At the beginning of the day, the producer listed the opinions he wanted to get. "Ok, we'll get a middle aged guy who says this, a younger couple saying something along these lines". He knew exactly what he wanted at the start of the day.
There were three camera crews working most of the day getting interviews. I get the feeling that with a bit of editing you could have make "the public" have pretty much any view on a topic that you want.
Of course "Person confirming stereotype" attracts clicks and shares, is easy to do, and that's good for career progression. Actually finding out what's happening, explaining what it means, the who, what, where, when, why of the story, that's hard.
Much easier to say
"Mr X thinks this is terrible"
Than say
"This is terrible because...., but it's good because...."
Loads of TV shows were using these techniques to make the public say all kinds of crazy shit as if they were widely held opinions.
It was funny because back in the 90s it seemed like, well at least to me, that we still trusted journalists and we didn't have social media. So seeing interviews obviously manipulated was funny.
I can also remember Charlie Brooker, the Black Mirror guy, showing the same footage from a set up reality TV show[1].
By just using editing he could show the same event but with very different interpretations.
Instinctively I think we all know that but seeing it done as demonstration is shocking and fascinating.
A similar series with all the levers cranked to the maximum is "Killer Ratings" on Netflix - just an unbelievable story out of Brazil that left me questioning everything. And that one I couldn't resolve in my head; it still bothers me today.
Guess what, it turned out they made a program on "how Linux is less secure than Windows" and cut out my whole interview leaving just the initial disclaimer that, taken out of context, seemed to justify their agenda. From that time on, I refused any kinds of interviews for TV.
People hold journalists to crazy high standards of integrity and soothsaying, and the older I get the more it boggles the mind that grown adults still cling on to this.
Journalists work for private corporations who write things for a target audience to make money. That's all there is to it.
Like articles with embedded twitter/reddit posts in them. Sure it gives a primary source for whatever topic/view you want to support - but aside from "one person might think this" is pretty irrelevant.
Watching Meerkat Manor when I was younger taught me that any narrative can be archived with a bit of editing
The vast majority of people disagree on if they should either give up and surrender to the PRC because they may launch missiles or invade once they have a non-laughing stock navy, avoid a bloody war, or if China wouldn’t dare to do that because it would trigger WW3 so they are safe to declare and protect their country (Taiwan.)
Everyone out here agrees that the PRC is basically evil.
Edit: Just want to add that a lot of you probably have no idea that Chinese people and Taiwanese people also get along with each other just fine. They are unfortunately a geopolitical chess piece on the table between the PRC and Deep State US.
I find it deliciously ironic that when Taiwanese people travel or work in China that they use their ROC (Taiwanese) passport and there is no issue with that. A lot of the conflict is also theatre for your American news cycle.
However Taiwanese people don't use their passport to travel to China. China doesn't recognise it. They are issued a travel permit by the PRC, similar to citizens of Hong Kong and Macau.
At the end of the day, Taiwan culturally has more in common with the mainland than, say, Hong Kong does, because more of its history was spent together. Anything beyond is often a lot of "the grass is greener on the other side" mentality happening. People on both sides envy some aspects of what the other side has, but also would not trade what they have themselves to get it.
What? China has among the highest satisfaction with their government in the world. For example: "95.5 percent of respondents were either 'relatively satisfied' or 'highly satisfied' with Beijing."
Source: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-sur...
> At the end of the day, Taiwan culturally has more in common with the mainland than, say, Hong Kong does
As a western for some reason I thought this would be the opposite.
I can't imagine how anyone from taiwan could naturally be 'Pro' chinese gov (given the media portrait and long history of rivalry), they would more likely support either 'green' or 'blue' camp, who will act on behave of people to interface with mainland policies.
The difference is some of my close Taiwanese friends are very weary of the political shows as they believe it is highly industrialised consumable entertainment while in the mainland people are quite innocent and audience are not mature enough and easily stirred up emotionally.
