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China Says US Uses Facebook To Spread Political Unrest
crimeandpunishment writes "A Chinese government-backed think tank says the US and other western governments use Facebook and other social networking sites to spread political unrest. Their report says, 'We must pay attention to the potential risks and threats to state security as the popularity of social-networking sites continues to grow,' and calls for increased scrutiny of the sites."
...says the government that pays citizens by the post to write pro-government comments on Chinese blogs.
No doubt the FBI, CIA and DHS log far more hours in Farmville than just regular folk. It's a conspiracy I tell ya!
It's worth mentioning that the Chinese have had the worst social unrest since perhaps the French revolution. The cultural revolution was a populist movement, pushed along by one man who had been sidelined in the government. Lots of people died, lots of great things were destroyed. Given that, it is kind of understandable that the Chinese are wary of avoiding popular unrest.
Another point that needs to be taken into consideration is that the Chinese power structure is not all based in the national government. Just as in the US there is a constant struggle between state power and federal power, in China there is a struggle between the national government and regional governments. One method the national government has as a power lever is manipulation of the people; they are capable of fomenting unrest when they want to foment it (as during the Correfour riots. Some have speculated that the riots were aimed not at the French, but at the city governments to remind them who is in control).
Qxe4
Oh, I have no doubt that, if they thought they had a shot at it, the feds would be shoving propaganda down every last tube in the series, social networks included.
I'm just deeply unconvinced that something like Facebook, or any Facebook-esque clone, is a particularly effective medium for the US to spread political unrest in China(now, I can see a much stronger case for the US encouraging the spread of Facebook, ideally the real thing just so that we can make a buck on the side, or Facebook-esque sites within China, on the theory that they will magnify the effects of existing Chinese governmental problems).
Something like Voice of America, whether it is effective or not, is relatively easy for the government to set up. Some radio hardware in the nearest friendly or at least not hostile location, just enough native language speakers to translate the programs, and a friendly news desk to churn out the message. Getting the same effect from a social networking site is harder. Or, rather, getting a precise analog of that effect is pretty easy: just set up a VOA fan page/RSS feed/twitter whatever that people can choose to follow(and the state can probably block, in many cases). Using the social network more subtly and effectively is hard. Even the most sympathetic Chinese are going to be pissed if they are getting machine-generated spam from CIA fronts; because everyone hates machine generated spam. And it isn't bloody likely that we have anywhere near enough analysts who speak reasonably idiomatic Chinese and don't have better things to do to actually infiltrate social networks on a personal level and do message shaping.
Here is my guess: China, despite the authoritarian pretensions of its central government, has a great deal of trouble with corruption and mismanagement at the local level. When you combine that with a somewhat wild-west quasi-capitalist expansion, you get a recipe for a nearly constant stream of stories of abuses that would get all but the most dogmatically statist Chinese citizens upset. People's land basically being stolen by thugs with the connivance of local officials, blatantly illegal pollution poisoning people, fake baby formula with no actual nutritional content killing a few hundred babies by slow starvation, that sort of thing. The state doesn't generally approve of this sort of thing, often executing the perps; but it also generally does not approve of any spread of broader popular discontent about it. Some local anger is unavoidable; but censorship is frequently employed to slow the broader spread of the message until damage control and spin can be done. These are the sorts of situations where social networking tools could really make that task more difficult. Everybody is linked to their school buddies from back home, and their college buddies from wherever, and their work people from where they are now. Some nasty provincial scandal occurs back home, your highschool friend who stayed local tells you about it, you get upset and tell your college and work friends...
If that is the sense in which China believes that the US is "using Facebook to spread political unrest", they may well be right. I'm sure the Feds aren't exactly crying bitter tears over that effect, and they may even be taking more direct actions in its favor(overt and covert cooperation between strategic corporations and nation states is neither new nor exclusive to the US...). If, on the other hand, they are suggesting that facebook is full of CIA agents pretending to be popular schoolgirls or something, they are either lying or dreaming. The CIA might wish that that were so; but there just is no way that they have enough Chinese-speaking agents to have any real effect on Chinese areas of facebook, and everybody hates spam, so simply bombarding Chinese users with machine messages would be counterproductive.
This goes to something I've been saying for years now. The U.S. has some pretty impressive military power, but that's not what scares the world's dictators, religious zealots, and oppressive regimes. What do they fear about us? Rock 'n' roll, short skirts, blue jeans, and *especially* cell phones, e-mail, and Facebook.
The U.S. does a lot of things poorly, including, lately, waging ground wars. But one thing we're still very very good at: coming up with new ways for the world's young people to mock and ridicule authority figures, and for adults to talk to each other freely without government interference.
