[machbio]

Am starting to feel this trolling is an industry (like troll farm) of its own - there are people or bots dedicated to trolling and reporting people who raise voice against the discrimination.. I recently had to report an unfair service by virgin atlantic staff after an emergency landing - I tweeted the pictures and video of the incident.. I was immediately trolled by twitter accounts about how i should be happy that I am alive - I was complaining about how the staff handled the issues after the emergency landing .. wish the social media companies could raise voice against companies or countries that use their platform to discredit real concern - guess people do not matter anymore

[AFascistWorld]

You may not believe it, the vast majority of Chinese actually love the CCP and the system, they only just hate that a few corrupt low-level officials who are the bad apples fucking up leaders' glorious visions.

These "bots" are mostly spontaneous people, they are not even government-sponsored Wumao, they genuinely love China and defend it, their reason being it may have some flaws but any other country has too and is worse than China, and them being either students or comfortable middle-class help.

[wisty]

I wouldn't say most Chinese love the system. They don't despise it though.

I think a lot see the HK thing as an attack on their country. There's a fair bit of history (the insult of losing territory to foreign powers) and also current tensions ('locusts' is a HK slur against mainland Chinese). A lot of HK people kinda dislike mainlanders coming to HK, but the city kinda relies on mainland money.

So there's already a bit of contention, then a large number of HK people are protesting against mainland China having any influence. It's then easy to conflate attacks on mainland China (the government) with attacks on mainland China (the people).

[gleenn]

I feel like all the people who are involuntary organ-donors might disagree if they weren't dead. China has a way of disappearing people who don't like it. I wonder how many people would come out more vocally if you weren't disappeared for disagreeing or even being outspoken.

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/true-stories/the...

[jjcc]

Give you some hint: According to Godel theorem, a system in higher order is necessary to judge the truth in current system. So self claim the story is true implied the story teller (i.e. the author of the news) is not quite intellegent and maybe very naive to mix fact and belief.

I totally respect your strong belief about the story. But don't enforce others accept your personal opion by imply your personal belief is truth. It's quite insulting.

[legacynl]

> I totally respect your strong belief about the story. But don't enforce others accept your personal opion by imply your personal belief is truth. It's quite insulting.

Are you Chinese? You being offended by his post makes me feel like you are. He wasn't forcing his oppinion on you.

Also godel's theorem doesn't have anything to do with this, as godel's theorem is about mathematical systems.

[jjcc]

Legally I'm not Chinese but it's not relevant in this context. You have a wrong assumption about the cause. Another wrong assumption is I'm offended which I’m not. Here's the subtle difference: A person's behaviour is insulting meanings he/she could offend some (not all) people who follow some rules, which might be: reasoning process should base on relative facts/axioms within the same axiomatic system.

Let me explain a little more about where the insulting comes from. During daily conversation people usually omit many relevant consensus details: context and premises. Otherwise communication would be extremely redundant.

One thing is important is: anything put into premise that other conclusions can drawn from, should be relative facts which all the parties agree. By providing personal belief as premise to draw other conclusion without explicitly stating that’s just personal belief means the “evidence” provider cannot tell the difference , unintentionally and implicitly force others reasoning within “evidence” provider’s own axioms system, without knowing there’s totally different axioms system with other premises exist.

In short: There's no problem at all to express personal opinions. However put personal opinion into a premise to draw other conclusions during reasoning without explicit emphasise is not good.

About Godel theorem, strictly it’s only about Math. You are right on that. I’m half joking but it’ an analogy. In sports field there’s a referee because if one team can act as authoritative way to claim they own truth implicitly gives the other team the same authority which will lead to chaos. There’s a parallel relation here.

