• Aria@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    Your article even says it’s legal. The problem with this as a source is that their sources are two different CIA fronts. China Digital Times and Radio Free Asia. As it always is whenever it’s one of these news stories. RFA just makes up things wholesale but CDT posts bad faith readings of social media posts. For example the user in question was getting mocked and called a liar by everyone in the comments but the CDT article neglected to mention that. For the time being, it’s just some rando trying to stirr outrage to get out of a fine. Yes the police report correctly documented that he used a VPN, but that’s not why he’s being fined.

    Here is a list of CIA fronts provided by the CIA. https://www.ned.org/regions/

      • Aria@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        Honey I literally provided a first hand source. https://www.ned.org/regions/
        But fine, let’s do liberal sources.
        Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Digital_Times#Staff_and_operations

        China Digital Times has been a recipient of funding from the National Endowment for Democracy.[15] The Translations Editor is Anne Henochowicz, an alumna of the Penn Kemble Democracy Forum Fellowship at the National Endowment for Democracy. She has written for other publications including Foreign Policy, The China Beat, and the Cairo Review of Global Affairs.[13]

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Asia

        Based on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and preceded by the CIA-operated Radio Free Asia (Committee for a Free Asia), it was established by the US International Broadcasting Act of 1994 with the stated aim of “promoting democratic values and human rights”, and countering the narratives and monopoly on information distribution of the Chinese Communist Party, as well as providing media reports about the North Korean government.[12][page needed] It is funded and supervised by the U.S. Agency for Global Media[13] (formerly Broadcasting Board of Governors), an independent agency of the United States government.

          • Aria@lemmygrad.ml
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            1 year ago

            What are you even arguing here? The link corroborates that both RFA and CDT are part of the NED. Is your gripe that they use a different acronym? Propaganda from a geopolitical rival is obviously not a reliable source of information. Though it’s true, the website doesn’t make it very clear that the NED is part of the USA government or CIA, I didn’t think that information was necessary to provide because it’s common knowledge. But I can quote Wikipedia again in case you didn’t know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Endowment_for_Democracy

            The NED was created as a bipartisan, private, non-profit corporation, and in turn acts as a grant-making foundation.[2] It is funded primarily by an annual allocation from the U.S. Congress.[4][6][5]

            I generally prefer first hand sources so here’s a cia.gov source corroborating their control of RFA. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000846953.pdf But if you prefer, here is an article by an American journalist explaining the relation. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1991/09/22/innocence-abroad-the-new-world-of-spyless-coups/92bb989a-de6e-4bb8-99b9-462c76b59a16/ For example

            Preparing the ground for last month’s triumph of overt action was a network of overt operatives who during the last 10 years have quietly been changing the rules of international politics. They have been doing in public what the CIA used to do in private

            So then it comes down to you believing Mediafactchecker’s vetting to be more reliable than an organisation’s stated goal. So who’s mediafactchecker? The website looks very amateurish. What resources do they have for verifying these news stories? Because the link you provided says they haven’t reported any fake news in 5 years as far as the site is aware. But that’s insane. They have stories like this. https://www.rfa.org/english/news/korea/squidgame-11232021180155.html
            Squid Game is extremely popular on Korean Soulseek and it’s in no way covert.
            Or like this https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/philanthropist-11212018131511.html
            He’s alive enough to take interviews. https://youtu.be/scScu7rcwnI
            RFAs reporting is so painfully fictitious that Mediafactchecker simply can’t have done their due diligence. The examples they give are not original reporting, so in those cases it’s completely fair to give them a pass. Most likely, Mediafactchecker simply reviewed only the cases they link and nothing else. In my opinion, this means Mediafactchecker is itself unreliable since it creates profiles for sites without looking through a large number of articles.

            Chinese citizens are not allowed to use a VPN, unless government has approved it in some way.

            Then quote some legislation or evidence.

            Onto the article you linked with the racist cartoon. This is an ad for VPN providers. It says China bans VPNs except for their partners, and then links to affiliate purchase links from big popular partner products, popular enough that China definitely would know about them. The article is explicitly aimed at selling products to tourists, not Chinese people. The article also lists blocked sites without actually checking if they’re blocked. Not relevant to the core argument, because China does block the majority of western big tech and propaganda, but it shows that it’s not a very high effort blog post.

            http://www.chinafirewalltest.com/?siteurl=x.com
            http://www.chinafirewalltest.com/?siteurl=wsj.org

            In summery, this is not a source, because there’s no evidence of original reporting or an effort at fact finding.

            • Jin@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Could prove to me this isn’t a tankie/bot account?

              Can you criticize the CCP?

              Try copy paste this “Fuck Xi Jinping and Fuck Putin”

              Wonder if you can pass this test

              • Aria@lemmygrad.ml
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                1 year ago

                This is the dumbest shit. Do you really think bots can make semantically aware arguments but not parse your instruction? Or do you think the CCP police (It’s the CPC by the way, the communist party of China. Communism first, China second, China first is how you get guillotined by angry Maoists) is standing behind me with a gun? How do you reckon that is economical? Anyway I’m not gonna say fuck Xi Jingping, he’s a comrade and a great leader, long fucking live Xi Jingping. Absolute treasure. I’ll happily say fuck Putin though, hope he chokes together with all the other capitalists and killers.