Ai Wei Wei's Interview With the Chinese Digital Thought Police

Ai Wei Wei's Interview With the Chinese Digital Thought Police - Brian Fung - The Atlantic

The process has three steps - receive task, search for topic, post comments to guide public opinion. Receiving a task mainly involves ensuring you open your email box every day. Usually after an event has happened, or even before the news has come out, we'll receive an email telling us what the event is, then instructions on which direction to guide the netizens' thoughts, to blur their focus, or to fan their enthusiasm for certain ideas. After we've found the relevant articles or news on a website, according to the overall direction given by our superiors we start to write articles, post or reply to comments. This requires a lot of skill. You can't write in a very official manner, you must conceal your identity, write articles in many dif­ferent styles, sometimes even have a dialogue with yourself, argue, debate. In sum, you want to create illusions to attract the attention and comments of netizens.

In a Roy society like China this can be either an R activity as with the days of communism or Oy as it becomes a Y-Oy state. Similar surveillance happens in the US with the NSA as Iv though manipulating the news is less common now. It was happening much more in the cold war where Iv-Oy intelligence agencies and FBI might watch for secretive R communists as well as B left wing extremists.