Asian Boss planted deep blue YouTuber and pretended he was a 'man on the street'
laorencha.blogspot.comI once interpreted for a crew recording "man on the street" interviews. I had no experience working in TV, I was a last minute replacement.
At the beginning of the day, the producer listed the opinions he wanted to get. "Ok, we'll get a middle aged guy who says this, a younger couple saying something along these lines". He knew exactly what he wanted at the start of the day.
There were three camera crews working most of the day getting interviews. I get the feeling that with a bit of editing you could have make "the public" have pretty much any view on a topic that you want.
I was at an election briefing at a large media organisation a few years ago, one of the chief editors told the journalists "We can't stop you using vox pops, but please don't use them much" and that (paraphrasing) "they are usually awful, we know they add color but they detract from the story and become the story"
Of course "Person confirming stereotype" attracts clicks and shares, is easy to do, and that's good for career progression. Actually finding out what's happening, explaining what it means, the who, what, where, when, why of the story, that's hard.
Much easier to say
"Mr X thinks this is terrible"
Than say
"This is terrible because...., but it's good because...."
Man-on-the-street interviews should record the entire footage for transparency, without any cuts, for transparency, so that the audience can know which opinions were kept and which were removed.
Reminds me of a movie I saw as a kid. Can't remember the exact situation. But some celebrity, super-hero or whatever got asked by a journalist something ala "why did you say you hate this city?" and they answered "I have never said 'I hate this city'". Then what was aired was the last of that sentence, only the 'I hate this city' part.
I think that's the Scooby Doo live action sequel.
"I think Coolsville sucks!": https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-think-coolsville-sucks
Haha, that's it. Thanks! Funny that it even has its own knowyourmeme page.
Arrested development has this gag as well with “I killed Earl Milford”. Here it is:
Things they told us at boot camp:
It is ok to tell them your name and rank.
Expect everything else to be twisted.
Luckily I have never been tested in such a situation, I guess it will be pretty hard to stick to this in the long run.
As with everything, the Simpsons did it too. I think it was a grest piece of media literacy education to me as a kid.
Should, but nobody will watch that unless they themselves are investigative journalists. It adds a lot of noise to something that's already low on signal.
Eventually they'll figure out at what street corner to stand to find people with the leanings they want to film, if they're intent on coloring the reporting. At some point you'll also have to let go and trust the reporter or the outlet they work for, which admittedly is an increasingly challenging decision, these days.
They don't need to do that. Interviewing people on the street already selects for the kind of people who wander around shopping malls in the middle of a weekday, ie those who don't work 9-5, very much not a cross-section of society. The sooner vox pops disappear altogether the better.
I got interviewed for one of these man in the street things for a local newspaper. I had just completed jury duty and was about to grab an early lunch and head into work. The reporter paraphrased my words very slightly when it went to print but the intent and meaning was the same so no complaints from me.
Don't even have to do that, literally everyone passing them by could have been instructed on what to say, out-of-view.
If there's a solution it's probably something akin to research preregistration.
If there's a solution
Isn't what you're asking for just polling?
Aren't we trying to solve the trustworthiness of street interviews?
You can't. They are unrepresentative and meaningless as a means to inform.
so that the audience can know which opinions were kept and which were removed.
Let's be honest, you already know that just from the context of the question and which show is doing the interview. If the audience is deceived it's only because they want to be.
And how woefully undereducated and uninformed - or willfully ignorant (maybe even dumb) - a large percentage of the population is.
I am reminded of this story:
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2014/04/08/less-ameri...
(also here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/04/0...
)
Most people answering a 2014 poll (hopefully uniformly sampled) could not locate Ukraine on a map of the world, with many placing it in Africa, East Asia, Greenland or even the US; but the more interesting part was that the farther from its actual location was people's guess, the more they were supportive of US military intervention in Ukraine.
> And how woefully undereducated and uninformed - or willfully ignorant (maybe even dumb) - a large percentage of the population is.
A couple of people-on-the-street interviews will never ever give you an accurate representation of "a large percentage of the population".
Edit: see also this comment- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29889236
In my less pessimistic moments I like to think that many are not quite that uninformed and the interviewers find enough by sheer numbers interviewed.
What gets me is how easily inexperienced people are led to saying exactly what the interviewer wants. And it is blatant: they don't even pretend that isn't what they are doing on live news anymore.
