It is interesting that there was recently a petition asking for people to support the national security law, and that it managed to gather 3 million signatures. For comparison, high estimations on the number of people who went on the streets to protest, was about 2 million. Both numbers are likely to be overestimations, but it seems to show that the Hong Kong people are divided about whether China is good for them, and whether they should support the protests or not. It is unfortunate that the mainstream media only reports Hong Kong events on the surface level, and does not analyze the issue more deeply.
To those that wish to learn more deeply about the Hong Kong events, I recommend browsing Quora. There are quite some people there who say they live in Hong Kong.
> I recommend browsing Quora. There are quite some people there who say they live in Hong Kong.
I live in Hong Kong–those people on Quora are wrong. Actually, I don't, but there's really no way to verify that; take online comments by people who supposedly live in a region with a grain of salt.
That's not the point. He's saying that there's no possible way to decisively figure out who does and doesn't live in Hong Kong on Quora; there are a lot of nations interested in influencing what's going on there right now (including US, I might add), and Chinese disinformation campaigns (especially ones where they pretend to be from elsewhere) aren't a new phenomenon.
Petitions are bullshit, Quora is bullshit. Look for bodies, anything else is easy to fake.
Suppose a foreigner posts a video on Youtube, showing that he's on the street in China, speaking about Hong Kong. Would you say that that is a valid opinion?
Also, if we're so skeptical about all sorts of online comments, do you believe I should consider all HN comments about anything political, to be invalid too because they might be disinformation campaigns?
Notice that walking on the streets of China or Hong Kong is still a world different from posting an internet comment or incrementing a mysql column.
Also, yes, we generally are skeptical of political claims online. See this thread and any political discussion on HN. It's why political submissions are usually clusterfucks like this one where every top-level comment is greyed-out and making a strong claim. Or made by someone who registered an account just to post it.
Either way, you are here bringing Quora posts and a petition in into a superhot discussion that demands more. Linking to published opinion pieces from people at ground zero would definitely be more compelling than pointing us to an internet forum where you write your own byline credentials.
Here is an actual person, living in China, commenting on Hong Kong. Do you believe this video deserves skepticism? If so, can you tell me why? https://youtu.be/h64hTb4on78
The Chinese government allows dissent to some degree; "disappearing" of critics isn't universal and shouldn't be seen as such. Criticize it for things it actually does, of which there are many.
I don't know why your other post was flagged. I just want to say two things in reply.
You read too much into why I mentioned "foreigner". I actually wanted to ask whether people consider the video that I posted above, which is made by an actual foreigner (as a fact, not as an insinuation of anything more) can be considered an honest opinion.
I also used the word "valid" as a shorthand for "an opinion that deserves to be heard and considered, rather than downvoted or dismissed", for the lack of a better term.
If he's representing his affiliations honestly, why wouldn't it be? Faking video is harder than lying about who you are on the internet.
To point back to that comment, Chinese living in China have just as much a right to have opinions on it, and so do Americans living in America, but neither of their opinions are worth half as much as people living in Hong Kong. As long as they're representing themselves honestly (as Chinese or Americans, living in their respective countries), they've still got honest opinions, even if their opinions don't matter as much as the ones of people living in Hong Kong.
You're redirecting the conversation. Is this intentional? I didn't claim any which way as to the "validity" of opinion: I agreed with Saagar, saying that the fact of where you live is easy to obscure or lie about on the internet, and opinions that were possibly deceptively broadcasted should be taken with a grain of salt.
Suppose a foreigner posts a video on Youtube, showing that he's on the street in China, speaking about Hong Kong. Would you say that that is a valid opinion?
This is a fun question, because there are four or five layers to it! I'll try to answer it and the rest of your questions the best I can, because I don't think we're that far off from ideological alignment here.
First, I'll start off again by pointing out your usage of "valid opinion" isn't here nor there (all opinions are valid, even if some are deceiving and many are wrong): my statement wasn't on the validity of opinions, but on whether or not the opinions were coming from people who were being honest about where they were from. But I still like this question, so I'm going to answer.
You word this like it's a "gotcha," as if for some reason expats are primarily on the side against CCP (or China, because let's be honest, a lot of the hate directed in the CCP's direction is anti-Chinese xenophobia, despite there being a lot of valid reasons to hate the CCP and detest its actions), but most foreigners who'd be willing to film themselves talking in China and publicly broadcast it are pro-Chinese government. I don't think this is inherently a bad thing, and it's completely natural given that the Chinese government has some absolutely fantastic scholarships and has relatively accepting immigration policies.
