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Comment by system16 | Hacker News Reader

On Twitter you can find promoted full blown propaganda paid for by hostile (to the US at least) state sponsored news agencies and government officials. These same governments ban Twitter in their own countries and would never allow similar content on their own platforms. Twitter's solution here is to insert a tiny "State affiliated" footer text below the account name.

Can you imagine in the Cold War-era NBC being allowed to broadcast propaganda ads bought and paid for by the Soviet Union?

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> full blown propaganda paid for by hostile (to the US at least) state sponsored news agencies

twitter is available freely on the Internet in any country that doesn't block it. with that in mind it's extremely difficult to remain "neutral" or be expected to be the arbiter of truth.

there are some obvious (easy) ways to implement constraints against state-affiliated propaganda outlets but with the above in mind what is "propaganda" to a European audience might just be news in a FVEY country. facebook has the same problem and I think it's not solvable in a "fair" way.

Say if they really went after anything that is "propaganda" should they also be pointing out that Bellingcat is having very strong ties with Atlantic Council (and collaborates with GCHQ), or should @NatSecGeek be called out for only doxing non-US organizations and individuals? There simply are too many small players that participate in InfoOps and their alignment isn't always as straight forward.

note: I personally think both bellingcat/NatSecGeek do excellent work but none of them are unbiased (or unaffiliated) which means they will at times end up as useful idiots (whether it suits them or not).

You might want to take a look at Voice of America, a Congress-funded network that broadcasts almost exclusively outside the US as US propaganda: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America

Sorry, I'm not making the connection to what OP was saying. Can you expand? Does Voice of America pretend to be a domestic news source to the areas it broadcasts?

No it doesn’t. I think the OP was making a what-about counter argument, that the CIA was blasting pro-NATO radio programs into the Eastern Block. Of course the Soviets hated this and constantly tried to jam the signal so I think this example supports the root comment that most governments have a serious interest in curtailing adversarial propaganda.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Prensa_(Managua)

Protip about wiki links. Posting the mobile link loads the mobile site for both desktop and mobile users however posting the desktop link will load the appropriate version for both desktop and mobile users. Always post the desktop version link.

I always take care to remove m. from a wiki link I'm sharing if I'm using a mobile device.

I think it's great that, despite censorship, we work hard at providing a reliable source of information throughout the world.

Even the folks who worked for the VOA and its parent the United States Information Agency acknowledge that was created as a Cold War propaganda channel[1]. The broadcasts were heavily influenced by the CIA. The agency was reorganized in 1999 and the USIA abolished, but it's still mostly about presenting the State Department's view of international news.

[1] https://archive.org/details/warriorsofdisinf0000alvi

"Propaganda" is a loaded term. VOA is historically a very accurate and unbiased (as far as that is possible) source of news. [1] [2]

[1] https://www.adfontesmedia.com/voice-america-bias-and-reliabi... [2] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/voice-of-america/

The best propaganda is always an excellent and unbiased news source on _most_ topics.

It's possible to be completely accurate and show no obvious bias, but be propaganda by careful choice of what is and is not mentioned and how it is framed. The best propaganda doesn't isn't obviously propagandistic, it simply sets the agenda according to a pre-determined point of view.

Right. VOA is pretty much a mini American BBC nowadays.

I think people that call it propaganda are judging it based on the Cold War era VOA.

The kinds of people who really have a hateboner for VOA tend to be the kinds of people more at home in the cold war anyway.

Not sure if you have read or watched VOA as of late but there is a lot of "America bad" content in there as well. If it's propaganda, it sure is doing a bad job at it.

Plenty of it by our own government and allies as well.

Maybe we can be a little more principled than "good guy nations" and "bad guy nations" if the goal is truth?

Who's truth is more truthful, who's lies are more harmful/helpful?

"Seriously because the aliens are already here and I have proof!" -- Joking aside sometimes pushing a truth whether it's true or not has an impact on inflaming conspiracy theories... Youtube's covid, election banners for example IMO did more to incite deep state conspiracy then to reduce it... "One often meets their fate on the path they take to avoid it..." - Kung Fu panda

YouTube's blanket ban was a problem absolutely - it was lazy and as hands-off as possible missing all nuance.