Nobody will watch the 6-18hours of raw footage.
It's not needed for everybody to watch this footage, summary video can be presented. It just should be linked somewhere for those who want to see the results and verify summary themselves.
Yes. But I still think that nobody (lets say <1%) will watch this.
It might be enough. Like open source - not everybody needs to read the source code, it is enough when one knowledgeable person does that and makes a stink when they find something fishy.
Very much this. "The average person won't ..." is a huge fallacy. This also applies to repair (that knowledgeable people are able to do it is enough because they can sell it as a service at economically viable prices).
The footage is for verification only. No one will watch the whole thing, but people can scan through it and notice if the conclusion most people are giving different from the edited shorter final production video.
Then don't show any of it
Yes indeed. During the 1990s I first became aware of this as a comedy trope.
Loads of TV shows were using these techniques to make the public say all kinds of crazy shit as if they were widely held opinions.
It was funny because back in the 90s it seemed like, well at least to me, that we still trusted journalists and we didn't have social media. So seeing interviews obviously manipulated was funny.
I can also remember Charlie Brooker, the Black Mirror guy, showing the same footage from a set up reality TV show[1].
By just using editing he could show the same event but with very different interpretations.
Instinctively I think we all know that but seeing it done as demonstration is shocking and fascinating.
I only really noticed this when I watched Making a Murderer on Netflix. After each episode my opinion switched between "They were definitely set up by the police" and "They're definitely guilty." If the show had ended after one or the other episode I would have probably firmly held either view. Definitely impacted the trust I put in any media. Or rather the trust in myself to not be manipulated.
I'm also there with you, that was quite the roller coaster and impacted my trust fairly deeply. Although the totality of the evidence made that one pretty clear to me after researching further than the show; I felt like there was some bad faith cherry-picking going on, which is extremely effective on me but only while it lasts.
A similar series with all the levers cranked to the maximum is "Killer Ratings" on Netflix - just an unbelievable story out of Brazil that left me questioning everything. And that one I couldn't resolve in my head; it still bothers me today.
Another bad Netflix one is “ Under Suspicion: Uncovering the Wesphael Case”. It’s packed full of armchair psychologists and very little factual analysis (and way too long).
In the past one could look at just about every Michael Moore documentary ever.
It seems if you want to push a fringe or poorly supported narrative on something then there is little better format than pop documentaries.
I was once interviewed for a national TV channel about the security of open and proprietary systems. Since I wanted to present a balanced view, I started with a disclaimer, saying that open source can not be equated with a higher level of security by itself, but then I proceeded to present a couple of arguments about the advantages of open systems, and I specifically stressed the need for crucial communications components (like SSH) to be open.
Guess what, it turned out they made a program on "how Linux is less secure than Windows" and cut out my whole interview leaving just the initial disclaimer that, taken out of context, seemed to justify their agenda. From that time on, I refused any kinds of interviews for TV.
Makes you understand the strange verbiage politicians communicate with a little, doesn't it?
I've had a similar experience. I'll never submit to a vox-pop interview again; they presented my remarks out of context, and manipulated me.
I mean the sad thing about this one is that of all the vox pop content producers, Asian Boss doesn't do nearly the worst manipulation or selective editing. (The worst ones make people sound like idiots, which is unfortunately pretty easy.) Some of their content is genuinely powerful for it and frankly this video on the whole is pretty amazing by the thoughtfulness of the people they interview. It's too bad that they had to arrange something to get a pro-unification viewpoint on camera, but it would've been ok if they'd just owned up to it with a brief caption introducing that person as who they are. The real problem is they didn't do that and I do agree with TFA that it's a bad ethical lapse.
It's journalism by selective editing. Fairly widespread practice.
Fairly widespread is undercutting it. It's universal practice.
People hold journalists to crazy high standards of integrity and soothsaying, and the older I get the more it boggles the mind that grown adults still cling on to this.
Journalists work for private corporations who write things for a target audience to make money. That's all there is to it.
> Journalists work for private corporations
Indeed - that's the drift of Manufacturing Consensus.
To add to that: TV journalism is a form of entertainment, especially sofa-chat news-lite and vox-pop. Vox-pop, especially, is always manipulative. Interviewees always seem to be idiots, because audiences don't want to feel more stupid than the "man on the street". The information content of a vox-pop segment is zero.
