Paul Mozur 孟建國 Profile picture
Apr 6, 2020 5 tweets 3 min read Read on X
Another sign of soaring xenophobia in China. A cartoon imagines foreigners as trash to be sorted. It invents their crimes against the virus response, mixes it with their malign motives in China, and fantasizes about committing violence against them. mp.weixin.qq.com/s/BiOzO4snKit4… Image
In Hefei two weeks ago I was called 洋垃圾/foreign trash while quietly eating at a restaurant. These cartoons inflame already nasty sentiment. Below we have a guy who has been in China a long time, but secretly criticizes the country online. Image
It's depressing to see xenophobia and racism all over the world in response to the virus. China's brand of it harvests nationalism and broad suspicion towards foreigners, and then mixes it with fears over the virus. Here's a nasty one about a foreigner tricking Chinese women. Image
I really do wonder how much of the expat population will return to China after all this, given visas no longer work to get in. The xenophobia tends to subside over time. But this plays on a new ethno-nationalism/Han chauvinism that propaganda has been stoking in recent years. Image
A final cartoon of the worker kicking away the trash can. The xenophobia is ugly and revolting, and has been flourishing online in various forms. Not a ton of government effort to walk it back. Wonder how much they can walk back when it's all over. Image

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Paul Mozur 孟建國

Paul Mozur 孟建國 Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @paulmozur

Dec 15, 2022
As Russia's invasion of Ukraine stalled, its television propaganda fired on all cylinders. In recent months we went through 1000s of emails from Russia's biggest state broadcaster to learn how. It was a master class in constructing an alternative reality. nytimes.com/2022/12/15/tec…
Each day Russian producers sent incredibly detailed lists of memes and media that could be used to undercut the West. Often that included right-wing cable TV and misleading memes, like this one, showing empty grocery shelves in the US:
Tucker Carlson was a favorite. “Don’t forget to take Tucker” producers wrote to a state-media journalist in the US, pointing to a clip where Tucker warned how opposing Russia and China could end the dollar’s status as a world reserve currency. They often used other clips too:
Read 9 tweets
Nov 28, 2022
It’s day 3 and still videos of protests spread on Chinese social media. We see some familiar tricks, people use filters and take videos of videos to bypass AI models designed to identify sensitive videos. Still, the scale of sharing is likely overwhelming censorship manpower.
It’s difficult to censor video. AI trained software can find specific videos, or things in videos (like candles and tanks). But it’s costly to train new algos and the diversity of protest videos makes it very tough. Thus you need people to check, that takes time.
Tactics like the above, video of a video, trip up the algos too. Ultimately, it’s not that the censorship apparatus is failing, it’s just hit it’s natural limit. When you have this many people posting this much and being creative, the world’s best internet control regime loses.
Read 6 tweets
Nov 27, 2022
Videos of protests across China are still visible on WeChat, even as they quickly become unplayable. This is definitely another Li Wenliang moment, when the full power of the world’s best censorship system battles the full fury of many Chinese. For now, the censors are struggling
It’s worth recalling since Li’s death, we’ve seen with increasing frequency online outrage that even China’s internet controls have struggled to contain. Shanghai lockdowns, Guizhou bus crash, now the Xinjiang fire. Each was a massive censorship event all its own.
It’s hard to know how large each given outpouring was. But the increasing frequency with which you see these mega censorship events is certainly a trend line that gets us to where we are now.
Read 4 tweets
Oct 28, 2022
Get ready for China state-affiliated commentators to raise objections/kiss up to Elon. It would be surprising if Musk doesn’t get lobbied by Beijing to cut Twitter’s labeling of China media/officials. We’ll see how he responds. Obvi big q is also how he handles China disinfo.
Exhibit two in the trend. Again China has been massively active on Twitter with bot nets boosting state media/diplomat disinfo efforts on Covid origins, mass internments in Xinjiang and Russian propaganda like Ukraine bio labs. Musk will have a test in how to deal with it.
For examples about how this works, last year we showed how Chinese state media and embassy accounts on twitter spread YouTube videos in which minority Uyghurs read rote scripts attesting to how free they were and how great their life was: nytimes.com/interactive/20…
Read 9 tweets
Sep 22, 2022
We spent months digging through a 700 gigabyte cache from within Russia's de facto internet intel agency Roskomnadzor.

It gave us one of the most complete pictures yet of Putin's efforts to control the internet. It is at turns farcical and terrifying.
nytimes.com/interactive/20…
As Russia's invasion of Ukraine proceeded, local officials in Bashkortostan, a republic east of Moscow where the files are from, noted down in detail online discontent and protests. They tallied views, likes, specific criticism of Putin, and updated dossiers of worst offenders.
The attention to detail from one small team in one tiny part of Russia is startling. They chronicle anti-war walks and complaints about inflation. At times the reports sound like weather forecasts. “Calm with separate minor pockets of tension,” one said after a dissident arrest.
Read 11 tweets
Jun 26, 2022
Awash in a sea of data, China authorities are trying to police the future.

It's not sci fi. Using vast data records on citizens, new software uses scoring and AI to predict crime and protest before they happen. Often the result is automated prejudice. nytimes.com/2022/06/25/tec…
It works like this: Police make blacklists of people they believe are suspicious: drug users, protesters, the mentally ill. Then they aim the surveillance system at those groups, collecting huge amounts of data on activity, location, relationships: nytimes.com/video/world/as…
Specialized software helps them program digital tripwires on predetermined behaviors they believe could signal a crime. If someone goes to a train station daily, but doesn't ride, they might be a pickpocket. An alarm instructs police to check on them. No warrant necessary.
Read 14 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(