Information operations directed at Hong Kong

HongKonger here. I have some friends in China posting similar anti-protest posts on WeChat social media. It's like the news they read has a completely different story than what it's being told in legitimate new sources. The problem of fake news does become very apparent, and I hope people in China can eventually gain awareness or at least start to question the validity of their news sources.

Interesting. Are the images shared from this article suggesting that protesters are destroying property and engaging in other such behavior fake or somehow being taken out of context?

Well it is certainly a willful misrepresention of the protest movement as a whole, to share the window smashing and say "radical people of hong kong" "complete violent behavior" - the context is peaceful revolution, the context is riot cops showing up and applying violent repression of crowds.

You're asking questions of concern without taking a side by the way, suggesting that maybe the mainlanders are right to see the protesters as violent and deserving of violent repression by a dictatorship. I would urge you to be a little less willing to take the dictator's side on this.

I try to not take sides, but rather to simply evaluate evidence. As the evidence shifts in one direction or another, so do my views. To see why judging issues by the groups involved instead of evidence, one doesn't need to go back far. The Iraq war ended up costing hundreds of thousands of innocent lives, trillions of dollars, and helped accelerate a rapid destabilization of the entire Mideast setting the stage of the rise of groups such as Islamic State and its ongoing reign of terror.

The mainstream media were all, in orchestrated unison, arguing loudly for the war. And the government provided lots of allusions to evidence and appeals to authority, demanding support for it. And this was a conflict with the 'good guys' versus a literal dictator who was undoubtedly a horrible person. Yet the consequences of that war far dwarfed the atrocities of that man. And it was all based on lies. There was no WMD, the secret high level insider source was a taxi driver who had no connection to the government, the 'mobile weapon labs' were helium generating stations for use in conventional artillery, etc.

Throughout history it's not infrequent that such things happen. We'd like to imagine that when the 'good guys' win good things happen, but reality is often not so kind.

---

Attaching this as an addendum since I've now been throttled for getting downvoted:

I am referring to things such as the single word title piece ran by the Washington Post, "Irrefutable." [1] On the same day the New York Times published this [2] piece entitled "Irrefutable and Undeniable". And there were many other such pieces being run as well. It's just a tad tedious to dig up these articles now from 16 years ago. It was bad. Note in these articles the complete and absolute lack of any sort of critique or even consideration of the possibility that evidence might not hold up to scrutiny. Instead the media condemned and proclaimed with absolute certainty. That was not, is not, journalism - it is propaganda.

Consequently I find it important to always remain critical of anything that has substantial political undertones. And so I prefer to take information that both sides agree to and judge it for myself while giving the arguments a distant secondary interest. And while it may ultimately leave me drawing the wrong conclusion, I'd rather be able to justify my logic based on evidence I personally felt compelling beyond any doubt, rather than on parroting others' analysis.

I don't really understand why more people don't think this way.

[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2003/02/06/i...

[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/06/opinion/irrefutable-and-u...

This is a very one-sided view on the media and political environment leading up to the Iraq war, at least from my perspective in the UK. Much of the mainstream media were very much against the prospect of the war from the beginning. The claims of WMD were widely disbelieved or minimised by large parts of the media. It triggered one of the largest demonstrations/marches in recent years.

It was one of, if not THE most divisive and unpopular decision(s) the Blair government made, even at the time.