades.
British, Taiwanese and Koren parliaments look like cage fights.
As a U.S. citizen I wish that the CIA and FBI employees would spend more time posting aonoymously on Facebook rather than listening to my phone calls and reading my emails.
Caring
- 2016-05-22
OP, this topic is clearly "uncomfortable" for this outlet and the handful of followers
Caring
- 2016-05-20
Most media outlets are under plenty of influence everywhere and so is this board. What is sad is that regular falks cannot get the true picture of the real world, even though they have so many sources at hand. The degree of manipulation in just about every field in China, however, is astonishing to say the least. Amazingly, when we thought that the internet would make it easier to share information than before, we've found that it hasn't made all the snake oil sales people's messages worth reading.
We kinda knew that already but it's nice to see it quantified:
China's government fabricates and posts several hundred million social media posts a year to influence public opinion about the country, according to a new paper by U.S. researchers examining one of the most opaque aspects of the Communist Party's rule.
The academic study led by Harvard political scientist Gary King claims to be one of the first in-depth looks into the inner workings of China's push to influence public opinion by flooding social media with posts portrayed as if they were coming from ordinary people.
The research project, which took advantage of a trove of government emails, spreadsheets and work reports from a propaganda office in central China leaked online in 2014, concludes that an estimated 488 million fake posts a year “enables the government to actively control opinion without having to censor as much as they might otherwise.”
They do not step up to defend the government, its leaders, and their policies from criticism, no matter how vitriolic; indeed, they seem to avoid controversial issues entirely,” the paper's authors write. “Letting an argument die, or changing the subject, usually works much better than picking an argument and getting someone's back up.”