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China Fakes 488 Million Social Media Posts a Year To Deceive Its Citizens (bloomberg.com)
In an attempt to keep its citizens from seeing bad news and getting involved in sensitive political debates, China's government fabricates about 488 million social media comments a year, reports Bloomberg citing a study (PDF). The propaganda workers who post comments are known as Fifty Cent Party because they are believed to be paid 50 Chinese cents by the Chinese government for every comment they post. From the report: Although those who post comments are often rumored to be ordinary citizens, the researchers were surprised to find that nearly all the posts were written by workers at government agencies including tax and human resource departments, and at courts. The researchers said they found no evidence that people were paid for the posts, adding the work was probably part of the employees' job responsibilities. Fifty Cent Party is a derogatory term since it implies people are bought off cheaply.
About half of the positive messages appear on government websites, and the rest are injected into the 80 billion social media posts that enter China's Internet. That means one of every 178 social media posts on China's micro blogs is made up by the government, the researchers said. The sites affected include those run by Tencent Holdings Ltd., Sina Corp. and Baidu Inc.
Too lazy to RTFA, but a "Fifty Cent" party sounds like a good time.
>> China Fakes 488 Million Social Media Posts a Year To Deceive Its Citizens
Hmm...that seems low. Here in the US, I'll bet we're at least over a billion on this statistic.
e.g., http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/may/18/ap-perpetuates-tale-benghazi-attack-caused-anti-is/
fortunately in the US we have useful idiots that make the same types of postings free of charge!
slackers. less than a billion followers, too.
Our glorious country and it's beloved leaders would never do such a thing. Please report to a nearby office for re-education.
Fifty Cent Party is a derogatory term since it implies people are bought off cheaply.
And to think there are people in the world willing to do this for no money at all! Imagine being paid, even if it is 50c, for something that you would likely already do, anyway.
They're doing it much more efficiently too. Things that people post most about in the US- food, and cats. In China they are combined in one picture!
I can't help finding it slightly ironic that this academic study was apparently funded by the US federal government.
"Our thanks to... DARPA (contract W31P4Q-13-C-0055/983-3) and the National Science Foundation (grant 1500086) for research support".
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Where you would literally choke on the government's propaganda, ie the horribly polluted air.
488 million accounts are being faked to help spread doom, fear, and other bad news over stupid, menial things like which bathroom people should use, and why unisex bathrooms are the worst idea in the history of the world.
We need now the same kind of study to verify how many paid drones do so on the corporate states of america. I don't doubt the number of government-sponsored posts is very low in the USA, but the corporate propaganda drive there should never be underestimated...
I do it for free.
Seems on english speaking sites I run in to far more Putin shills.
The sad part is that if you asked around (in China), you would find that a large percentage, if not the majority, of Chinese people actually "support" these forms of oppression. THAT is the power of indoctrination. When you spend your entire life knowing nothing but authoritarianism and oppression, and being told constantly that it's for your benefit, you will have a very difficult time imagining the alternative. It's similar to how a life-long prisoner, upon being set free, finds that he just can't function properly outside of prison. The authoritarianism is actually comforting to them, and that's exactly how the rulers would have it. The only people who dare to imagine a better society are the radicals, and we all know what happens to radicals in China.
Or maybe your worldview is so skewed, you call everyone who disagrees with you a shill.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
It is not 0.50 USD. It is 0.50 RMB, or about 0.08 USD.
I think mdsolar forgot to log in.
At least money goes to the people and not to the managers.
Russian Trolls!
Over 1.33 million posts a day
Almost 55,500 an hour
Just over 9000 per minute....
That's one way to bump up employment
China provides you with all the smog you could possible want and you still complain? They have NO smog at all in the western world, or at the very least they can only get it in really huge cities, and even then not always. In wonderful China you can now even have it in the countryside more often than not, and the Chairman and his people are toiling hard day and night to ensure that you will never have to exist without!
Also, dear party, I haven't been paid for over two weeks... I mean, I had the pleasure of enjoying participating in the glorious spreading of our enlightened truth for two weeks but I'd like to get some ramen again, if you could possibly find it in your endlessly big heart to fuckin' pay me?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So the approximately 50 posts I shit every day into /. are worth about 4 bucks?
Hmm... Is there any kind of requirement how long or informative the posts have to be?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
3 point back at you.
Careful there, people have been executed for smaller errors in their bookkeeping. Embezzlement is a capital offense in China!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I have a degree in nuclear physics. Why would I need to get paid for commenting on nuclear?
That does seem low. Only 488 million?? In a country with eighty billion social posts a year?
I would have guessed a much higher number.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Here in the USA, we just pay Fox News to do all that for us.
Certain people have purchased media, and at the same time placed puppets into the Government. This is why no matter who we have in office the shit continues. We don't hear about horrible policies and are drown in "interest" stories (AKA Propaganda).
This is not new, it started back in at least the 60s. Start to track the point where "Conspiracy" synonymous with "false narrative" and "Conspiracy Theorist" was used as an ad hominem against certain types of investigative reporters covering specific types of stories.
Not that the public at large was ever crazy intelligent, but in the last 50 years we have gone from mostly rational to a place where in general people can not tell fact from fantasy. "Feelings" today trump facts in the majority of our discussions in Political Philosophy and Sociology.
I read long ago that there are two possible ways to view the world. One, pushed by media and politicians, is that everything is accidental and results which could never be predicted. The other, which is ignored by media and politicians, is that most things are intentional with results which are predicted with reasonable accuracy. When you consider that the people in politics are the highest educated among society, with literally teams of highly educated people working as advisers and think tanks, which do you find the more likely world view?
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Americans fake billions of social media posts every day to deceive other Americans.
So the question is, how many posts on this thread will be from the 50 cent party ?
Every forum or google search I've done on anything controversial in the last few years is rather obviously populated by people trying to bias opinions or spread obviously false (but oh, so *happy-talk*) information.
Mentally, you filter it out. Many folks don't, I'm sure.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I don't. I know people like him. They even call me a Putin shill just because I disagree with their opinion even though I've already been on Slashdot when Putin was a small fish yet.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
I'm not sure how you slept through the last several years but you did. Snowden dumped the complete playbook and we found it to be the US Government inside of everything all the time. More than half of the countries we ally with in Europe have shit canned US services and ban new projects from landing on US servers. Not because "Ebil IBM and MS" but the more "EBIL UNCLE SAM".
Several whistle blowers have been jailed, reporters have been jailed and threatened, and lawsuits have been filed by numerous parties. Stonewalls have been erected all over Washington DC, and countless very high ranking politicians spend extended durations of time doing nothing but denying what they did was "really" wrong.
Since you have slept through the last few years, you probably also missed the US having black sites, covering up wrongful death in the middle east, etc....etc.. Maybe you should try living out of the cave for a while. You can't be an incarnation of a different sockpuppet 'cf" trying ot re-write history can you? Nah, you have to be crazy from all the batshit.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
How can Tencent Holdings afford to pay fifty cents a post?
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
Expel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... from your country
Casteism