Classic Google, when nuance and reason are required they instead program a dumb bot to handle it.

Our lies are probably the most harmful as we have the world's largest military and it's deployed worldwide. Do you not remember the NYT lying to get the Iraq War started? I can't think of a more devastating instance of propaganda.

So once again, along with naming the CCP vs. naming China as the bad actor, we need to instead of naming the US as the bad actor, we have to name the industrial complexes including the duopoly that has been allowed to develop over the last many decades - allowing the duopoly's two core narratives to be the majority of what people get fed through mainstream media conglomerates (the media industrial complex) owned by a handful of individuals.

If we don't correctly, accurately label who is the real target - our anger will be misplaced - and that is something the bad actors want to have happen, and will certainly perpetuate themselves. And we don't learn then. Quick soundbites spread easily but it's not the way.

I was struck by the Chinese embassy that got banned a couple months ago. They said that their fight against radical islam is good for uighur women.. which is propaganda but also the exact same propaganda that western interventionists use all the time. One is ok, the other is not.

Of course, Twitter DID take action against a Western leader who was leading an attempted coup, and they got absolutely creamed by the “freedom of speech” folks for doing so. So Twitter has been willing to draw the line for Western leaders as well.

But that raises a good point: if the media outlets in the lead up to the 2003 Iraq invasion (I won’t even mention the 2001 Afghanistan invasion as there just was not the same level of meaningful opposition) had stood up to Bush’s propaganda even with the limp-wristed[0] way Twitter stood up to Trump’s, perhaps we wouldn’t have been dragged so deep into Middle East interventionism to begin with.

[0]It really was.

That's american-on-american, I was talking about geopolitical interests.

I saw reports of posts from air force bases supporting our attempted coup in Bolivia, for example.

Uyghurs in Xinjiang are typically Chinese citizens. Chinese-on-Chinese (in the nationality sense). So it sounds fairly consistent to me.

I guess it depends on how you split it, there's not a significant population of Uyghur nationalists of twitter. It's mostly westerners using them as a bludgeon to try and strike the chinese.

A bludgeon? The Chinese government doesn’t need defending from the big bad westerners telling them not to genocide their own people.

It’s not about Uyghur nationalism (although I suppose more Uyghurs may desire that if China keeps this up) but about human rights.

This eagerness to defend the CCP is not going to help anyone abused by Western nations. One genocide does not justify another.

I don't think it's comparable - however yes, bad actors and bad actions are decentralized to a degree. The different between China and the US is the CCP is in "permanent" tyrannical control vs. the US et al have democratic elections and at least the society, the people, have the chance to evolve society to elect better people who will steer the ship better towards the ideal global society.

Electoral politics in the US has done nothing to stop the US from invading countries around the world (particularly in the Middle East) for the past half a century+. Who would I vote for if I wanted to stop bombing people? There is no one.

Well, there was, but a lot of people really went out of their way to remove him from power.

Then run for political leadership.

Well it probably helps only one of those is sterilizing muslim women while keeping them in detention camps?

Fighting a multi-national ground war against ISIS is a bit different then genocide against your own citizens.

Like I said, the 'good guys' propaganda is good :)

If you track down some of the claims you're making, you'll find that most of them originate with this guy Adrian Zenz who is literally a paid propagandist for his job at the "Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation".

Not that anybody who claims to be 'liberating the muslims' is ever up to any good. But some more objective measures might be things like, what is the body count associated with either nation, or has the population been going up or down in a given region.

Also consider that Chinese narrative of Counter Insurgency / Deradicalization is the majority diplomatic position with plurality of UN support. The opposition to XinJiang block is not only smaller, but the "genocide" position is also currently the absolute minority position. It's a case where Twitter content policy goes out of the way to align with US propaganda.

It is allowed because the gatekeepers today are much more financially involved with hostile states. The same situation didn’t exist with the Soviets.

Yes, only US should be able to spread their propaganda

You'll have better conversations of you engage with the argument rather than misrepresent it.

Why does it matter if propaganda is coming from a foreign state actor or domestic groups, like activist groups that seek to shut down any opposing views?

Your comment has some unintended irony if taken as a call for action.

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