A US State Department report that accuses the Chinese government of expanding disinformation efforts is “in itself disinformation,” Beijing’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs claimed Saturday.
The ministry shot back after the State Department issued a striking report this week in which it accused the Chinese government of expanding efforts to control information and to disseminate propaganda and disinformation that promotes “digital authoritarianism” in China and around the world.
The US report, issued by the Global Engagement Center on Thursday, alleged that China spends billions of dollars a year on foreign information manipulation and warned that Chinese leader Xi Jinping had “significantly expanded” efforts to “shape the global information environment.”
It also underlined US concerns about China as a main military competitor and key rival in the battle over ideas and global disinformation.
This is funny. It also reflects in Lemmy. For example, take this tankie comment claiming “zelensky made having peace negotiations with putin ILLEGAL”, based on an article which says “Zelensky’s decree released Tuesday declares that holding negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin has become impossible after his decision to annex four regions of Ukraine.”
Then watch how mods from lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml ban users and delete comments which question their narrative.
Cherry on top: A user from this curated bubble remarks that “Nobody actually has any argument against this”, because of course they are shielded from comments who pointed out the inaccuracy of the claim, and don’t question it themselves.
Compare yourself:
- lemm.ee version: https://lemm.ee/comment/3929526
- lemmygrad.ml version: https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/2389500
Now read that comment in the basement of this thread again:
Understand we American make more lie for pleasure and entertaining. Not chinese lie. China always with great truth.
comments which question their narrative.
But don’t you see that’s NATO propaganda. Want proof? Have a look at who posted it.
Had to open the links up in web version to see the difference. Ngl, it’s something I expected lemmygrad to do. I’m glad to be on lemm.ee. I love the admins and their transparency and how their policies are democratically decided like when we voted to defederate Threads.
I also think there is nothing wrong with stuff like this and it’s what lemmy was made for. If one instance doesn’t like something, they can remove it, other instances may still want to see it, if members don’t like it, they can move or have their own instance but can still interact. It’s the beauty of decentralization.
to be fair it’s lemmygrad so it’s the worse of qorse, not exactly lemmy in general
What are you talking about? The first reply to that comment has more upvotes and debunks it.
The first reply to that comment has more upvotes and debunks it.
Yes, from our point of view. This is fine. My point is, compare to their point of view.
All comments rectifying the lie got removed. Users from that instance see a whole other story. Only now that weird comment makes sense:
Nobody actually has any argument against this except ad hominems, which is usually fairly telling.
The OP article seems to talk about a similar situation, just in geopolitics, while we play in Lemmy. Two parties with very different narratives. One is heavily filtering and censoring, which allows people living in that bubble to honestly believe what they are being told. Because that’s all they see, their Big Brother takes care.
Sorry, I am unsure how this federation thing works but your explanation made it much clearer.
It’s unclear what you mean with “that comment”, since my comment refers to three distinct comments, and two different views of a comment section, with different replies and upvotes. If you can narrow down your question (preferrably with a link), I will try to answer it.
Where
This is exactly what I was looking for.
I feel like we could all save a lot of money on diplomats and ministers by just getting a bunch of toddlers to shout “no u” at each other until the end of time.
I feel like this would be easier to settle if the report came with specific examples of narratives originating from Chinese troll farms with metadata supporting their general origin.
Shit even pegging it to tankies known to be sympathetic to the CCP would probably be sufficient
No u
Nuh uh
Removed by mod
US does the same thing, they just use Israel as a proxy.
He jas a point
It is so funny that US does propaganda like this, because there is so much shit happening in and because of countries like China, Russia and North Korea. Why doesn’t US talk about the genocide? Why doesn’t US talk about public executions (oh wait I know the answer to this one), why doesn’t US talk about concentration camps (oh I know this one too), why the duck does US have to have shitty disinformation propaganda like North Korea forcing specific haircuts instead. There is so much shit happening because in these corrupt areas, and lies about haircuts is the thing they want to focus on.
I’ve always found it hilarious when people try to point at a person’s shitty past as evidence to say their own actions are somehow okay or not that bad.
Has the US committed genocide on a national scale? Ask the native Americans who are ALLOWED to stay on broken down, often desolate reservations, and the literal millions of Buffalo slaughtered for the sole purpose of taking away their food supply to starve them out.
But that doesn’t for a second excuse other countries doing similar things. We know how fucked up that is, we’re not the same country we were 150 years ago. We’re not even the same country we were 15 years ago.
I know YOU aren’t saying the US can’t talk about things like that, but it’s often seen “but WHAT ABOUT blah blah blah” and your comment reminded me of it. You’re probably right though, a lot of people in the US don’t like talking about those things, and REALLY don’t like it when you point out their own country has done many of the things we supposedly fight against. Hopefully it’s been a long time since those things happen, but all too often you see it happening in some small way still today.
Everyone fucked up is my motto.
I really believe both can play the same game. Both the western and the east block can do propaganda.
US/ CIA was the… mastermind of many collapses of communist government during the cold war. I’m Chinese Indonesian and we are definitely one of victims of such acts.
This might help someone.
when do we go to war with eurasia?
Another case of projection. At least they’re honest about why they are projecting, they’re losing their grip on monopolizing the global stage.
The US has found a really good dog whistle for “opinions and facts I disagree with.” Everything is disinformation! Some of it is Democrat disinformation (“fake news”), some of it is Republican disinformation (“wrong”), and some of it is foreign disinformation (“makes other country look good and America look bad”). Welcome to the state of modern American journalism, I guess.
For what it’s worth, China doesn’t really need to spend billions of dollars on disinformation abroad because (1) The Great Firewall exists (so foreign disinformation has no domestic impact), (2) China has almost always adopted the “actions speak louder than words” strategy that better aligns with Chinese culture, and (3) China has also taken that view on foreign policy in that it uses the actions of other countries to determine their positions rather than their stated views.
Frankly, a lot of people are applying Western views on Chinese culture without taking a step back and asking themselves WHY there’s such a big gap between what they expect and reality.
disinformation has no domestic impact
Ow, my head.
A significant contributor to the deadliest man-made disaster in the history of mankind was domestic disinformation in China.
Edit: I misread the comment and didn’t see the preceding word ‘foreign’. In hindsight my original comment doesn’t make sense given this context. I don’t agree with OP’s comment though. They seem to rely on the idea that, ‘China is special and unique (unlike you troglodytes)’, as an explanation for how the government behaves in international politics.
I think a different poster explained the CCP’s sophisticated methodology better: “no u”.
They were clearly referring to online foreign disinformation, not domestic disinformation.
Yeah, my bad. It’s clear I got stuck on that one point.
Precisely. Everyone has domestic disinformation, but it’s a domestic issue.
That has no relation to the issue of foreign disinformation. Whataboutism, much?
Hideo Kojima was right.
He predicted all of this in MGS2.
“Nobodies ever invalidated, but nobody is ever right either.” Referring to how you can pick and choose what you want to believe and find no shortage of information on the internet to support or debunk it.
