Vietnam Admits Deploying Bloggers 93
New submitter jespada writes "BBC News reports the Vietnamese Communist Party is approaching its internet image in a more sophisticated manner by hiring shill bloggers to argue its case. From the article: 'Hanoi Propaganda and Education Department head Ho Quang Loi said that the authorities had hired hundreds of so-called "internet polemists" in the fight against "online hostile forces." While the exact number of these activists is unknown, Mr Loi revealed that his organisation is running at least 400 online accounts and 20 microblogs. Regular visitors on popular social media networks in Vietnam such as Facebook have long noticed the existence of a number of pro-regime bloggers, who frequently post comments and articles supportive of the Communist Party. The bloggers also take part in online discussions, where they fiercely attack anybody who they see as critical of the regime.'"
In expected things, entertainment's in the details (Score:5, Informative)
I didn't say it was either unusual or unexpected; I said it was entertaining. Regardless, the criticism you offer applies equally well to TFA as well. That doesn't make how they do it uninteresting.
Let me give an example to illustrate. I once looked up a certain Fortune 500 company on Wikipedia. I'll call it Jonesing for Capital Industries, or JCI for short, to protect its identity. (Full disclosure: I looked at their page quite some time ago, and it looks like much of it has been changed since then--who knows what has transpired since?) Back when I checked JCI's page, most of it clearly read as corporate propaganda, the kind of thing that isn't remotely unusual or unexpected. Frankly, I don't really find the encomia corporations write about themselves all that troubling. They're perfectly transparent and, as you say, what else would you expect? What was unexpected was the section that appeared on the page about controversies JCI had been involved in. Not that I didn't know the corporation had been involved in controversies--most have--but what impressed me was that this wasn't removed wholesale from their Wiki page.
As I looked more carefully, however, I noticed that anytime a claim was made against them an edit would be made by the same anon IP, or another IP from the same town. The edit, if I recall correctly, would come during regular working hours. Most often it wouldn't remove note of the controversy (many of these things are too public) but would change the wording around. Problems with activities the company engaged in became things people said the company did. Simple factual claims in the indicative were made into hearsay. An article cited against the company would be accompanied by another article cited in favor of the company as though both claims were equal. Of course, it's always good to give both sides of the story but that's not quite what was going on here. What was going on is a journalistic tactic/fallacy called false equivalence. It's often employed to great effect by climate change skeptics.
In my view, this is quite interesting because it makes us aware some broader risks with Wikipedia's model. Companies have full-time staff to edit their pages and control their image. But because of Wikipedia's neutrality standards, equivalence, even if it is false, will always be favored over journalistic discrimination. I'm not suggesting that Wikipedia should do otherwise--it isn't a newspaper editorial board after all and those who write for it aren't journalists. What I do suggest, however, is that we pay attention to these seemingly mundane facts, not merely dismissing them as expected, and use them to encourage ourselves to look critically even when we're presented with 'two sides' to a story.