Sure, but it ends up being extreme even for Reddit. There’s no discourse, it’s just everyone nodding along and agreeing.

lemmy.world is such a cesspool I don’t understand it

That’s literally the role of the government, though.

US politics is basically neither side compromising on the basis of ideology and saying it’s the other side’s fault.

That’s a far more condemnable position when you’re the actual government than when you’re the opposition.

Think of all the profits you’re delivering to shareholders!

Isn’t it also an indication that the current government is unwilling to compromise? It’s not like the government not controlling the house is a new issue, but the lack of progress as a result of it seems to indicate that neither side is willing to make progress towards a shared middle ground.

Taiwan literally had a government intervention to launch TSMCcand developed their university system around TSMC being the crown jewel of employment, while the US has had dysfunctional support for anything STEM that succeeds in spite of itself.

No government is going to toss millions of dollars at a project that gets no results

Why would you believe this? The talent is specialized and most of them are already employed by the few dominant market players.

I’m saying the report is US propaganda, not the disinformation. The US needs a bogeyman, and it can’t be “some idiots in their mom’s basement”

I’ve edited the original post to clarify.

Since the article didn’t link the report, I have it attached here: https://transparency.fb.com/integrity-reports-q2-2023/

As we always should do with these reports, let’s question the source:

1. The lead author is Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow for Atlantic Council. According to testimony, “the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and [others] all have inadequately-disclosed ties to the Department of Defense, the C.I.A., and other intelligence agencies. They work with multiple U.S. government agencies to institutionalize censorship research and advocacy within dozens of other universities and think tanks.” According to this internal CIA memo (accessible via FOIA), Atlantic Council fellows are almost all controlled by various US intelligence agencies and report to the director of the CIA.

2. Ben Nimmo’s track record of identifying state-sponsored misinformation is spotty at best. A few years ago, the DFR wrote a hit piece that implicated Ian Shilling (a British retiree) as a Russian bot disinformation account. This led to the takedown of his account by Twitter… Which was rolled back soon after after he went to the news… He was then suspended under X, so go him I guess.

3. Looking at the authors, we have Ben Nimmo (discussed above), Mike Torrey (previous NSA and CIA analyst), Margarita Franklin (has conspicuous 3 year gap between her masters graduation and her first job, quickly rising to the role of Director… which could be a coincidence), David Agranovich (ex-DOD, ex-National Security Council), and Margie Milam/Lindsay Hundley/Robert Claim (for all intents and purposes legitimate people focusing on IP and DNS). Given the large number of actual, non-government-affiliated cybersecurity researchers, the prevalence of ex-US intelligence on this report is rather startling.

Overall, there’s a stronger claim for this report being US propaganda (as shown above) than there is for some barely-intelligible sentences that look like they were written literally by idiots being Chinese propaganda… But who knows, maybe they’re both propaganda?

You mean… People are jerking off by posting stupid bullshit online during work hours? No way!

Must be a state sponsored mission man.

China’s intelligence apparatus isn’t stupid and they do possess basic technologies líke machine translation (which has gotten really good nowadays).

Half a million people is a drop in the market by almost any measure.

Put it this way: if you had half a million followers on TikTok, would you be happy? Not really.

Idk if this is propaganda or just some fucking idiot online LMAO

I don’t imagine that the boss of whoever would be responsible for this supposed project would look at the responses and go “yep, looks about right”

It’s not like being bilingual is that rare in intelligence positions in China. The evidence for being state-sponsored is weak.

You’d think they would at least cite the report from Meta… RollingStone is back at it with their top tier journalism.

Fuck that. Requiring trains to be built in the US will blow up the already obscene budget even more and lead to poor-quality trains due to a lack of experience in high speed trainset manufacturing.

We saw this in Boston, where the requirement of US-made led to absolutely fucked supply chains, constant delays and cost overruns, and shoddily constructed trains with a multitude of problems (though, admittedly, the entire Boston transit system has these problems anyway so I guess it’s just another part of government dysfunction). For what? For a voting bloc of like a thousand temporary workers?

Thing is, the US doesn’t really have high speed rail in the pipeline that can share technical expertise. The proposed Texas line is planning to use Shinkansen trains, Brightline already has a supplier, and so does Amtrak. Where are you going to get economies of scale to come into play?

It’s also a fucking California state project, and California is the safest blue state that ever blued.

Honestly not against this? Canada delegates education to the provinces and does fine.

China did to EVs what the US did to semiconductors.

The US and EU markets lack competition.

I too can point to people I don’t like… That isn’t evidence.

So… Was the propaganda false propaganda or true propaganda?

US propaganda during the Cold War included things like “our grocery stores have bananas” (true) and “we will totally definitely not expand NATO if you dissolve the USSR” (false).

True propaganda is just a fact that makes you look bad.

So… No evidence, just “these people happened to be spreading ideas that didn’t fit with the Western perspective”

Are we back to McCarthyism already?

I’m not doubting that Russia’s trying to spread propaganda: so are we, and so is any major player that wants to play the game. I’m just skeptical that this mess of a source is worth a damn.