[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...