But then, Hong Kong isn't China. I wouldn't trust an American living in France to tell me about Venezuela, even if their opinions are "valid" as long as they're representing themselves as an American living in France telling me about Venezuela. I'd trust a foreigner living in Hong Kong to tell me about Hong Kong, I'd trust a foreigner living in China to tell me about whichever part of China they're in (I'm not going to claim someone living in Chongqing could tell me much about Huangshan; people don't accept that China is more like USA than a tiny country like France, but I wouldn't trust a Californian to deliver a good summary of what Wisconsin is like, either).
It then follows that Chinese living in China and Americans living in the USA have opinions that are worth less than anyone living in Hong Kong, which I'd say is true if you think people should have a right to self-determination. Most online opinions claiming to be from Hong Kong online should probably be discounted then, solely because given the volume of people from both countries with an interest in interfering in Hong Kong's affairs (let's be honest, CIA is assuredly interfering too given the obvious benefits of an independent Hong Kong to US intelligence).
Also, if we're so skeptical about all sorts of online comments, do you believe I should consider all HN comments about anything political, to be invalid too because they might be disinformation campaigns?
Again, you're using "invalid" in a sense that I don't think is useful. Nonetheless, anyone claiming to be from anywhere online has a pretty strong chance of not being from there. Any dog can log on. So yeah, definitely discount HN pretty heavily. Even if HN isn't subject to any disinformation campaigns (ignoring that Amazon's been caught paying people to comment on here and some Amazon accounts have been banned for that), it's still primarily well-off people circlejerking about the dangers of economic systems they've only read the Wikipedia articles about; yes, absolutely throw the opinions away. Most importantly, do so when sides not directly involved (meaning not Hong Kong in this case, despite that China is 'directly' involved; China is 'directly' involved in the sense that USA was during Vietnam) have vested interests in making things go their way.
I'm really curious how exponential the amount of signatures you'd get for a protest that brought 2 million people together would be. I'd bet it'd be 30m+ easy but I'm doing completely baseless twitter retweet math.
edit: I worded this strangely and tried to recover it, hopefully it makes sense.
Note that the coercion doesn't have to be blatant or explicit. China said some fairly threatening things about Hong Kong, and some number of residents may have decided that, for their own safety, they needed to signal that they were in support. What they actually feel or think may be different.
>> Last Friday Leung Chun-ying, Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing former leader, demanded that HSBC state its position after enjoying privileges in the territory that “should not be taken for granted”.
He also warned that it could “be replaced by banks from China or other countries overnight”.
In a Facebook post he wrote: “We need to let … British companies such as HSBC know which side of the bread is buttered.”
Well I did say that 3M is likely to be an overestimation. How many do you believe are fake? Let's say 40% are fake. That puts the number of legit signatures at 1.6M: still in the same ballpark as the number of protesters, which shows that society is divided.
If you disagree with this analysis, I would love to hear why.
A petition is a much lower effort action than a protest. People motivated enough to protest in person probably represent a stronger opinion base than people merely motivated enough to sign a petition.
That's generally true. In this case, it's a petition about a national security law, so does that still hold? I would say that anybody signing support for a national security law has to be mad (under normal circumstances), no matter how easy it is to put down a signature.
I was offered a bag ~10 surgical masks or a hand sanitizer a few months ago in return for signing that petition by people waiting at the entrance to my apartment building. At this time there was a huge scramble for masks which were in short supply. I'm not disputing the law or the level of support but I feel there were some flaws in the signature collection process.
40% is the conservative estimate number the the US government faked for the net neutrality thing and that's with transparency in the comments. Let's go with 99% for China?
Thanks, but I don't think that applies here. I'm not accusing that poster of "astroturfing, shilling, brigading, [or being a] foreign agent".
I'm saying that they're parroting CCP propaganda in the form of an extremely questionable survey and that generally attracts downvotes here (including mine).
It’s an interesting comment history and the pro CCP angle is pushed hard.
However that doesn’t mean views are necessarily always wrong - though mine are in strong opposition.
@Dang has a horrible task dealing with this stuff.
If you go on journalist twitter, the “mainstream media” is full of very enterprising journalists who have done deep dives into the security law (as much as released by the CCP...) and is uniformly critical.
Also rather than “online polls”, the more damning feature are the local elections, or remnants thereof, where the Beijing faction is routinely getting crushed with pro-democracy candidates getting 70-80% Of the vote
In the last local council elections, pro-Beijing candidates got 42% of all votes, while pro-democracy candidates got 57%. That the pro-democracy candidates won almost 90% of the seats is an artifact of the election system, which doesn't guarantee proportional representation.
To those that wish to learn more deeply about the Hong Kong events, I recommend browsing Quora. There are quite some people there who say they live in Hong Kong.