EDIT: typo and grammar fix

[gleenn]

Godel has nothing to do with this. Chinese organ donation is well documented across many news organizations. There are some crazy facts regarding how quickly you can get a new liver, for instance. It can take people months or years in most cases to find an appropriate liver, but in China you can get one in weeks. They execute prisoners and extract their organs. Chinese doctors have even admitted this. [0]

'In 2006, allegations emerged that a large number of Falun Gong practitioners had been killed to supply China's organ transplant industry. An initial investigation stated "the source of 41,500 transplants for the six year period 2000 to 2005 is unexplained" and concluded that "there has been and continues today to be large scale organ seizures from unwilling Falun Gong practitioners".' [1][2]

'In December 2005, China's Deputy Health Minister acknowledged that the practice of removing organs from executed prisoners for transplants was widespread.' [3]

'China Daily reported in August 2009 that approximately 65% of transplanted organs still came from death row prisoners. The condemned prisoners have been described as "not a proper source for organ transplants" by Vice-Health Minister Huang Jiefu...' [4]

[0] Matas, David (2011). Steven J. Jensen (ed.). The Ethics of Organ Transplantation. Catholic University of America Press. p. 234. ISBN 978-0-8132-1874-8. [1] http://organharvestinvestigation.net/ [2] http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/00... [3] http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/asia/article2612313... [4] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8222732.stm

[bigbluedots]

Being insulted by someone who is expressing what they believe to be true is not very conducive to participating in a rational discussion of anything.

[bigwavedave]

Being insulted is not a choice, being offended is.

[freeflight]

> You may not believe it, the vast majority of Chinese actually love the CCP and the system, they only just hate that a few corrupt low-level officials who are the bad apples fucking up leaders' glorious visions.

This has been a common theme with this "Fake News and Social Bots" stuff since the very beginning not reserved to China.

On the 34C3 there was a really interesting talk [0] about the troublesome nature of classifying users as "social bots" and how it regularly turns out to be completely wrong, with plenty of absurd examples.

Tho the English translation is a bit spotty, especially in the beginning.

[0] https://youtu.be/k6GUpbRq5Vs

[dragonwriter]

> You may not believe it, the vast majority of Chinese actually love the CCP and the system, they only just hate that a few corrupt low-level officials who are the bad apples fucking up leaders' glorious visions.

Is that what they actually feel, or is that exactly the upper limit of what the State accepts as legitimate dissatisfaction with the status quo, which the vast majority of people are aware of an unwilling to buck out of fear of the consequences? More to the point, in an authoritarian regime that is known to punish dissidents who go outside of the tolerated limits, how could one ever hope to get honest enough answers from a diverse enough base to confidently state this?

[alexron782]

Well, because the quality of life is indeed getting better and better in China. CCP successfully satisfied the fundamental need of people who were living under extreme poverty before right? Perhaps the next generation of Chinese people will start to demand more freedom, etc..

[dragonwriter]

> Well, because the quality of life is indeed getting better and better in China. CCP successfully satisfied the fundamental need of people who were living under extreme poverty before right?

That's a reason one might suspect that people would support the regime, but not an answer to the question asked in GP.

[Retric]

That would seem logical, but it’s less accurate than you might think. Revolutions actually become more common as society exists famine and extreme poverty.

The issue is when people start wanting more than food and shelter it becomes more apparent all the things they can’t buy like free speech, or more recently clean air.

[jacquesm]

I've lived in a place like that. Communist Poland, 1985/1986. It was pretty weird. Inlaws, very well to do by Polish standards were continuously reminding their twenty something daughter that she should keep out of that because 'names were being recorded' and nothing good would ever come out of it. Never mind the details of Zomo's beating up people in the streets, it was their own reputation they were scared of. They looked pretty silly for a while when the wall fell, but then all their connections landed on their feet and made bank, and nothing really changed for a long time. By now it fortunately has changed, but still, lots of the fat cats from before the wall fell are much fatter still today.

The amount of legitimate dissatisifaction is proportionally inverse to people's general well being and with China having made very rapid progress on that front you can bet that people are in principle quite satisfied with their leadership.

If it stagnates for too long or crashes then things will change. The dissidents are not even a blip on the radar until the economy goes haywire, then they will matter.

[rolltiide]

It is extremely hard to get an honest opinion about what anybody feels, but it is important to know the context. China is an extremely large place with a history of attempts at cohesion which is 98% successful but only in the last several decades.

