China, Russia fueling QAnon conspiracy theories | Hacker News Reader

China, Russia fueling QAnon conspiracy theories

news.yahoo.com

11 pointsBalgair4 comments

>The analysis by the Soufan Center, a New York-based research firm focused on national security threats, found that nearly one-fifth of 166,820 QAnon-related Facebook posts between January 2020 and the end of February 2021 originated from overseas administrators.

Less than 20% of Facebook discussion on the topic occurring outside of the US hardly suggests China and Russia are "fueling" the theories.

The author here, Michael Isikoff has a bit of reputation of being a useful dupe for US intel [1] who would love these conspiracies to be originating "outside their house".

And futher, the Soufan Center that conducted this study certainly has an ideological bent towards the US establishment [0]. Very skeptical of conclusions reached by career intel officials that suggest theories about the US establishment are baseless foreign-driven propaganda.

[0] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/07/12/isikof...

[1] https://thesoufancenter.org/about/team/

If you read the original report, it basically boils down to: we trained a classification model, and it said that X% of the people posting about QAnon on Facebook are Chinese and Russian. How this classifier works or what features it uses is not explained. Whether the classifier can tell apart a person in mainland China paid by the government to post and a Falun Gong adherent in the US is also not discussed. QAnon is heavily anti-Chinese, and Falun Gong has heavily promoted QAnon, so it would be surprising if the Chinese government were supportive of QAnon conspiracy theories.

I have noticed that QAnon bore similarities to a Russian agitprop campaign...

China, Russia will do anything that will help to destabilize USA. Have I discovered anything new? Rather not. This sentence is a tautology. In the same way USA is/was destabilizing Middle East countries or communistic countries during cold war (I am grateful for the latter, BTW).

I am only curious how sophisticated such action can be. Who was behind the claims that Trump was a Russia ally (this turned out to be total bullshit at the end). Is Russia or China supporting BLM movement (or will support it), which is clearly destabilizing and polarizing US society (not judging if BLM are right or wrong, it does not matter, China and Russia cannot care less, that what matters are street fights)?

Maybe they don't need to do anything, Facebook and Twitter are even better in polarizing people, throwing them into information bubbles outside which everybody is an enemy.

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