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Comment by gunian

5 hours ago

It's a cool phenomena tbh if I was rich enough to go to college I would love to do a thesis on it

We know both China and the US are nation states with global ambitions so it would be logical for both to use digital platforms to surveil and perform social engineering.

We also have had whistleblowers on both sides that have come forward and said this is a common practice. We also know based on simple game theory it is in the interest of any nation state to do so not just the US or China

But even on a site like HN that presents itself as rational and factual the sentiment is the US does not do any surveillance or social engineering.

And for the life of me I just don't understand why maybe nationalism? Or the aforementioned social engineering being so effective? But it is so cool to see

4 comments

gunian

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suraci  4 hours ago

Their's an old joke about this:

A Russian is on an airliner heading to the US, and the American in the seat next to him asks, “So what brings you to the US?” The Russian replies, “I’m studying the American approach to propaganda.” The American says, “What propaganda?” The Russian says, “That’s what I mean.”

  • gunian  3 hours ago

    This made me chuckle :) it truly is beautiful it's sad its one of those fields you can't take credit for what you do but the people running it deserve all the credit. An impossible ask but would be cool to read about the tech behind it in today's digital age.

tmnvdb  2 hours ago

The obvious answer is that the US is still a democracy with free media and rule of law. That means you're likely to be found out and have a huge scandal if you try to use government resources to manipulate the public at scale. This is somewhat confirmed by the huge scandals causes by relatively small scale manipulations, which form the somewhat worn examples commenters on this website like to bring up whenever criticism of China is voiced. Note that in China there is no such risk of discovery or pushback as media and courts are fully controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.