[somenameforme]

So I decided to take the really sophisticated step of doing a "link:www.milanomodaweekly.com" search on Google. It turned up this [1] page, and pretty much only that page. But that seems to explain what this probably is.

This looks like an amateur hour scam operation. Somebody sets up some sites that look vaguely passable (targeted at an audience who does not even speak the language on the site), auto-populates them with auto-translated Chinese newswire and blog stuff, local scraped stuff, etc. and then claims they're "major foreign media outlets", which they then sell access to for the riveting price of just 1.4 million won - about $1000. It looks like a modern take on something like a 419 scam, except I expect they probably do follow through on publishing whatever people submit!

Granted not as exciting a discovery as a shadowy influence operation with a super sexy nickname, but probably more accurate.

[1] - https://kmong.com/gig/497744

[bombcar]

This is the key to many scams these days - you're not the person being scammed, you're a byproduct or accident.

E.g., all that pointless spam that doesn't even have a way to buy anything whatsoever? Spammers selling services to people who don't know what they're doing.

[imiric]

Did you miss the part in the article where these sites contain blatant pro-China propaganda, and ad hominem attacks on CCP political dissidents?

I did the same cursory look as you. Go to https://www[.]eiffelpost[.]com/?s=china with a VPN. It shows 24 pages of CGTN greatest hits. How you can interpret this to be anything other than a CCP psyop is beyond me.

It's disappointing to see this kind of dismissal on a forum of highly educated people. It's common knowledge that the Chinese government has a history of censoring information that shows them in a bad light, promoting largely false self-aggrandizing narratives, and attacking anyone who challenges them. It shouldn't be surprising at all that the internet outside of their great firewall is a major focus of their operations. Given a lack of direct sources to determine the truth of the situation, I will always lean towards believing that this is part of their established modus operandi, rather than minimizing it by claiming it's just another "amateur hour scam operation".

[dang]

Please make your substantive points without swipes, as the site guidelines ask: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html.

This is particularly important when the topic is divisive. That's in the guidelines too btw.

[imiric]

Noted. I toned it down a bit.

[somenameforme]

What do you think Chinese news and blogs are full of?

[imiric]

These are not Chinese news and blogs. These sites are created in the language and region of other countries, sometimes by scraping the content of other local sites, and then filling them with the usual Chinese propaganda. Chinese people are not the target audience.

[somenameforme]

The target audience seems to be Koreans who want to market their [whatever] in e.g. France, but neither know French nor anything at all about France. I found the link where you can buy access to the EiffelPost site you mentioned here: https://kmong.com/gig/399972

I assume you didn't check out the link earlier. Basically it's some sort of a Korean craigslist/ebay type site. The site itself is complete legit - Amazon did a case study of them here. [1] The seller/scammer, "Excelsior Partners" claims to be affiliated with governments, advertising agencies, and so on. And they guarantee publication in more than 10 "major French media outlets." They even offer to take care of translation for you, with their "direct partnership with a professional translation agency." Heh. Of course those "major media sites" are all the ones the article from this thread is talking about.

They're just trying to fill out the site with enough junk that somebody who doesn't know the language, doesn't know the locale, and is naive enough to think you can buy guaranteed article placement in multiple major Western publications for $1k, might think it's real.

[1] - https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/kmong/

[imiric]

Alright. So the CCP is even lazier and doesn't bother with creating their own sites, but buys access to these branded localized sites, and posts their content that way. Or "Excelsior Partners" is just another CCP front, and those kmong listings are a scam in itself.

Otherwise, how would you explain 24 pages of CGTN propaganda?

In either case, it's a clear link to the CCP. This is no different to what they do on social media as well. They use all established platforms to broaden their reach.

[somenameforme]

The same way I'd explain all the other stuff. It's just lots of filler to try to make the site look, from the scammer's perspective, legit. And you have to keep in mind this issue of perspectives. What you see as propaganda, is what somebody else would just see as the equivalent as a stream from e.g. Reuters. And the scammer is probably Chinese or Korean. Since the target victims are Korean, he probably wouldn't want to use e.g. Korean news sources that might be more readily recognizable.

If you want to see this as some sort of a state influence operation, you run into a million issues. The sites are poorly done (template boilerplate is even left up in many places!) and no native would likely consider them "real", there has been exactly 0 effort to advertise or share the sites, the sites seem to be regularly taken down which ruins ranking/viral possibilities, what "propaganda" that does exist on the sites has to be actively searched for, the sites seemingly allow anybody to publish on them, the sites are loaded with stuff that's going to push people away like shady crypto spam (and I say that as a huge fan of crypto!), so forth and so on.

Especially for things like this, I think Occam's Razor is quite sharp.

[avgcorrection]

> Did you miss the part in the article where these sites contain blatant pro-China propaganda, and ad hominem attacks on CCP political dissidents?

What does the irrelevant adjective “blatant” have to do with anything? And why is “ad hominem” significant when 95% of politics is about technically fallacious argumentation such as that?

Oh, a 10KUSD FB ad campaign bought by Kremlin and targeted at the US population? Obvious psyop, yes. Also completely irrelevant noise in the scheme of things, just like this apparent “amateur hour” operation.

It’s about having an appropriate response to “bad things”. There is no need to freak out about a few ants in the backyard.

> It's disappointing to see this kind of dismissal on a forum of highly educated people.

Of course. As “highly educated people” we are supposed to circle the wagons and irrationally blow apparent low-effort (again according to the OP) psyops out of proportion because it’s an enemy regime. That’s after all the primary ideological role of the “highly educated people” (loose source: Chomsky).