It's not just about money for the journalists themselves. Visit a journalism school and you'll find very few students there looking to maximize their earnings.
It's a lot like other fields such as science or arts. People entering these careers knowlingly accept low pay and/or difficult working conditions in exchange for other kinds of satisfaction. For some it's intellectual curiosity; for others its artistic ambition or applause.
For journalists, it's the psychological satisfication of using political influence to spread their beliefs to others.
The actions of journalists cannot be understood according to a simple profit model. (The actions of their bosses can - they hire journos who will accept low pay, with the implicit exchange that those journos can use the position to satisfy their activist impulses. Fanatics work for cheap.)
> Journalists work for private corporations who write things for a target audience to make money. That's all there is to it.
Not universally true. There's some big corporations like News Corp that from a top level are in it to make money and push a right-wing narrative, but lower down there's a lot of journalists that do things for the public good. Think about the journalists that handled Snowden and Manning's revelations, think Wikileaks, think the journalists that got footage from Gitmo proving the US is committing war crimes, think those that reported on the Panama and Paradise Papers, on Epstein and 'the elite's pedophile rings, the list goes on.
These people have risked and sometimes lost their freedoms and their lives. Would you do that if it was just about money? Or are you just projecting your own motivators in life?
> Journalists work for private corporations who write things for a target audience to make money.
Sure, but let's not pretend that stuff like NPR is devoid of bias. They are clearly choosing their teams as well, even if they don't do it for money.
Not sure why you put private in front of corporations. You should try watching the political stuff the public networks put out in Canada.
The extremely budget modern version is the "Public Reacts" article that's a few paragraphs of bare editorial followed by 6-12 tweets with about 6-12 likes each.
The article is accusing Asian Boss of something different - planting a YouTuber for the appearance of an impromptu interview about Taiwan.
Yep
Like articles with embedded twitter/reddit posts in them. Sure it gives a primary source for whatever topic/view you want to support - but aside from "one person might think this" is pretty irrelevant.
> I get the feeling that with a bit of editing you could have make "the public" have pretty much any view on a topic that you want.
Watching Meerkat Manor when I was younger taught me that any narrative can be archived with a bit of editing
I live in Taiwan. Very, very few people here are pro-PRC. Tons of Taiwanese people love China and culturally consider themselves Chinese (to be clear, not Chinese citizens.)
The vast majority of people disagree on if they should either give up and surrender to the PRC because they may launch missiles or invade once they have a non-laughing stock navy, avoid a bloody war, or if China wouldn’t dare to do that because it would trigger WW3 so they are safe to declare and protect their country (Taiwan.)
Everyone out here agrees that the PRC is basically evil.
Edit: Just want to add that a lot of you probably have no idea that Chinese people and Taiwanese people also get along with each other just fine. They are unfortunately a geopolitical chess piece on the table between the PRC and Deep State US.
I find it deliciously ironic that when Taiwanese people travel or work in China that they use their ROC (Taiwanese) passport and there is no issue with that. A lot of the conflict is also theatre for your American news cycle.
My wife is Taiwanese, so I can confirm Taiwanese and Chinese get along fine. Many marriages, friendships and business partnerships cross the Taiwan Strait.
However Taiwanese people don't use their passport to travel to China. China doesn't recognise it. They are issued a travel permit by the PRC, similar to citizens of Hong Kong and Macau.
Not only that. You can’t just travel from China to Taiwan. It’s a bit difficult. Most people must travel as part of a tour group. Unless it’s business or you have family to sponsor you or something like that. Basically you can’t just jump on a plane and have a holiday in Taiwan from China.
This used to be true, but in 2008 direct flights between China & Taiwan were established and today it's easy to holiday in Taiwan from China.
When president President Tsai Ing-wen was elected it became difficult. In both 2016 and again in 2019. China banned solo travel from certain cities in China to Taiwan.
I was just talking to someone who came back from working in Shanghai and that’s not what she told me but it’s very possible she misunderstood my question.
ROC and PROC don't recognize each others' passports, since both states hold the official position that the other state does not exist (and that travelling between the mainland and Taiwan does not, therefore, count as "international travel").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainland_Travel_Permit_for_Tai...
