Information operations directed at Hong Kong

This seems like a very slippery slope.

Recently Jackie Chan and Liu Yifei are a couple of higher profile individuals have expressed support for the mainland or condemnation of the protesters' riotous behavior. Jackie Chan is a Hong Kong national - Lieu Yifei is Chinese American. The reason that this is relevant is because we live in the day and age where holding the wrong opinion is increasingly frequently grounds for getting black listed or worse. They feel strongly enough that they're willing to risk an immense amount, just to share their views and values.

They they feel so strongly about this issue is reasonable evidence that many others also likely feel strongly about this issue, and not necessarily in support of the protesters. Consequently, there are undoubtedly large numbers of people expressing genuine negative views against the protesters. How many of these individuals ended up getting banned? It's twitter. A huge chunk of the userbase posts like bots. There's not exactly a whole lot of insightful discussion going on with 140 characters + memes. When you get into political talking points where real people are simply repeating the same talking points at one another, this gets even more extreme.

I just looked through Jackie Chan's movies for the past few years, and they're almost exclusively produced by mainland Chinese film companies. I understand he's a Hong Kong national, but it seems that he is toeing the line for the movie industry he's working for. Considering how the Chinese have cracked down on Cathay Pacific (forcing them to fire employees who have participated in the protests), I doubt a mainland movie star could get away with saying anything else.

Here [1] is Chan's filmography. He's very active in the American industry still. Using the fact he also acts in Chinese films against him is not very reasonable. And Liu Yifei is American Chinese and literally just got her big break playing the lead in Mulan.

It seems increasingly disturbing to me that people seem to want to assume that anybody who holds a different view from them must be a "troll" or some sort of secret government conspirator or whatever else. Social media echo chambers are making people increasingly incapable of understanding that people can see the same information, without omission or ignorance, and come to different conclusions.

> Using the fact he also acts in Chinese films against him is not very reasonable

Sure it is. He's economically and likely personally exposed to Beijing. China has no rule of law. Offending Xi's government carries drastically harsher consequences than doing something similar in a country with the rule of law.

No, it's not because a Chinese actor acting in some Chinese films is about as irrelevant as you could get unless you are claiming that anybody with any connection to China now cannot be trusted because they 'might' be 'compromised.' And in such case you would effectively disqualify 100% of the people with a direct interest in this, unless they happen to agree with you.

It's logic akin to:

- only pious individuals can be trusted

- it would be impious to argue against the 'fact' that everything revolves around the Earth

- since no pious person would ever make such an argument, only impious individuals would and impious individuals cannot be trusted.

- only untrustworthy individuals would claim Earth is not the center of the universe and all within it

- since no trustworthy individuals are among the heliocentric claimants, it must be the case that they're lying.

- QED: the earth is the center of the universe according to any and all who can be trusted