[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.

[imiric]

> It's just lots of filler to try to make the site look, from the scammer's perspective, legit.

And they just happen to have mostly political propaganda from CGTN, a CCP mouthpiece? If the intent was only to scam, there are thousands of ways of doing that with better results, without involving propaganda.

> What you see as propaganda, is what somebody else would just see as the equivalent as a stream from e.g. Reuters.

C'mon. If you search for "china" on any of these sites you'll only see pro-China narratives, promoting the One China policy, etc. Western media has its own agenda, sure, but this type of blatant propaganda is only found on fringe publications.

> If you want to see this as some sort of a state influence operation, you run into a million issues.

State run psyops don't need to be sophisticated. Their only goal is to flood the web with their narratives, and lower the signal to noise ratio, so that when people search for specific topics, theirs will hopefully come up. For every attempt that does this right, there are millions more that do a half-assed job at it.

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

Precisely. The CCP runs a well-oiled machine built to pump out disinformation via every public channel available. It takes them no effort to create sites like these, and all steps of the process are likely fully automated. I find the simplest explanation to be that this is just another variant of this, rather than a scam operation that builds dozens of sites with pages upon pages of content just to get people to click on some links, or whatever type of scam this might be. If it quacks like a duck...

I don't think we'll know for sure either way, or convince each other, but cheers for the discussion.

[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).