Well, I stand corrected.
Besides some outlier ultra nationalists, most regular citizens of the mainland are also not huge fans of the CCP either and would happily get along with Taiwanese. And I have met some Taiwanese who even ironically have an overly romanticized view of the mainland --- seeing it as having made huge strides economically compared to the somewhat stagnant local economy.
At the end of the day, Taiwan culturally has more in common with the mainland than, say, Hong Kong does, because more of its history was spent together. Anything beyond is often a lot of "the grass is greener on the other side" mentality happening. People on both sides envy some aspects of what the other side has, but also would not trade what they have themselves to get it.
> Besides some outlier ultra nationalists, most regular citizens of the mainland are also not huge fans of the CCP either
What? China has among the highest satisfaction with their government in the world. For example: "95.5 percent of respondents were either 'relatively satisfied' or 'highly satisfied' with Beijing."
Source: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-sur...
I imagine North Korea has a similar percentage of their population that would report either ‘relatively satisfied’ or ‘highly satisfied’ with Pyongyang too.
I always found it (vaguely) interesting that people from both Taiwan and Hong Kong refer to PRC China as ‘mainlander’. But I see how it makes sense.
> At the end of the day, Taiwan culturally has more in common with the mainland than, say, Hong Kong does
As a western for some reason I thought this would be the opposite.
> Taiwan and Hong Kong refer to PRC China as ‘mainlander’
It's a general thing in the broad Sinosphere. Even the Japanese refer to (PRC) Chinese as "mainlanders" (大陸人/だいりくじん †) despite, you know, it being a completely different country for much of history!
†: You'll notice this sometimes in Anime. For example, in Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei's first episode the students respond to the teacher's unusual name with "must be from the mainland (=China)".
In modern usage, the "mainland" modifier is often used to get around the sensitive Taiwan issue. Different people may disagree on who is included in "China", but "mainland China" unambiguously excludes Taiwan even in the PRC.
Another fun fact is that English is woefully inexpressive when it comes to the cultural complexities of the broader Chinese cultural sphere. For example, a Taiwanese (or immigrant Chinese) person might identify as "culturally" Chinese (华人) but not "nationally" Chinese (中国人). A lot of this stuff gets lost in translation and ends up offending people inadvertently, because there aren't different English words!
> As a western for some reason I thought this would be the opposite.
Hong Kong split from the mainland in the 1840s and has been largely culturally (not necessarily politically) independent since. Modern Taiwan is the result of the KMT retreat during the civil war a _century_ later, in the 1940s.
A mainlander visiting Hong Kong will feel like an American going to, say, the UK -- it will feel familiar but distinctly foreign. A mainlander visiting Taiwan will feel like an American going to, say, Canada --- it will feel quirky but kind of like home. The mainlander might struggle to chat with a Hong Kong local as many won't speak Mandarin, whereas in Taiwan, they will have no trouble engaging in a conversation, with maybe only occasionally realizing that the other person refers to what they would call a "microwave" as an "electronic range" (this is not a real example. A real example would be something like a mainlander referring to "topping up (a transit card)" as "recharging" the card while a Taiwanese might call it "adding value" to the card).
We do get alone quite well at least in my circle. In my opinion people from Taiwan are actually more tolerate and warm than us. But increasingly young people from mainland are catching up and becoming more international.
I can't imagine how anyone from taiwan could naturally be 'Pro' chinese gov (given the media portrait and long history of rivalry), they would more likely support either 'green' or 'blue' camp, who will act on behave of people to interface with mainland policies.
The difference is some of my close Taiwanese friends are very weary of the political shows as they believe it is highly industrialised consumable entertainment while in the mainland people are quite innocent and audience are not mature enough and easily stirred up emotionally.
0) This surprisingly has nothing to do with chess engines or the US Democratic Party.
1) Documentary programs are almost always faked, in the sense that they present false continuity and false spontaneity. People often don't notice the manufactured aspect unless a subject they're intimately involved with is featured, and then it's immediately apparent.
I had some training on video news production, from a guy that does editing for major channels. You simply can't make engaging video without lots of cutting and splicing. You have to re-order segments to make a coherent storyline. All "live" video news is processed this way, otherwise nobody would watch it.
The scales fell from my eyes; that was the beginning of my awakening to the true nature of video news.
