The Chinese government has built up the world’s largest known online disinformation operation and is using it to harass US residents, politicians, and businesses—at times threatening its targets with violence, a CNN review of court documents and public disclosures by social media companies has found.

The onslaught of attacks – often of a vile and deeply personal nature – is part of a well-organized, increasingly brazen Chinese government intimidation campaign targeting people in the United States, documents show.

The US State Department says the tactics are part of a broader multi-billion-dollar effort to shape the world’s information environment and silence critics of Beijing that has expanded under President Xi Jinping. On Wednesday, President Biden is due to meet Xi at a summit in San Francisco.

Victims face a barrage of tens of thousands of social media posts that call them traitors, dogs, and racist and homophobic slurs. They say it’s all part of an effort to drive them into a state of constant fear and paranoia.

  • barsoap@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Nono tankies aren’t Chinese operators, they’re CIA, tasked to discredit the left. That’s important because they’d be proud of the former but are enraged by the latter.

    • StalinsSpoon@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      tasked to discredit the left

      Ah, yes, of course, the classic strategy of discrediting the left by using the viewpoints of the definitely not left wing movement of … checks notes communism?

      • barsoap@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        The strategy of equating a classless, stateless, and moneyless society with brutal, authoritarian, oligarchy-run, very much statist, state capitalism. Just paint all means of oppression red and it’s going to be fine, amirite?

        • StalinsSpoon@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Marxist-Leninists do not argue that when you have a communist revolution that you’ll just magically end up with communism. Look into the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

          Just paint all means of oppression red and it’s going to be fine, amirite?

          No, of course not. China has a strategy of democratic centralism, which actually seems to be a quite effective implementation of a democracy. Unlike in countries like the US, Chinese citizens are quite satisfied with their government.

          • barsoap@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            democratic centralism, which actually seems to be a quite effective implementation of a democracy.

            Read your fucking Lenin. Democratic centralism is an organisational principle for parties, not for societies. Also it doesn’t work as the enforced unity (“thou shalt not question shit that has been voted on”) allows authoritarianism to take root, especially considering that party officials were never freely elected, but from lists drawn up by guess who those already in power.

            It’s always funny, Tankies thinking other leftists don’t know anything about the mechanics of ML parties and their state-level experiments. We do. We understand it. We know where it leads. That’s why we don’t want that shit because to communism it leads not. Granted Cuba is on a good path right now but, well, they’ve left a lot of that old ML stuff behind them.


            As to China. Fucking China. China doesn’t even have public healthcare. It has billionaires. It’s not even state capitalism it’s straight-up authoritarian capitalism. Singapore but in corrupt, without rule of law, and with polling that you can’t trust because people are both afraid of speaking their mind, as well as isolated from the world.