The cell phone, the 18" satellite dish, and the Internet are the most terrifying weapons against autocratic states the world has ever known. Is Facebook a threat to oppressive regimes? HELL YES, and we should be proud of that.
U.S. foreign policy should recognize this fact, and use it to its advantage. Rather than planning air strikes against Iranian and North Korean nuclear sites, we should be flying over and dropping cell phones, laptops, and MP3 players loaded with Rage Against the Machine and Ani diFranco.
the US WOULD push social networking in China if they thought it would help bring freedom of speech to China.
[emphasis mine]
That's an incredibly naive way of looking at US foreign policy. It should be -
The US WOULD push social networking in China if they thought it would advance the interest of the US ruling class. And it would not matter to them a bit if any resulting social unrest would harm or kill thousands of innocent Chinese, or turn China into an even more oppressive dictatorship, as long as it toe the US line.
Anyone who don't believe this just need to look at examples as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the various democratically elected governments in South America (and around the world) overthrown by the US in the past century to see how US foreign policy works.
Actually it's not so much about local v federal. That's mostly to do with corruption, and not wanting to give up proffi...err control. They honestly could give two flips about autonomy unless you live in HK. The real issue that seems brewing to me is Western China military v Eastern China Government. What most know is the somewhat safe Eastern China where we get most of our shiny crap from. The Western China however seems to have more in common still with fudle lords of days long gone by. Just no one really talks about it much. The quality of life in that area is markedly lower (what middle class?), technology of course hasn't made much impact there, and if your foreign, your pretty insane to even think of going near the Western areas.
I'm still wondering how that is going to play out especially with the coming water shortages China is getting itself into.
I wonder if the Chinese gov't (or other regimes) have thought of just using Facebook to track down the networks of friends and acquaintences of dissidents, instead of banning it.
During the Cultural Revolution, they said "Let a thousand flowers bloom", meaning they let dissident and anti-regime opinions flow unrestricted, suddenly free of censorship. But instead of listening to those ideas and implementing them, after a short period of freedom they cracked down and jailed those who had raised 'bad' opinions after they had revealed themselves. The promise of free speech had been a trap. I wonder if the same sort of thing could happen with online social media?
People in the west talk about privacy violations of Facebook, but imagine if a bad gov't got its hands on all that data and data mined it...
Clearly they have yet to realize that political unrest spreads itself. Facebook just makes it faster.
Now to make a serious point. One of the biggest problems of the US today stems from that time in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It's backward religions. Pioneers equipped with nothing but the Bible and no educated teachers went on to invent ridiculous religions - such as Mormonism and the wilder extremes of Southern Baptists - that continue to hold the US back socially and culturally today. (The same thing happened in South Africa, where the Dutch Reformed Church arose from semi-literate Boerdom.) The backward religions, just like fundamentalist Islam and settler-friendly perversions of Judaism, are well funded to gain support via the Internet.
The Chinese actually need to use the Internet to stop the same thing happening there. The Internet can spread a wider view of the world. My guess is that the Chinese government is well aware of the argument I've outlined above, in far greater depth, and their policy is simply based around the traditional Chinese policy of using the media to spread cultural homogeneity, but with an eye to the undeveloped part of China rather than the developed part. This is far from stupid. Freedom of speech is all very well in a pluralistic Western society where you can look out of the window and see that people are lying, but much less effective for isolated agrarian communities with no standards of comparison.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
'The purpose of government is to serve society in a way that keeps it from destroying itself.'
I would rephrase that as: The purpose of government is to serve people in a way that keeps them from destroying each other; in that any social institutions should be present for the benefit of people.
Otherwise, it's just replacement of government with society as the raison d'etre for tyranny.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
What would you say about America, if they removed the right to bear arms, and then the murder rate shot up from 42.8 / 1,000,000 to 200 / 1,000,000? I'd really like you to think through it, and then share your thoughts with me. I don't think that it is fair to compare them the way that you did.
Also, in places with Sharia law, most deaths are most likely attributed to natural deaths, deaths due to holy wars, and justice. If I want to kill you, and I have a law to protect me, then it won't be attributed to murder. This goes the same way in other countries. I've nothing against blacks and whites, but I do want to use them just for the sake of illustration. If a white master kills a black slave, then do you think that it would be murder, *legally* speaking? Legally speaking, it probably won't be, but you and I can look in with a clearer mind, and say that it murder, pragmatically speaking.
Also, another thing to bear in mind is how we deal with dead bodies that are unaccounted for. If a body turned up in a river, then would it first be classified as a murder, an accident, or what? I wouldn't be surprised if some cultures would just assume that it might have been just an accident, while others might initially classify it as murder.
You gave disclaimers for those statistics, and I respect that, but I think that you shouldn't have brought those into the discussion. They just cloud the issue.
testing out my trending skills