I used to see these Vox Pop YouTube videos occasionally. Like the line up videos, street interviews and what not. The issue I realized people are never going to give their open and unbiased opinion about something. Because they are moderated, edited and these people are always subjected to some form peer pressure from the group or the producers surrounding them.
Moreover the questions are drafted in a "so you are saying" kind of way. Now that is assuming the production is random and fair and they are not hiring actors or screening people based on their political belief systems, which is obviously not the case.
Being outside of US, I thought there are geopolitical and socially ambiguous questions which were drafted in a pattern that subtly were politically biased.
Now, subtle political biasness would make people think I am a little bit out there. But what I realized I don't inherently have any strong political feelings at all. There are some objectively true facts that are often being manipulated to fit narratives. So it is best just to ignore these shows all together.
These Vox Pop crap is nothing better than day time reality shows like 90 Days Fiancé, but atleast these reality shows are transparently stupid and does not want toy with an agenda.
I don't take this vox pop crap for more than what it is either, but this is about as honest as some China-based channel arranging an interview with Alex Jones in a random park and passing it off as the voice of a random American man of the street
Vox Pops, they're awful when the media use it, but at least the vox pop is supposed to highlight the story rather than set the story.
Why anyone listens to it when some random youtube channel does is incomprehendable.
Ask 1000 people a simple question and you'll get 10 crazy answers. Show 9 crazy answers and 1 normal question and claim 90% of people are crazy.
I dont know, asking people to point out a country they support bombing on a map never gets old.
Bonus points if its a presidential candidate.
Presidential candidate isn't a vox pop, that's news
You're talking entertainment, the cheapest form - laughing at other people. It's not journalism, but it pretends to be.
For those who like me didn't understand the title. From paragraph 9:
> For those who don't know, "deep blue" means very pro-KMT, generally favoring Chinese identity, closer ties with China and eventual unification with China.
Search for KMT leads to Wikipedia article that says it is the same as Guomindang, the party was exciled from mainland China to Taiwan in 1949. I don't know how it evolved to "eventual unification" from "Taiwan is the only China", so I prefer to skip the article entirely as non-comprehensible.
To somewhat relief your confusion (but not nearly entirely; the KMT switching to pro-unification is in itself extremely incomprehensible that even Taiwanese don’t understand), the KMT never held the view “Taiwan is the only China”. Their original view was more like “we rule the only China from Taiwan” (and that China is even bigger than the PROC’s current territories).
The title sounds very cryptic. It should actually be somewhere along the lines of "Asian Boss a YouTube channel interviewed a popular Pro-CCP Youtuber and pretended he was just an ordinary man on the street"
He's not a pro-CCP Youtuber, but a pro-KMT one, the KMT being the CCP's opponents in the Chinese civil war. Their party flag is blue with a white sun (found in the upper-left corner of the Taiwanese flag), hence "deep blue".
I think this only exemplifies that the title can be hard to decipher if you're not deeply familiar with the context. If I understood this exchange correctly, the commenter above received the exact opposite of what the title was supposed to convey. The fact that I'm not sure either furthers the point.
The KMT party has shifted over the years to being far more pro-CCP than the other parties. Saying being deep blue and being pro-CCP is not disingenuous at all.
Fascinating to learn about the "Blue/Green" divide in Taiwanese attitudes to China. Does anyone know where the colors comes from?
Green is the color of the Democratic Progressive Party (currently in power, and the historical anti-KMT (read: anti-authoritarian) party)[0]. Green has thus become the color of the Taiwanese independence movement (i.e. not "Republic of China", but "Republic of Taiwan")
Blue is the color of the KMT (former dictator party)[1], whose logo is still the top-left quadrant of the flag of Taiwan[2]. Historically, this party has claimed to be the politically legitimate government of all of China (as the "Republic of China" rather than the "People's Republic of China"), but lately is effectively an arm of the Communist Party of China.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Green_Coalition#History
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Blue_Coalition
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_Republic_of_China
How did that takeover happen?
It's a long and fascinating story that involves China firing missiles to affect the outcome of Taiwan's first democratic election, as well as the largest American military action in Asia since the Vietnam War.
In summary, the KMT upholds a "One-China Policy", which makes them a natural ally of the CCP against any Taiwan independence movements.
