My only concern is when, not if, the U.S. Government will start trolling to keep the masses from waking up to the fact that the wealthy are grabbing an insanely larger piece of the asset pie every year..at the expense of the 80% in the middle.
Many discussions have been ruined by trolls. Often times there are more troll comments than legitimate comments. Paying trolls needs to be made illegal. It is a crime to stagnate the evolution of human thinking! One of the worst crimes against humanity there is. Stifling free speech.
More nonsense, bad mouth and demonization to use outdated old picture and old Cold War material to demonized today's developing China by the U.S. Media..
Media propaganda to PR for obama's trip to Asia, to prior Washington 's new war in Asia after mess up Iraq and Syria: pivot Asia
War after war, chaos after chaos for everywhere the Uncle Sam war machine goes..
As China and all Asia countries are focus in economics development, in cooperation ,
Ash and Obama are at war, at overthrow government, in military expansion ..media propaganda to PR for its war machines' war business and weapons sale
stme, I find it hilarious that when you post the truth the brainwashed come out with absolutely nothing to say other than to call a truthful poster names.
stme, don't you feel sorry for so many neuronless brains out there attacking somebody for native language?
Scott, how does use of english make one funny? Does your missing capitalization in english make you ironic? Grow a brain before badmouthing non-native speaker's English!
Talking about trolls / brainwashed Chinese people, just go to YouTube to watch how the Federal Reserve Secretary General cringed / squirmed under questioning by Rep. Alan Grayson on the missing $9,000,000,000,000 from off balance sheet obligations. The American people must be really brainwashed to think their money is in "good hands". Period.
The HRC team must of outsourced to China for trolling.
Say anything about the email scandal, the Clinton foundation corruption and Bill's Lolita Express trips and they thumbs down your comment trying to hide your comment.
10/04/2010 10:34 pm ET | Updated May 25, 2011 HUFFPOST MEDIA
•Usha Haley Author, Professor and Center Director
A funny thing happened when I published my first HuffPost blog entry. My blog dealt with subsidies from the Chinese government to its paper industry, with suggestions for US policy. Before HuffPost informed me that my entry had gone online, someone had posted comments to my blog. The commentator did not agree with my views and was not amused. In two lengthy, initial posts, the commentator questioned my data and US policy on China as a whole, and then presented an alternative view for readers of my blog to consider. Although I did not know at the time, I had received my first communication from China's Fifty Cent Party. The commentator continued to respond around the clock to every positive comment on my blog, eventually posting about two dozen comments.
Chinese Internet users first coined the term "Fifty Cent Party" for undercover Internet commentators that the Chinese government paid to influence public opinion. Fifty cents refers to the alleged pay the Internet commentators received per post. Currently, the term describes anyone who actively and publicly posts opinions online that defend or support Chinese government policy. Party organizations train the fifty centers to safeguard the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) interests and to neutralize undesirable public opinion by pushing pro-Party views. Qualifications for a fifty center include the "need to possess relatively good political and professional qualities... have a pioneering and enterprising spirit... and [the ability] to react quickly." In China, fifty centers report dangerous content to authorities; outside China, they work with Chinese news organizations and Chinese embassies. For an external observer of China, the fifty centers offer insights into what President Hu Jintao called "a new pattern of public-opinion guidance."
China is not the only country in the world to employ cyber police. However, the scale of China's efforts is staggering. The social media now comprises the dominant online activity for the Chinese. Currently, user-generated content provides the greatest component of China's online content. Noticing these trends two years ago, President Hu called on the CCP's members to "assert supremacy over online public opinion, raise the level and study the art of online guidance and actively use new technologies to increase the strength of positive propaganda." After Hu's speech, the State Council advertised for "comrades of good ideological and political character, high capability and familiarity with the Internet to form teams of Web commentators... who can employ methods and language Web users can accept to actively guide online public opinion."