150 years ago there was a stalemate with a guy claiming to be Jesus' brother before the winners decided to absolve the state of religion. In that context its clear how order is kept over there.

There are 8 cities in the region surrounding Hong Kong with distinct cultural nuances and history which are now also more economically relevant to China and arguable the world stage. Shenzhen, the one bordering Hong Kong, is an marvel on its own, and it would make sense if our news had more represenation about things happening there alone, than Hong Kong, purely from academic and industrial advances. The standard of living in those areas does contrast to Hong Kong now: HK has the extreme market driven inequalities as London, Vancouver, San Francisco, you name it - while the spacious but dense neighboring zones offer modern spacious but practical accomodations and safety nets as a byproduct of the marxist ideologies with the newly added twist of valuing private ownership and increasing forms of capital formation.

Its not as simple as trying to school every Chinese person you see on how oppressed they are. It will always, 100% of the time, be met with vitriol. Its just not that simple.

In classic socialist fashion it does remain to be seen what happens when the economy downturns. The outcome is predictable. But for now, the party has won after a long history to get where it is, it maintains cohesion and stability and rising living standards for the world's largest population, while others in the world practicing a market based ideology struggle with their also predictable problems.

Its not relevant to the average person that the communist party acts in its own interest. The corruption is aggravating but there is nothing to act on. Its not relevant on a day to day basis that disgusting party members all the way up north in beijing are having dissident's body parts harvested so the party member stays healthy. This has nothing to do with the cohesion of the country, and there is zero context to imagine a rule of law ideal that applies to prevent this. Its not relevant that all the way on the other side of the Gobi fuckin desert, there are concentration camps. There are also no threats of islamic extremism. Yet again, something the loudest countries also aren't able to brag about.

Its important to understand how irrelevant Hong Kong residents are to Chinese people internally. Its important to understand how irrelevant the authoritatian central planning of Beijing is to Chinese people on a daily basis. Then, you can begin to understand how Chinese respond to the things we focus on. We focus on everything dark about China, as if everything about China is dark. They simply don't.

The party isn't playing a game of civil rights. They are playing the millenium old game of "lets run a country and make sure nobody attacks us". Mission accomplished, nobody is attacking China or even wants to, not even non-state religious extremists. The people accept that role of government, accept that centralized power comes with disproportionate privileges even its aggravating, and accept that they're being provided for.

They watch their competitors continue to play imperialist and watch them undermine their own budgetary contraints and their own national security. Whereas China loosens marxist restrictions on their entrepreneurs to develop in burdgeoning and fragmented markets that the west is ignoring, and doesn't undermine its national security in the process. Its an approach, its a perspective. I think we should try to incorporate that context into why they do what they do.

[ottolin]

That's very true. CCP controls the communications and spreading propaganda. Those who doesnt know how to get pass GFW are simply living inside the Matrix. There are also some who can receive information from the outside world but choose to shut their mouth as they afraid the consequence to speak the truth.

[rolltiide]

Of the people that receive information from the outside - and are actually on the outside - there is only an extremely small subset bothered by it in the way you want them to be.

Think about it like if you found out that the Waco disaster was actually a much larger massacre against an ideology that wasn't really that fringe. It wouldn’t really change your mind about the viability of your country or the federal government based on the excessive response to that incident - even after you then found out about rendition sites and border camps. There is an extremely small chance you would consider it a defining moment in history that you would dedicate your own cause to escaping from or changing. Everyone of that ideology thinks you are afraid to talk about it but honestly you’re aware and just got better shit to do, whether there were consequences of caring or not, whether you rationalized how the government responded correctly or not.

[mike_hearn]

I'm glad more people are noticing this. The idea of huge bot or troll farms on Twitter is, as far as I can tell, more or less completely in the heads of people with particular political views.

You can see this at the start. The guy has to give a grovelling disclaimer in his first slide that he's leftist, hates Nazis, hates racists etc. He has to say this because he's about to destroy a conspiracy theory held exclusively by these kinds of people.

I did an analysis a few years ago of a typical claim along these lines. It turned out to be what I could only describe as academic fraud:

https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...