Back in the day, the KMT (Nationalist party) was the conservative counterpart to the progressive CCP (Communist party).
After the civil war stalemate, this left the mainland with only a progressive party and Taiwan with only a conservative party.
Then Taiwan developed its own progressive party. And nowadays the CCP is becoming much more conservative under Xi... so... yeah...
> Back in the day, the KMT (Nationalist party) was the conservative counterpart to the progressive CCP (Communist party).
Tell us you are American without telling us you are American
I wonder how many accounts the chinese state maintains on hackernews to upvote/downvote post and comments. It's an easy way to influence the public opinion and hard to expose.
I am not pro-Chinese, I am French with no ties to China. But I have downvoted/flagged anti-China posts and comments a few times.
There is an anti-China sentiment in the US that just feels wrong, and it shows on HN. Every time something good is said about the Chinese state, or even if it is "not that bad", it is Chinese propaganda. Every time someone says that China is evil, it is the truth, as if US propaganda couldn't exist. I am not saying that China is good, just that it is one-sided enough to raise a few red flags (pun not intended).
So, I downvote, most of it isn't interesting from a tech perspective anyways. It what I think of that submission. In fact, I am only here because I was curious about what "deep blue" meant (for me it meant IBM).
You are free to disagree with me, here I am just telling you that there is at least one person who has nothing to do with the Chinese state and dislike anti-China content.
I don't think it's one-sided at all. If you look at the 30 most popular stories in the past year then 5 of them paints China in a positive light (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...):
- China lands rover on Mars (581 points, 314 comments)
- China to supercharge uranium race with 150 new nuclear reactors (261 points, 354 comments)
- China on Mars: Zhurong rover returns first pictures (243 points, 66 comments)
- China releases videos of its Zhurong Mars rover (236 points, 167 comments)
- China unveils 600 kph maglev train (229 points, 433 comments)
You could even argue that whenever China does something positive that's note-worthy then it has a much higher chance to be promoted multiple times (e.g. 3/5 are about the Mars rover, all within a month) and less chance that it will be flagged (or at least remain flagged).
I think it's safe to assume the majority of HN support democracy, privacy, freedom of speech & press, and similar civil liberties that China have cracked heavily down upon and not just within their own borders. When you look at what they have done in the past few years with Xinjiang, Hong Kong, SARS2, Taiwan, etc. then it's only natural that there will be a lot of negative coverage, and this negative coverage is understandably and deservedly greater than the positive coverage. If USA or any other country banned under-18s from playing games for more than three hours/week then it would receive the same amount of coverage. Same thing goes for for Swiss Ph.D student’s dismissal, Steam being banned, cryptocurrency deals becoming illegal, blocking Wikimedia from entering World Intellectual Property Organization and every other story you might consider "anti-China". My submission doesn't even mention China so people are not blindly upvoting it because it's "anti-China", but more likely because it's interesting to see proof that one of the largest Asian YouTube channels (which cover a lot more than just China) is planting interviewees to push a certain agenda (keep in mind the channel put a lot of emphasis towards presenting themselves as being 'authentic' and sharing views of random and regular people they meet on the streets).
Looking at the typical patterns of voting and commenting, do you honestly think the CCP runs an effective influence operation on this site?
If you look what the CCP does elsewhere it's not unlikely, eg. https://www.nzz.ch/english/swiss-phd-students-dismissal-spot...
My question was about this site, not elsewhere.
I have no deeper insights into hackernes userbase. But here is another recent example:
"Wikipedia blames pro-China infiltration for bans" https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58559412
Btw. casting doubt on unwanted opinions is often used in propaganda. ;)
Not many, I think. I usually look at the new section of HN and check what has been flagged unreasonably. Anti-chinese post are rarely flagged multiple times.
My opinion is that there are honest pro-chinese people on HN, most likely chinese working in the US who don't plan to stay for life and feel patriotic enough to protect the fatherland on internet forums.
Maybe, but i think every platform that has a lot of influence or a big audience is a valueable target for propaganda.
Agree, just I'm lacking the evidence. Plus, we might overrate the importance of HN for the CCP. Most of their thought control is for internal use. The external influence is usually based on money and access to the chinese market, not by thrall farms. Exceptions apply to social media, but I think that they concentrate on the large platforms like FB, Twitter and Youtube.