The CCP has responded to the growth of Internet blogs by employing more fifty centers. By some estimates, China employs about 300,000 people to police the web in China, and an additional few thousand freelancers around the world. China's cyber police have special sections in every local, Chinese Public Security Bureau. Supervisory bodies for the Chinese Internet include:
•The Internet Propaganda Administrative Bureau and the Centre for the Study of Public Opinion (under the Information Office of the State Council)
•The Internet Bureau and Bureau of Information and Public Opinion (under the CCP's Publicity Department, formerly the Propaganda Department)
•The Ministry of Information Industry (MII)
•The Ministry of Public Security's Computer Monitoring and Supervision Bureau
•The MII's Centre for the Registration of Illegal and Unsuitable Internet Content
Until last year, the fifty centers focused their attention on Chinese netizens. However, in 2009, the Chinese government announced a "Going Out" or zou chu qu media policy. The government pumped about 45 billion yuan into the mega project labeled China's Media Aircraft Carrier. China National Radio, China Central Television, People's Daily and Xinhua have restructured to boost China's global reputation. Through its Media Aircraft Carrier, China hopes to wield soft power more effectively in the global media which often ignores Beijing's positions. The fifty centers form the foot soldiers in this global battle to establish Chinese credibility. They provide the CCP's alternative voice on developments in China and around the world, without the official stigma.
Zhu Liangcai, Secretary of the Zhoukou Communist Youth League Committee, indicated some of the instructions that fifty centers received from the CCP:
The reason we don't use our true identity while communicating with netizens is because by not revealing our identity we allow them to feel our mutual equality, and avoid creating a feeling of opposition. At the same time the work can be smoothly accomplished without revealing what goes on behind the scenes; this achieves very good results.
Specific instructions for one fifty-center effort included:
• For local websites that republish news or related reports on this story, do the work of guiding online opinion; you have the responsibility of taking care of your own territory.
• Only post comments and follow-up comments, do not write commentaries.
• Each Party committee and department must post at least 5 follow-up comments and one substantive post, to be reported to the regional Discipline and Inspection commission classroom.
• Before April 25, each Party committee and department will send all posts, and also indicate the number of follow-up posts, choice posts, their length, their number of characters, their organizational clarity, and their richness of content.
An internal speech by China's top Internet official detailed some of China's plans to use the Internet to project soft power abroad. Wang Chen, Deputy Director of the Propaganda Department, Head of External (foreign) Propaganda and Director of the State Council's Information Office made his speech to the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress on April 29 and posted it on the Congress's website on May 4. The next day, Chinese government censors removed, sanitized and re-posted the speech on another government website. However, Human Rights in China caught the original speech which it included in its report, China's Internet: Staking Digital Ground.
Wang Chen's speech outlined a vast array of Chinese institutions and methods that control opinion at home and abroad to "create an international public opinion environment that is objective, beneficial and friendly to us." His speech underscored the Fifty Cent Party's utility as informal public-opinion leaders that push the CCP's line on sensitive issues: "Government agencies at all levels... have gradually built mechanisms to guide public opinion through integrating the functions of propaganda departments."
China first moved to international deployment of fifty centers with Twitter. When the international media anointed The Huffington Post as one the Internet's most influential blogs, China listened. Chinese sources indicated that the Ministry of Propaganda has recruited hundreds of Chinese students in the USA, and several Chinese Embassy employees to respond to HuffPost's blogs.
In China, many netizens mock the Fifty Cent Party. See, for example, this blog post by Han Han, and this satirical training manual for Fifty Cent Party members. Cartoons about the Fifty Cent Party have also gained wide circulation on the Chinese Internet.
In the USA, diverse interest groups sponsor and fund the information we consume. However, we generally have awareness of funding sources behind campaigns to sway our opinions. Unlike the Fifty Cent Party's propaganda, most US web campaigns have short lives and employ relatively few people. Consequently, the journalistic axiom, "Consider the source" becomes crucial. As organized employees, fifty centers' efforts have both short and long-term ramifications. Yet, casual readers of blog posts may detect no discernible patterns. Unlike China, the US government should continue to protect anonymity on the web and freedom of speech. However, befitting our traditions, consumers of information also have a duty to interpret the easy flow of information through awareness of organized motives.