Of course the media ran with it and never published any corrections or critical analysis. Everyone who read the relevant stories in the Times of London/New York Times was simply misled and fell further down the rabbit hole of imagining non-existent Twitter bots.

Now the same newspaper (NYT) that's published outright fraudulent stories about Twitter bots as fact in the past, is trying to convince us that China is using the same tactics. Maybe they are. But given how much wrongness is out there on this topic, I am very skeptical.

Here's an example of just one of the absurd mis-identifications:

https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/i-m-not-a-russian-tro...

Also remember that Twitter themselves are a big part of the problem here. As the speaker in the video observes, any time you try and research this topic you can find people whose accounts were suspended and frequently find them complaining about it on other platforms (i.e. not bots). A Twitter employee himself has openly referred to (real) Trump supporters as "bots":

Just go to a random [Trump] tweet and just look at the followers. They’ll all be like, guns, God, ‘Merica, and with the American flag and the cross. Like, who says that? Who talks like that? It’s for sure a bot

The video of that can be found on Project Veritas.

[freeflight]

> The guy has to give a grovelling disclaimer in his first slide that he's leftist, hates Nazis, hates racists etc. He has to say this because he's about to destroy a conspiracy theory held exclusively by these kinds of people.

He said that because in Germany it's actually quite mainstream to blame everything on social bots.

When the German alt-right gained popularity, and alt-right topics became very popular on Facebook, the reaction of the German mainstream to that was to go "Those are all Russian social bots! There are no alt-right Germans! Facebook you need to fight those fake news and social bots harder!" [0].

By now those supposed "social bots" are going to elections and are voting [1]. The German mainstream reaction to that is to keep ignoring it, after marginalizing it as "Russian propaganda" didn't work.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/11/ge...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/01/world/europe/german-far-r...

[jknz]

The examples given in the article are hardly "genuine, spontaneous citizens". Of course, the important question is to quantify bots vs. genuine--though the following examples are pretty clear-cut. Quotes from the article:

> The accounts posted in Indonesian, Arabic, Portuguese and other languages. They promoted hookup services, posted about Korean boy bands and retweeted messages about pop-punk music.

> “As a Hong Kong person who loves Hong Kong, I really miss the Hong Kong of before, which was developed and ruled by law,” @derrickmcnabbx wrote in Chinese on June 15. The account’s location was described as “Georgia, USA.” Before this year, nearly all of its tweets were links to pornography.

[nitwit005]

Russia and China have, in effect, trained people to assume posts defending them are paid or bots. Many of us have seen the sudden swarm of patterned posts, sometimes with bad English, show up in comments. And we've seen news articles like this one.

Maybe it works, on average, but it tends to undermine real people's posts. Why listen to someone who is likely to be a bot?

[gonehome]

I suspect when living under a system experiencing nearly miraculous economic growth people are less political and more willing to look the other way with potential abuses.

Growth leads to a lot of things being a lot better for a lot of people.

If that ever slows down though I think there will be trouble.

It's good to think long term, but removing term limits seems to increase risk around transitions of power. Though at the moment I suppose they could point to the US's current political situation as a reason you can't trust the public to have unfiltered access to the internet with elections.

[jjcc]

I would say "love" might not be accurate word. A lot of things CPP did are quite controversial and it's well known to most educated people. However alternatives are much worse which is not very well known outside of Chinese speaking community. In addtion, western media constantly brain wash their wesern audiance by distorting news coverage so that quite some Westerners believe CPP defenders are the brain washed groups added fuel to nationalist sentiment by insulting those CPP defenders.

So to consider lot of mainland Chinese defending CPP as "they love CPP" is a simplified interpretation. Does'nt reflect reality

[bigbluedots]

To take a single example: The Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s which caused the deaths of many millions of people through famine. Which alternatives do you think were 'much worse' than that?

[lettergram]

I’ve pointed this out before, but China has a huge population. They also have hundreds of millions of “migrant workers” who aren’t allowed to live in cities without having an active job. These works have to collect money so they can send it back to their farms and pay for their brothers or kids education(s) (because in China you have to pay for education).