This is almost certainly it. HN is first and foremost a technology website and its userbase is tiny in the grand scheme of things. I get that we like to think we're the center of the universe, but is it so inconceivable that even if the CCP knew we existed, it wouldn't care?
And also non-Chinese people that support the PRC, like myself. Many of us are communists, but not all.
The trend on HN is indeed quite clearly anti-China and anti-communist, so Chinese propaganda is definitely less successful than that of the US and Western Europe.
I'm not a communist (I'm not an ML(M), to be specific) but I do have a self-destructive compulsion to put up tepid contextual defenses of western adversary states like China, Russia, and Iran. I don't think they're universally wonderful places with perfect benevolent rulers, but the way most people here are completely delusional about these countries, from history to present conditions and motivations, can be frustrating. It's a soft (and sometimes hard) chauvinism which is a little sad coming from a group that likes to think of itself as fair and critical thinkers.
Also the implicit dehumanization ("they have no culture") of the people who live in these places can be really disgusting.
Exactly. Even the barest minimum of anti-imperialism gets pushback.
Western chauvinism is quite something. It's more noticeable if you're in any way "Eastern", even European.
You are one public forum. People can disagree with your messages just as you can disagree with others. If you don't want pushback write a blog and disable comments.
There is a difference between "nobody should be allowed to disagree with me" and "it's regrettable that most people hold what I consider to be very regressive positions on this topic." I don't think anyone is expressing the former.
Surely I can critique the collective behaviour of a particular public forum without excluding myself from it? Different fora differ drastically in behaviour, after all.
I don't think HN influences "public opinion".
I am pro Chinese myself, I’m not getting paid by anybody, and I can assure you that posting pro Chinese comments here gets them flagged pretty quickly. But I’m not sure if it is because people don’t like those opinions or because they think it’s unlikely anybody can be pro Chinese so they automatically think you are a propaganda account. It could very well be either, based on my past experiences posting comments that go against the “allowed” politics of the site.
Looking at some of your other comments, which have nothing to do with China, it’s absolutely no wonder you’re getting flagged.
If you present contrarian opinions but on top of that you wrap them in a shit sandwich, I too will flag.
It is absolutely without any doubt happening on HN and I have previously been banned trying to point it out.
Do you have any evidence, or just paranoid delusions?
For me it was apparent this channel is pure propoganda and i'm astonished this is up so high on HN. Couldn't even take the channel serious.
Which videos/topics are affected by that, in your opinion? Just curious what you have seen, since they have videos from multiple countries by multiple authors.
My memory recalls an interview from a guy who escaped from Korea. There were other warning signs as well but much more subtle and I don't recall them exactly. Like some people are being a bit too positive or some people seem to be oddly specific in their answers.
I'm sure they have legit videos as well, but I can't be bothered by such channels.
This is an instance of something true-by-default about media, journalism & such. What you see, read or hear is a story. A story told by a journalist or producer.
It might be plants. It might be selective editing, with certain interviews making the cut... possibly a minority from a wide selection. The choice of question. The choice of location. Etc. It's just generally true that these are stories contrived by someone.
We know this intellectually, but seeing and hearing still tends to beat our skepticism. Reality TV is, to me, the perfect example of this. Even though everyone knows reality TV is fake, we usually "forget" that a conversation between 2 people is taking place in front of a cameraman. That is, we don't really forget, but we also don't interpret the conversation as we would if we actually saw the cameraman.
People love micro-trottoire, you can find thousand of youtube channel doing them for country X, a lot with millions of views.
They are one of the form of journalism that are the most easy to manipulate (show mostly one opinion, show "crazy" people for one opinion and only "classy" people for the other, ...) and their value is therefore very questionable (plus, who care what the guy down the street thinks about complex subject he has no education to have a opinion about). Sadly, a lot of people take them at face value.
I know this blog post is niche but title could be edited to simplify what "deep blue YouTuber" means here. For HN readers I mean.
"...planted pro-China advocate for 'man on the street' opinions on Taiwan"
> For those who don't know, "deep blue" means very pro-KMT, generally favoring Chinese identity, closer ties with China and eventual unification with China.
That's so sad ... I used to follow the channel from its beginnings, especially when they used to cover exclusively Korea and Japan (with Kei), but since then I dropped off.
I'm very saddened to see it has reached this state.
