Continuing on from that last post.
Here’s an interesting article about people in China who are paid to sway/confuse/influence/”guide” public opinion on the internet. Al Weiwei interviews one of these paid commentors.
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2012/10/china%E2%80%99s-paid-trolls-meet-50-cent-party
Worth reading the whole thing but I’m gonna pick out a few bits I think are interesting/relevant.
Can you describe your work in detail?
The process has three steps – receive task, search for topic, post comments to guide public opinion. Receiving a task mainly involves ensuring you open your email box every day. Usually after an event has happened, or even before the news has come out, we’ll receive an email telling us what the event is, then instructions on which direction to guide the netizens’ thoughts, to blur their focus, or to fan their enthusiasm for certain ideas. After we’ve found the relevant articles or news on a website, according to the overall direction given by our superiors we start to write articles, post or reply to comments. This requires a lot of skill. You can’t write in a very official manner, you must conceal your identity, write articles in many different styles, sometimes even have a dialogue with yourself, argue, debate. In sum, you want to create illusions to attract the attention and comments of netizens.
You could say we’re like directors, influencing the audience through our own writing, directing and acting. Sometimes I feel like I have a split personality.
Regarding the three roles that you play, is that a common tactic? Or are there other ways?
There are too many ways. It’s kind of psychological. Netizens nowadays are more thoughtful than before. We have many ways. You can make a bad thing sound even worse, make an elaborate account, and make people think it’s nonsense when they see it. In fact, it’s like two negatives make a positive. When it’s reached a certain degree of mediocrity, they’ll think it might not be all that bad.
Can you tell us a specific, typical process of “guiding public opinion”?
For example, each time the oil price is about to go up, we’ll receive a notification to “stabilise the emotions of netizens and divert public attention”. The next day, when news of the rise comes out, netizens will definitely be condemning the state, CNPC and Sinopec. At this point, I register an ID and post a comment: “Rise, rise however you want, I don’t care. Best if it rises to 50 yuan per litre: it serves you right if you’re too poor to drive. Only those with money should be allowed to drive on the roads . . .”
This sounds like I’m inviting attacks but the aim is to anger netizens and divert the anger and attention on oil prices to me. I would then change my identity several times and start to condemn myself. This will attract more attention. After many people have seen it, they start to attack me directly. Slowly, the content of the whole page has also changed from oil price to what I’ve said. It is very effective.
As I say worth reading the whole thing but that’ll do. What I find particularly interesting about that article is the schizophrenic way in which this “guiding” of opinion is carried out, the feeling of split personality of the guy himself, the arguing with yourself, the two negatives reaching some sweet spot of mediocrity at which point people just stop giving a shit and lose interest, espousing outrageous opinions in order to attract attention and discussion away from the issue at hand. It’s barmy and I think it reveals broader aspects of our collective psyche as a species, that being that as a species we are absolutely batshit insane.
Now I think it would be naive to assume our own governments and various controlling interests don’t employ similar if not identical tactics. In fact it’s been documented they do after the numerous leaks we’ve had over the past few years.
This is a decent article about JTRIG which is a unit under GCHQ’s purview. The documents were part of Edward Snowden’s leaks.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
Will only quote a very small bit of it, but the whole thing is really worth a read.
Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable.
One of the things that always struck me about this particular leak is that it’s basically just a crap powerpoint presentation, but that the techniques and methods contained in it are really quite unsettling and insidious. A few years ago all this sort of stuff would have easily been dismissed as conspiracy theory and paranoid rubbish but now we actually have leaked documents stating that this is exactly the sort of shady practise our governments are engaged in, but still no one seems that bothered, a fact I would suggest is maybe in part due to the very methods outlined in this post. In fact at the time of posting this “our” Prime Minister is currently calling for even more invasive powers in order for our “security” services to be able to access pretty much any and all online communication.
I’m slowly attempting to make some sort of point here, not sure what though. I guess it’s to do with the inability to find steady ground on which to pitch yourself in this gale of information/misinformation/narrative/counter-narrative/truth/lies etc. How do you go about forming a reasonable opinion on anything when there are reams of contradictory information about it. Every story is spun, every stance subverted. Is it possible to make any sense of this? When your own governments are bold face lying to you who do you trust? Which sources are unbiased?
To somehow link this back to the work I’m making I would say that my own practise is concerned with these sorts of ideas but that any sort of meaning or “truth” that I’m attempting to reveal is necessarily subjective and personal and that that is my only real course of action in the face of a culture of such confusing and overwhelming information. I made another post which I think probably explores that train of though a bit better.
https://intoanoceanof.wordpress.com/2014/09/28/art-as-survival-mechanism/
I realise these posts are rather unfocused but I’m really just attempting to reflect a bit on my own thinking in regards this sort of stuff and how it relates to my work. If you made it through all that well done.
intoanoceanof 