[parthdesai]

Does China go around the world invading countries in the name of freedom?

> Content about the United States government rolling through protesters in armored vehicles, killing people in Venezuela with bombs, and threatening Greenland, straight to top of feed.

None of this is propaganda, it's just facts.

[thomasmg]

China: for Taiwan, they are in the planning phase. (Vietnam, Hong Kong, Tibet, Aksai Chin, Korea, Scarborough Shoal do not count in your view of course). Not saying they are worse than the US.

[rluna828]

What China did to the Han Chinese makes them worse than ANY other modern country. The great leap forward and the cultural revolution have not comparison. Add in the chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959 and 1979 invasion of Vietnam and they are butchers and imperialists.

[kdfjgbdfkjgb]

the Han? are you sure you didn't mean a different group?

[tw1984]

> The great leap forward

You need far better propaganda materials for your "great leap forward" blames in 2026. There were bad policies, but the intention good, it was all about moving the country forward. It failed horribly with huge consequences, that is just the reminder that a full scale industrialisation for over 1 billion people is not something that can be earned easily.

Like it or not, the "Exceeding the UK, catching the USA" (超英赶美) goal of the great leap forward has been overfulfilled under the leadership of the CCP with the help of brutal state capitalism. Everything else is just cheap talk.

Having a full scale industrialization larger than the G7 combined is not something handed to China on a silver platter - those very sad deaths caused by the failed attempts during the great leap forward was a part of the costs.

> and the cultural revolution have not comparison.

The cultural revolution is brutal, nothing should be used to defend it. It is just so wrong. That being said, the west is going through the exact same cultural revolution -

* extremely polarised society with everything is politicalised * populism taking control * suicidal policies destroying the civilizational foundations

the difference is 99% Han Chinese consider the cultural revolution as extremely bad, while the west is enjoying having its own ongoing cultural revolution.

if you add the recent woke cancer, the western version of the ongoing cultural revolution is far more brutal.

[direwolf20]

Intention doesn't matter

[rluna828]

So you agree that 50mm Han Chinese dead makes the CCP brutal, correct? Every brutal regime thinks they are justified. Ask the US if they think they are justified. Woke is dead. China is much smaller than the west. The G7 is maybe 1/4 of the west. The west includes EU, US, first island chain (japan, s. korea, Philippines, etc), all of the western hemisphere.) China has no allies, it probably doesn't need them. However, China doesn't control its vital sea-lanes. It has less water per person than Saudi Arabia. China has more old people than the west and Confucianism prohibit to "great leap forward" them. China is not escaping the middle income trap.

[tw1984]

I don't know what you are smoking but that thing must be strong. Have fun.

[sneak]

Propaganda can be entirely factual. In fact, the best propaganda is.

[brabel]

In Portuguese we use the same word for ad and propaganda! In fact that word is just propaganda!

[tintor]

In Serbian too: EPP - Ekonomske Propagandne Poruke | Economic Propaganda Messages

[direwolf20]

PR departments used to be called propaganda departments

[parthdesai]

I think you're being sarcastic, but just in case you're not

> Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic manipulation of information—including facts, half-truths, or lies—to influence public opinion, attitudes, and behaviors toward a specific cause, ideology, or agenda.

[muwtyhg]

Sometimes what you choose to show, even if true, can impact how people see a situation or fact. That is what the OP is referring to. Your quote even mentions that propaganda can be made of "facts" and "half-truths" (a half-truth is usually a fact with a portion omitted to change the interpretation of the fact).

[WarmWash]

A large percentage of Americans are convinced that police will just shoot them if they happen to feel like it.

Even including ICE in this statistic, you will never even meet someone who knows someone who was murdered by a cop. Police encounters that turn deadly, not even blatant murder, are on the order of 1 in 50,000.

However, that stream of police murder videos are definitely real.

Propaganda is often stoking tiny sparks into large raging forest fires.

[southerntofu]

> police will just shoot them if they happen to feel like it.

Well that's exactly the problem. There's nothing stopping them: no accountability, no justice. Many cops just don't feel like randomly shooting people, and that's good. The problem is if they do, and even if they brag about it, little will be done.

Take for example the latest Sainte-Soline repression scandal revealed a few months back by Mediapart [1] where videos show dozens of riot cops making a contest about maiming the most people, encouraging one another to break engagement rules, and advocating for outright murder. Everybody knew before the bodycam videos, but now that we have official proof, we're still waiting for any kind of accountability.

If i go around and shoot people, there is no way i will avoid prison. If a cop goes around and shoots people, or strangles people to death, prison is a very unlikely outcome.

> you will never even meet someone who knows someone who was murdered by a cop

That's not how statistics work. Police abuse tends to happen in the same low-income social groups (and ethnic minorities). As an example, living in France, i've met several people who had a family member killed by police. Statistically unlikely if i only hung around in "startup nation" or "intellectual bourgeoisie" circles, which is not my case.