1) Documentary programs are almost always faked, in the sense that they present false continuity and false spontaneity. People often don't notice the manufactured aspect unless a subject they're intimately involved with is featured, and then it's immediately apparent.
The scales fell from my eyes; that was the beginning of my awakening to the true nature of video news.
Moreover the questions are drafted in a "so you are saying" kind of way. Now that is assuming the production is random and fair and they are not hiring actors or screening people based on their political belief systems, which is obviously not the case.
Being outside of US, I thought there are geopolitical and socially ambiguous questions which were drafted in a pattern that subtly were politically biased.
Now, subtle political biasness would make people think I am a little bit out there. But what I realized I don't inherently have any strong political feelings at all. There are some objectively true facts that are often being manipulated to fit narratives. So it is best just to ignore these shows all together.
These Vox Pop crap is nothing better than day time reality shows like 90 Days Fiancé, but atleast these reality shows are transparently stupid and does not want toy with an agenda.
Why anyone listens to it when some random youtube channel does is incomprehendable.
Ask 1000 people a simple question and you'll get 10 crazy answers. Show 9 crazy answers and 1 normal question and claim 90% of people are crazy.
Bonus points if its a presidential candidate.
You're talking entertainment, the cheapest form - laughing at other people. It's not journalism, but it pretends to be.
> For those who don't know, "deep blue" means very pro-KMT, generally favoring Chinese identity, closer ties with China and eventual unification with China.
Search for KMT leads to Wikipedia article that says it is the same as Guomindang, the party was exciled from mainland China to Taiwan in 1949. I don't know how it evolved to "eventual unification" from "Taiwan is the only China", so I prefer to skip the article entirely as non-comprehensible.
Blue is the color of the KMT (former dictator party)[1], whose logo is still the top-left quadrant of the flag of Taiwan[2]. Historically, this party has claimed to be the politically legitimate government of all of China (as the "Republic of China" rather than the "People's Republic of China"), but lately is effectively an arm of the Communist Party of China.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Green_Coalition#History
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Blue_Coalition
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_Republic_of_China
There is an anti-China sentiment in the US that just feels wrong, and it shows on HN. Every time something good is said about the Chinese state, or even if it is "not that bad", it is Chinese propaganda. Every time someone says that China is evil, it is the truth, as if US propaganda couldn't exist. I am not saying that China is good, just that it is one-sided enough to raise a few red flags (pun not intended).
So, I downvote, most of it isn't interesting from a tech perspective anyways. It what I think of that submission. In fact, I am only here because I was curious about what "deep blue" meant (for me it meant IBM).
You are free to disagree with me, here I am just telling you that there is at least one person who has nothing to do with the Chinese state and dislike anti-China content.
- China lands rover on Mars (581 points, 314 comments)
- China to supercharge uranium race with 150 new nuclear reactors (261 points, 354 comments)
- China on Mars: Zhurong rover returns first pictures (243 points, 66 comments)
- China releases videos of its Zhurong Mars rover (236 points, 167 comments)
- China unveils 600 kph maglev train (229 points, 433 comments)
You could even argue that whenever China does something positive that's note-worthy then it has a much higher chance to be promoted multiple times (e.g. 3/5 are about the Mars rover, all within a month) and less chance that it will be flagged (or at least remain flagged).
I think it's safe to assume the majority of HN support democracy, privacy, freedom of speech & press, and similar civil liberties that China have cracked heavily down upon and not just within their own borders. When you look at what they have done in the past few years with Xinjiang, Hong Kong, SARS2, Taiwan, etc. then it's only natural that there will be a lot of negative coverage, and this negative coverage is understandably and deservedly greater than the positive coverage. If USA or any other country banned under-18s from playing games for more than three hours/week then it would receive the same amount of coverage. Same thing goes for for Swiss Ph.D student’s dismissal, Steam being banned, cryptocurrency deals becoming illegal, blocking Wikimedia from entering World Intellectual Property Organization and every other story you might consider "anti-China". My submission doesn't even mention China so people are not blindly upvoting it because it's "anti-China", but more likely because it's interesting to see proof that one of the largest Asian YouTube channels (which cover a lot more than just China) is planting interviewees to push a certain agenda (keep in mind the channel put a lot of emphasis towards presenting themselves as being 'authentic' and sharing views of random and regular people they meet on the streets).