Amazing ingenious process. Using capitalistic processes to promote communist values. If only the US citizens could be so positive rather than tearing down our own system with 90 percent (a guess) of the posts. Negative comments without positive alternatives are not helpful, but rather create a spirit of divisiveness and frustrations that lead to where we are with our current elections.
The problem with China is that they've invaded one too many countries recently. Kind of like Fascist Russia.
The problem with America is we think they finance a more progressive open China with a people who are interested in giving instead of taking.
The only thing wall street has ultimately financed is a juggernaut military communist government. Kind of like what the muslims have done.
So enough of this sucking up and time to start manning up. We got a problem and thinking that being nice guys is going to work for us anymore is folly.
Wallstreet funded a fascist Chinese govt. Wall street loves cheap labor, no pollution controls, child labor, no overtime pay, no social security... I figure wallstreet would like America better if we did away with the new deal. Feeding the poor and workers just isn't their bag.
"If you’ve ever posted anything, ever, online that might be remotely critical of Russia, you’re probably familiar with Russia’s marching army of propaganda trolls. Any website with a “Russia” tag will be found by them eventually."
Nice excuse, murican, nice excuse. Stop leaving in your damned 80s, Carl. This is not the 80s. This is 21st century, and everyone with an access to the internet can find and get any information they want. That's why your old and outdated cold-war era propaganda machine is not working very well nowadays, murican.
Well, that's the problem, not everyone can access internet freely. Chinese commie government have Great Firewall installed, Russia has similar technology to block internet. So their citizens can not freely access internet, they are being fed with information those authoritarian regime wants its citizen to read.
In these days of technology and society, did you really think everyone around the world accepts your, the White House, line of story the moment you point finger at Russia and say Russia is evil? Seriously, you thought that would happen? Not anymore, Carl. Not now, not these days.. That's why I say we are not living in the 80s when Reagan said USSR is an empire of evil and everyone bought it. Wake up from your dream and realize the world has changed. Not everyone who is not buying your propaganda is Kremlin's troll. That's what I am saying. Remember that it's a thief who catches a thief. If you are quick too accuse anyone with a different opinion a troll, then you are a troll yourself too.
The Internet is certainly filled with postings defending Red China.
The common practice is to defend Red China by saying it is doing no worse to,for example, Tibetans, than the USA did to red Indians. Of course, this actually admits Red China's crimes against humanity, but there you see.
There must be a guidebook from Red Chinese handlers to these Internet typists because they follow the same set of statements. P.S..... you can spot one of these nasty cockroaches because it calls HH the Dalai Lama "Dalai" as if that were HH's first name.
Also, see the cockroaches lie and show off miserable English usage.
OH... THAT'S INTERESTING... SO... When I simply point out the transparent fact that Vladimir Putin is little more than a modern day Czar who is taking Russia down the path of imperialism and economic decline, his internet monkey's will target me with decidedly silly rebukes...?
He is not a "czar". He is a mafia boss. A "czar" was a title of a legitimate (as of then) monarch in Russia. Putin's rule is illegitimate (it goes against the Russian Constitution). He and his cronies need to be tried for the usurpation of power and on other suspected crimes.
You two are a couple of idiots. Putin last I checked is the leader of Russia and all world leaders meet and deal with him. Only in your warped minds is this not apparent. Way to show your lack of intelligence.
Of course, they have to meet and deal with him. As they had with Saddam, Gaddafi and all alike. It's politics. That he is illegitimate as a "president" is a law.
The Russian and Chinese governments, ...STILL the same old vile, evil, lying, thieving, conniving, corrupt, disgusting, deceiving, dictatorial, totalitarian, ignorant, incompetent, incontinent, socialist/Marxist/commie, 'Evil Empires'.
Wouldn't surprise me if these shills are also trying to out "dissidents" by posting certain comments hoping to elicit certain answers that oppressive govt hackers can track back to a certain IP address or computer via supercookies or PC fingerprint.
"Confess your heretical crimes and we'll be lenient and only brainwash you while you work in the mines, or you'll be executed for violating our speech and thought laws."
Right on. The author of the article hit the mark. Wumao aka 50cent trolls aka cross eyed commie trolls bashing online post critical of the commie regime and praising the commie rule.
