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Comment by darawk | Hacker News Reader

Ya, i've been saying something like this for a while. China, for instance, is uniquely invulnerable to this sort of attack. Because the state is already in charge of censoring information, it is much more difficult to flood them with misinformation. It's one of the many reasons i'm concerned that models like Chinas will actually flourish more than they otherwise would in the coming years.

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Attempts to take this half-misinformation-flood style of propaganda into China are playing out in real time with Guo Wengui (and recently Steve Bannon, for some odd reason)

Edit:

For example https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/2174235/guo-wengui-a...

As for the actual attack surface he's trying to exploit, I'm not sure. As far as I can tell, it looks like the target is chinese expats & international students who have access to the uncensored internet

They may be less vulnerable to attacks from outsiders, but they are much more vulnerable to attacks from their own government. It's similar to totalitarian governments; they might keep organized crime low, but they expose people to far more crime from the government itself.

I would expect people in China and in the Chinese government to also be more vulnerable to misleading and suboptimal information, because there is a lack of competing ideas.

>They may be less vulnerable to attacks from outsiders, but they are much more vulnerable to attacks from their own government. It's similar to totalitarian governments

Interesting that you say that about China, because that was exactly Bruce Schneier's conclusion about the United States:

>Our research implies that insider attacks from within American politics can be more pernicious than attacks from other countries.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/11/propaganda_an...

> Without any evidence whatsoever, he said that Democrats were trying to steal the election through "FRAUD."

Well, wait a minute - both of those races had already been called in favor of the Republican candidate on the night of the election until boxes and boxes of mysteriously Democrat-leaning ballots were suddenly found the following day... I think that constitutes evidence, even if it's not conclusive.

Evidence of a poorly managed election system split into tens of thousands of individual parts across 50 states in dire need of reform (but will never be, because one party benefits from the status quo), or evidence of a Democratic conspiracy to fraudulently seize power by creating 'mysterious' ballot boxes in the most hamfisted and public way possible?

Sure.

For any set of boxes, there is a 50-50 chance that they will favor one or the other party. Given the geographic polarization of the parties, the boxes seem likely to heavily favor one or the other party. We can't distinguish the event from random chance, afaik, and therefore it's not evidence.

> mysteriously

Is there a basis for this word?

Seems the basis would be, that the new votes were highly un-representative of all the other votes previously tallied (majority Republican)

The parent comment probably disagrees with your assessment of 50/50.

What I mean is:

> [People in dictatorships] may be less vulnerable [than people in democracies] to attacks from outsiders, but they are much more vulnerable to attacks from their own government.

What the study is saying is:

> Our research implies that insider attacks from within American politics can be more pernicious than attacks from other countries.

That is, I'm comparing the vulnerability of people in democracies to people in dictatorships; the report is comparing the vulnerability of people in democracies to attack A or attack B. We're not disagreeing.

Yes. The point of agreement is that both people in dictatorships AND people in democracies are more vulnerable to insider attacks from their own governments, than to outsider attacks.

I was calling that out as .. interesting.

> It's one of the many reasons i'm concerned that models like Chinas will actually flourish more than they otherwise would in the coming years.

That's why the soviets won the cold war? From the british empire to the nazis to the soviets to cuba to even north korea today, the state controlled and censored information and they all failed or are going to fail. The US, with all our misinformation, is still going strong.

Also, china has succumbed to misinformation a few times in the past 200 years. The US is more or less "vaccinated" from misinformation because we deal with it everyday. China, with its sterilize propaganda environment, is highly susceptible to misinformation and no matter how hard they try, they will never be able to completely keep misinformation at bay.

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