We are likely only seeing the voices of people who love the CCP. I do agree many love China, of course they do, everyone has to or they aren’t allowed to work, or have internet...

[NicoJuicy]

I don't really think that it's true though.

If everything goes well, it can stay that way.

Bit when things go to shit and people found out the government lied, that patriotisme can reverse quickly. Depends on the roots of doubt on your close relatives.

Living in partial fear for the social credit ain't helping and realizing you live behind a firewall online is enough to grow doubts, from my point of view.

Eg. See Russia now and how the Soviet Union crumbled.

[dirtyid]

>people found out the government lied, that patriotisme can reverse quickly.

Pretty much why CPC is reluctant to endorse patriotism, patriotic positions can be much more extreme than the party line - it's very hard to walk back.

>Living in partial fear for the social credit ain't helping and realizing you live behind a firewall online is enough to grow doubts

These are not really considerations for the general population. Sentiment for social credit where it's tested is positive. People like seeing financial criminals punished. They also like "civilizing" behavior modifications of mass surveillance, i.e. country bumpkins in tier3 cities stop spitting, speeding and jaywalking because they're under observation. GFW is an annoyance but easily circumvented with lax VPN rules.

>Depends on the roots of doubt on your close relatives.

If China is going to collapse, it's going to be due to the demographic time bomb when only-childs watch their aging parents languish because there isn't sufficient social safety net. CPC living standards goals is to "become a moderately prosperous society" where poverty is largely eliminated by 2021 and "fully developed nation" by 2049, presumably one with sufficient social services. I think they're a little behind, and time is not on their side.

[fiblye]

China’s still going through massive economic growth, and it has for many young people’s entire lives. The USSR is remembered by food shortages and other various struggles.

So long as people are fed and comfortable, China won’t suddenly collapse. Any various small problems will be brushed off or silenced until they pass.

[ljw1001]

> These "bots" are mostly spontaneous people

You know this how?

[tomp]

How do these "spontaneous people" even access Twitter? Smells fishy...

[walshemj]

That's pretty common in dictatorships, if you read Alex Kershaw's two volume Bio of Hitler he gives some examples.

The response to corruption by local Nazi party members, was along the line of "if only the Fuhrer knew"

[UnFleshedOne]

This goes much further back, Russian peasants often expressed similar sentiments towards their tsars. Even Robin Hood stories feature benevolent king who would come in and fix everything, if only he knew.

[ben_jones]

It is an industry that goes way beyond Twitter and PR companies. It's incredibly popular for US businesses to pay firms in Asia, Africa, etc. to trawl social media and collect data using various automaton tools for BI and other purposes.

That said I also believe a lot of trolls and political posters are just normal people voicing their malignant opinions to the point where it is nearly impossible to identify astroturfing as long as the accounts are "tenured" enough (real pictures, some age, etc.).

[foldr]

What's the point in complaining on twitter about it? The situation sucks, but the airline was most likely doing its best to resolve it. It's probably not possible to plan ahead much for unexpected diversions.

[noja]

I'm not so sure... looking at your twitter thread it seems like the usual twitter responses from people who ignore context and detail.

[danso]

I'll have to second this. None of the accounts who belligerently responded look to be obvious bots or otherwise committed trolls. It looks like your account caught the attention of several news organizations, which means their tweets to you would have been seen by their followers. Or anyone checking out the "vs138" hashtag.

[TearsInTheRain]

I feel like those responses to your tweets were pretty organic. Are you suggesting they were paid to discredit you?

[windsurfer]

For those looking for context: https://twitter.com/machbio/status/1146954308086317056

[swiley]

Last summer I remember a coworker telling me he was writting bots to counteract what he belived to be bots employed by republican polititions. I already felt like the signal to noise ratio on twitter had gotten pretty bad but at that point I realised there isn't enough left to ever justify exposing myself to it again.

[naringas]

> guess people do not matter anymore

I agree with this sentiment.

only groups of people seem relevant nowadays. makes me really wonder about the philosophy and history of individualism.

[shmerl]

It is industrialized in case of dictatorships pushing propaganda. Normal people don't do it on such scale.