Yep. Me too. Followed after their first few videos which were interesting, but then stopped after they started making it an entertainment channel and could see through their lies.
At least now I can tie a name to these shitty channel style: "vox pop".
There are so many and they're so bad.
For those who are wondering why the title is unclear or misleading: this blog is extremely niche, written for people living in or interested in Taiwan. Bet you the writer behind it, who is well-known in her niche and a permanent resident of Taiwan, never thought this post would make it to this site. There have been some updates since clarifying blue/green in the Taiwan context, so presumably she’s noticed.
For those who are wondering why the title is unclear or misleading: this blog is extremely niche, written for people living in or interested in Taiwan. Bet you the writer behind it, who is well-known in her niche and a permanent resident of Taiwan, never thought this post would make it to this site.
Serious contender for top accidentally-misleading title for a HN story...
* Asian Boss - Not a boss; actually a YouTube channel.
* deep blue - not the chess engine, not the emotional state, not related to the US democratic party; nor to any of the films of this name; nor the songs of that name.
Yes, please get some context in the title.
Two notes:
- what is at the extremes, and in the middle, can be changing all the time, the view of the author is not "canon" in this sense
- why does a YouTube video have more impact than the research? Perhaps more work on scientific publication is necessary
Not sure why they felt the need to go with a plant. The views this guy expressed are enshrined in the constitution and were the dominant ideaology until ~2000. Plenty of the older generation still think this way.
i am chinese, i followed asian boss. just for click and ads and money , politicized emotion is also for money. they need money like every company else.
> state plainly that you’ve gathered representatives from all segments of the Taiwanese political spectrum
Hang on. Why do you have to do that? When did Youtube become a place to escape from bias, propaganda and misinformation?
There's jargon in this article that suggests it's not meant for the likes of me. I clicked the "deep blue" link at the top, hoping to find out what the term meant (nope!) before I realised it was explained below. But KMT? Isn't that Kuomintang? Is ROC Republic of China, or Russian Olympic Committee?
but i am unsubscribed asian boss servral days ago.
I was so naive :cry: Damn you Asian boss! Damn youuuuuuuuuu!
Boom - all credibility lost - it’s just a scam, another CCP shill.
I actually watched this video the other day, and I remember this interviewee and I remember being surprised at how pro China the people of Taipei are.
Clearly Asian Boss has served its CCP masters well because I was convinced this was real and not fake CCP propaganda.
I remember watching it and thinking the opposite.
The article states that the guy was incredibly pro-KMT, which is about as anti-CCP as you can get. His perspective was interesting, but it is disappointing to find out he's a plant.
> pro-KMT, which is about as anti-CCP as you can get
This isn't a binary issue. Historically, the KMT was the main opposition to the CCP, but both of these factions claim control over the mainland of China.
The DPP (the greens) are both anti-CCP and anti-KMT, since the DPP is pro-independence; China is China, while Taiwan is Taiwan, and neither is a part of the other.
> was incredibly pro-KMT, which is about as anti-CCP as you can get
Here are some reference that shows how pro-CCP they are:
https://international.thenewslens.com/article/116615
https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Taiwan-s-new-Kuomintang-lea...
https://frozengarlic.wordpress.com/2015/05/09/chus-china-tri...
https://www.quora.com/Why-does-the-Kuomintang-KMT-have-a-clo...
The KMT is not as anti-CCP as you can get, why do you say that?
I didn’t interpret what that guy said in the same way you did.
So why I wonder is this video coming up in our feeds?
Could it be because the CCP want westerners to hear the message of how people in Taiwan actually want to unify with China?
Yes I think so. The CCP know how to get things promoted on social media.
I'm far more sympathetic to the greens... but my personal views don't matter much.
I don't mind the first part of the sentence; that's just editorial. The second part is weak-sauce backpedalling.
The repetitive moral outrage made this piece five times longer than it needed to be.
Considering that the writer resides in Taiwan but cannot vote there (not a citizen), perhaps that’s a literal statement of fact, not a backpedal.
People are surprised to find out media is usually deceptive and used for propaganda.
In the USA we, too, have a "deep blue fringe" and a "deep green fringe".
In the USA Deep Blue is a one nation Tory like that Nice Mr Obama :-)
And what are these?
I guess it was a joke that went over my head.