My opinion is that there are honest pro-chinese people on HN, most likely chinese working in the US who don't plan to stay for life and feel patriotic enough to protect the fatherland on internet forums.
The trend on HN is indeed quite clearly anti-China and anti-communist, so Chinese propaganda is definitely less successful than that of the US and Western Europe.
If you present contrarian opinions but on top of that you wrap them in a shit sandwich, I too will flag.
I'm sure they have legit videos as well, but I can't be bothered by such channels.
It might be plants. It might be selective editing, with certain interviews making the cut... possibly a minority from a wide selection. The choice of question. The choice of location. Etc. It's just generally true that these are stories contrived by someone.
We know this intellectually, but seeing and hearing still tends to beat our skepticism. Reality TV is, to me, the perfect example of this. Even though everyone knows reality TV is fake, we usually "forget" that a conversation between 2 people is taking place in front of a cameraman. That is, we don't really forget, but we also don't interpret the conversation as we would if we actually saw the cameraman.
They are one of the form of journalism that are the most easy to manipulate (show mostly one opinion, show "crazy" people for one opinion and only "classy" people for the other, ...) and their value is therefore very questionable (plus, who care what the guy down the street thinks about complex subject he has no education to have a opinion about). Sadly, a lot of people take them at face value.
"...planted pro-China advocate for 'man on the street' opinions on Taiwan"
> For those who don't know, "deep blue" means very pro-KMT, generally favoring Chinese identity, closer ties with China and eventual unification with China.
I'm very saddened to see it has reached this state.
At least now I can tie a name to these shitty channel style: "vox pop".
There are so many and they're so bad.
* Asian Boss - Not a boss; actually a YouTube channel.
* deep blue - not the chess engine, not the emotional state, not related to the US democratic party; nor to any of the films of this name; nor the songs of that name.
- what is at the extremes, and in the middle, can be changing all the time, the view of the author is not "canon" in this sense
- why does a YouTube video have more impact than the research? Perhaps more work on scientific publication is necessary
Hang on. Why do you have to do that? When did Youtube become a place to escape from bias, propaganda and misinformation?
There's jargon in this article that suggests it's not meant for the likes of me. I clicked the "deep blue" link at the top, hoping to find out what the term meant (nope!) before I realised it was explained below. But KMT? Isn't that Kuomintang? Is ROC Republic of China, or Russian Olympic Committee?
I actually watched this video the other day, and I remember this interviewee and I remember being surprised at how pro China the people of Taipei are.
Clearly Asian Boss has served its CCP masters well because I was convinced this was real and not fake CCP propaganda.
The article states that the guy was incredibly pro-KMT, which is about as anti-CCP as you can get. His perspective was interesting, but it is disappointing to find out he's a plant.
This isn't a binary issue. Historically, the KMT was the main opposition to the CCP, but both of these factions claim control over the mainland of China.
The DPP (the greens) are both anti-CCP and anti-KMT, since the DPP is pro-independence; China is China, while Taiwan is Taiwan, and neither is a part of the other.
Here are some reference that shows how pro-CCP they are:
https://international.thenewslens.com/article/116615
https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Taiwan-s-new-Kuomintang-lea...
https://frozengarlic.wordpress.com/2015/05/09/chus-china-tri...
https://www.quora.com/Why-does-the-Kuomintang-KMT-have-a-clo...
Could it be because the CCP want westerners to hear the message of how people in Taiwan actually want to unify with China?
Yes I think so. The CCP know how to get things promoted on social media.
I don't mind the first part of the sentence; that's just editorial. The second part is weak-sauce backpedalling.
The repetitive moral outrage made this piece five times longer than it needed to be.
