Seriously though, democratic governments are much less good at propaganda operations than despotic ones, not necessarily because the people involved are much more honest on an individual level, but just because democratically elected governments are never really in all that much agreement about what sort of propaganda ought to be spread. The genius of democracy is that if you keep the people in power constantly fighting with each other they don't have as much time left over to screw the rest of us.

So although "whatabout the US?" is inevitably the top comment on every thread about the evils of China, I think that just sometimes we ought to actually pay attention to China qua China.

Of course, the cynical interpretation is that there's nothing weird going on, and people just have a larger attention span for gruesome fluke accidents than for corruption.

Yesterday, President Trump gave a speech about his trip to Asia, and 90% of the headlines were about the fact that he drank water during it.

As the U.S. president regularly demonstrates in his complaints (and as all his predecessors did, to a lesser degree) the U.S. government has little power over the news media and is very unhappy with what they do.

I do think the government's ability to place favorable stories and narratives in News Corp. publications (Fox, Wall St Journal) might be comparable as a propaganda operation. My sense is that that's their primary purpose. But it's still different; News Corp has the choice of whether to comply.

1. It's a blatant example of whataboutism[0], and a discussion of the reprecussions/implications of Chinese social manipulation can be had entirely without bringing America into the picture.

2. Even if we accept that we do the same thing, that in no way justifies it in either place, as you seem to suggest in a comment below

3. If you've read the article you'll see that distracting from the topic is a key tactic the propagandists use to derail discussion. I'm going to be generous and not assume you're in that basket, but can you see why your response might seem tone-deaf in that context?

4. The extent to which China has been experimenting with social manipulation is so beyond the pale of anything that happens in the US. [1][2][3]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System [2] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/muslims-china-police-state... [3] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/24/china_installing_mo...

HN is hosted in the United States and that's where most of the readers are. It's natural for a person to use their own country as a comparison in discussions about governments and countries that are foreign to them.

There's no conspiracy, and the same thing happens on any discussion site where a majority of users are from a specific country.

When you look at something objectively, it's hard to know how sinister (or lack thereof) it is. Because most folks here live in the U.S., it makes the comparison easier.

"Correct the Record was a super PAC founded by David Brock. It supported Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. The super PAC aimed to find and confront social media users who posted unflattering messages about Clinton and paid anonymous tipsters for unflattering scoops about Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, including audio and video recordings and internal documents."

Thankfully, though, there are very important differences to what it looks like in China. Correct the Record has only the resources of one political party, not the entire government, and it exists in opposition to a bunch of equally well funded forces from the other party. You're free to call CTR out on their bullshit, whereas calling the CCP out on its bullshit can easily lead to prison camp or death.

In the US there are meme wars, but in China there are none -- just a boot stamping on the face of a Pepe forever.

I dislike the way much of our media talks about “bad” things China does without discussing how the US does similar things. “Hacking” is the one I hear about China doing all the time, despite it being well known that the US government is heavily involved in global hacking efforts and is in fact the strongest player in the field. Yet I hear little about that and too much about China and Russias efforts there.

Perhaps if we acknowledged that all nations do these things, we’d have a different outlook on the issue than we would if we imagined this was a problem with “them”.

===

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2006/nov/20/mondaymediasec...

[2] HBGary was contracted by the USG to build a tool that is "creating an army of sockpuppets, with sophisticated "persona management" software that allows a small team of only a few people to appear to be many, while keeping the personas from accidentally cross-contaminating each other. Then, to top it off, the team can actually automate some functions so one persona can appear to be an entire Brooks Brothers riot online."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2231471

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...

Sure we have tremendous surveillance capabilities, but we use them to detect criminal and terroristic behavior, not to police thought crime in the same way that China does. Don't be silly.

It's so fashionable for pseudo-intellectuals to adopt a cynicism-all-the-time mentality, especially about America, but it's really just lazy thinking.

...Or maybe social dynamics and global relationships are more complex than that and patterns emerge even without the need for a conspiracy behind them...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_in_the_United_State...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Informatio...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Information_Agen...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_Secretary_of_State_for_P...

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-brown/propaganda-public-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

And this doesn't even begin to get into the deep collusion between the government and the media with lobbying, regulatory capture, government appointments, politicians on corporate board seats.

Maybe it's easier to believe in a massively orchestrated conspiracy machine masterminding all of this, but I believe that the world and ongoing international affairs are slightly more nuanced than that.

Perhaps you were simply referring to the normal complexity one would expect out of a diverse crowd of interests from bodies of government and businesses acting in ways that sometimes overlap when you said:

> "deep collusion between the government and the media with lobbying, regulatory capture, government appointments, politicians on corporate board seats"

We have always been at war with Eastasia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_mili...

National pride is disgusting.

This has nothing to do with national pride and everything to do with the highest respect toward something that is greater, older and much wiser than myself.