Some notes & quotes from recent reads:
Why China Is So Bad at Disinformation
Quotes:
“I would describe China's disinformation campaigns as Russia 2014. As in, they're 10 years behind,” says Clint Watts, the general manager of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center. “They're trying lots of different things but their sophistication is still very weak.”
Over the past 24 months, the campaign has switched from pushing predominately pro-China content to more aggressively targeting US politics. While these efforts have been large-scale and across dozens of platforms, they have largely failed to have any real world impact. Still, experts warn that it can take just a single post being amplified by an influential account to change all of that.
“Spamouflage is like throwing spaghetti at the wall, and they are throwing a lot of spaghetti,” says Jack Stubbs, chief information officer at Graphika, a social media analysis company that was among the first to identify the Spamouflage campaign. “The volume and scale of this thing is huge. They're putting out multiple videos and cartoons every day, amplified across different platforms at a global scale. The vast majority of it, for the time being, appears to be something that doesn't stick, but that doesn't mean it won't stick in the future.”
Notes:
Interesting to note that although there’s a lot of sophisticated misinformation and disinformation out there, one of the key players in generating it is actually pretty ham-fisted and ineffective (though Russia is good enough at it, at this point, that China’s relative inability doesn’t mean much on a practical level).
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