[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifestation_du_25_mars_2023_...

[WarmWash]

Being killed by police is different than being murdered by police.

Police in the US kill somewhere around 1000 people a year. But of those, it's something like 5-10 that are murders. There is maybe 1 every few years where the cop is itching to shoot someone who is clearly compliant and not a threat.

The 990 police killing videos that become available every year now are not particularly compelling, because its bad actors trying to kill police and getting themselves killed.

Sorry, I don't know anything about France and police though. The US has a different dynamic because guns are everywhere, especially where crime is. Every cop knows about the ~50 cops who are killed by guns every year.

[southerntofu]

The dynamic doesn't look very different here, at least from reading the news. I don't know about the US (though i suspect <1% murder out of all police killings is a gross under-estimation), just for anyone's curiosity, in France police killing of a threatening person is the outlier. [1]

We don't have guns circulating freely around here (though some people have them such as for hunting). Many police murders take place in police custody (such as El Hacen Diarra just this month). According to the most comprehensive stats i could find [2], out of 489 deaths by police shootings (1977-2022), 275 victims were entirely unarmed.

[1] Not very scientific method: any case of police being assaulted and using "self-defense" is widely spread in the media, and those few cases per year don't account for the dozens of deaths every year.

[2] https://bastamag.net/webdocs/police/

[pcthrowaway]

> Even including ICE in this statistic, you will never even meet someone who knows someone who was murdered by a cop.

Uh.. I know someone who was murdered by cops while having a bad LSD trip (not violent, just incoherent). He was restrained too tightly despite protests of his family, loaded into a vehicle, and suffocated to death.

> Police encounters that turn deadly, not even blatant murder, are on the order of 1 in 50,000.

Oh I see, you don't consider this murder.

[johnnyanmac]

>Even including ICE in this statistic, you will never even meet someone who knows someone who was murdered by a cop. Police encounters that turn deadly, not even blatant murder, are on the order of 1 in 50,000.

That just shows that people's social circles aren't that wide. 1 in 50,000 is rare in your personal bubble. For a town of 1 million people, thats 20 people.

Sounds tiny, but if we were to line up 20 people and have them murdered by law enforcement, it'd pretty much end the careers of anyone in that chain of command. Because that's not a behavior you want to let spread and expand.

[sneak]

I am not being sarcastic at all. It is a common misconception that propaganda means lies. Propaganda is information designed to get you to believe a certain thing or feel a certain way. The best propaganda uses entirely truthful statements to manipulate your beliefs and emotions.

[somenameforme]

One of the best examples of this were the endless photos and information about stocked store shelves, filled with fresh goods at dirt cheap prices, during the Cold War. In general truth is the best propaganda, because when you lie there's always a rubber-band effect when somebody realizes, sooner or later, that they've been had.

[carlosjobim]

Propaganda is information which supports a specific cause, whether true or false.

If you think "propaganda" is defined as something being lies, then you have misunderstood the word.

Product advertising is the most widespread form of propaganda. And in some non-english countries it is called "propaganda" and not "marketing".

[cheeseomlit]

>including facts

[parthdesai]

> deliberate, systematic manipulation of information

And, what are we doing with those facts? We're manipulating them lol

[fc417fc802]

It's using information to influence public opinion in a calculated manner. Said information can include facts. It can even be entirely factual.

Manipulating the feed of a social media website for the purpose of swaying the viewer's opinion is a cut and dry example of propaganda. Doesn't matter who does it or whether the information displayed is factual or not. Those things make zero difference.

[johnnyanmac]

This really doesn't pass the sniff test. It reminds me of a recent post I saw: "what are movies people like only becsuse it is good?", calling it "quality slop". It's contradictory.

If people are given a wide perspective of a situation and adjusts bias for the Overton window (aka, we don't let Nazis have an equal platform to a more progressive group), then we just call that good reporting. The act of convincing people isn't inherently a bad thing. How you do it matters a lot.

[Cthulhu_]

That can be part of it, but usually it's not necessary - certain facts, or certain aspects of facts (e.g. exclude some context) can just get exaggerated to have the desired effect on a larger population.

[mvdtnz]

So literally what he just said. Propaganda can be factual.

[morkalork]

You should see how some people justify Tibet..

[Cthulhu_]

That might be, but if it's amplified through social media it becomes propaganda.

Example, 99% of people are normal, but if all you see is the 1% that isn't you'll start to believe more than 1% aren't normal. Especially if that 1% is of a recognisable ethnicity / religion / background. This is why there's a shift to the right.

[ikrenji]

I mean China is not exactly a poster child for a benevolent hegemon - tibet / taiwan / uyghurs to name a few

[hungryhobo]

all 3 places you mentioned have been integrated into china longer than the us has been a country

[Cthulhu_]

Are you trying to say that excuses the human rights violations happening there?

Besides, you're comparing it with the US which is also known for its human rights violations ever since the continent was discovered.