Thanks. This was a refreshing take, on the tragic incident with the harassment of the Chinese student in Maryland.
I sympathize with the suggestion not to help spread the vitriol. However, it may not be like this SCMP contributor seems to assume, that “patriotic” campaigns like this is all done by actual extremists, who are the ones responsible for the “cesspools on the internet” that we should ignore. I think it may be more serious than that.
Sure, many real-life ultranationalists feel compelled to join, or people are caught up in this “Red Guard”-style, — about these real-life people, see also http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2017/05/badiucao-yang-shupings-face-mask/; http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-39996940, http://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-china-40021588/chinese-student-causes-uproar-with-us-graduation-speech, http://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-40021488/maryland-campus-on-furore-over-china-democracy-speech, and https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/23/world/asia/chinese-student-fresh-air-yang-shuping.html).
But it seems almost certain — given what we now know about public opinion manipulation on the internet — that a lot of this “public opinion” is machine-generated, that this kind of orchestrated campaign is likely a hybrid creature: partly whipped up and partly directly-manufactured by the state propaganda organs, which have of course openly declared the intent to shape = manipulate public opinion at home and abroad.
We don’t live in the 1960s anymore, and it may well be that the propaganda officials are now using bots (robot generated fake opinion cesspools) to make it seem this is from real people, to amplify the nationalism they want to whip up — using the model of what was done with bots in the US election, and the model of Russia, which may be a leader in this kind of hybrid warfare.
It probably hard to know for sure — especially as with the recent development of AI, bot-machine-generated robot “opinions” can apparently become more difficult to recognize. And deployed along with censorship of any divergent opinion + mobilization of willing redguardist ultranationalists, this kind of hybrid campaign can probably make it look like the entire public is swept up in a nationalistic frenzy, — even if in reality not everyone agrees.
So, I think we should be suspicious. And ignoring the cesspools may not be good enough.
(ps. somewhere, there is a “paper trail” of the orchestration. This is the kind of stuff that organizations like Wikileaks could perhaps have helped expose — if they had followed their original promise to expose the powerful whoever they are, and not retreated to their current limited agenda).
Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>