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Tag: Fake News

Manufacturing Dissent

Written by Alex Colville on . Posted in News and Trends. No Comments on Manufacturing Dissent

TikTok, often criticized in Western capitals as a vector for Chinese disinformation, has become a platform for distributing fake news about protests within China itself. Following the suspicious death of actor Yu Menglong (于朦朧) and what appeared to be a government cover-up in September, AI-generated videos falsely depicting mass anti-government rallies circulated widely on the platform, according to AFP’s fact-checking service. The terrifyingly realistic clips — betrayed at points only by slightly distorted faces and nonsensical Chinese characters — bore the watermark for Sora, the visual generation software from OpenAI. They originated from an account called “Team Taiwan Value” and garnered hundreds of thousands of views and comments.

Many users believed the fabricated protests were genuine, with commenters expressing solidarity. No evidence exists of actual large-scale rallies in China over Yu’s death, which Beijing police attributed to an accidental fall, prompting widespread questioning from fans, and related reports in Chinese-language outlets globally. The videos, including this one and this one, were taken down Tuesday afternoon.

SOURCE: AFP Factcheck.

Hoops Oops

Written by LS Staff on . Posted in News and Trends. No Comments on Hoops Oops

“Basketball is a bridge that connects us.” That was the headline of a commentary published in the Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Daily newspaper earlier this month, with a soaring byline from none other than LeBron James, the LA Lakers star who is the NBA’s all-time leading scorer. “I’ve been deeply moved by the enthusiasm and friendliness of my Chinese friends,” the commentary began, with a typical CCP frame of people-to-people friendship. “What I can do in return is give my all in every game as a way to show my gratitude to everyone.” For a generally insipid Party-run mouthpiece, such a celebrity endorsement was too good to be true — and of course it was. Representatives for LeBron James quickly disavowed the story. The star, they said, had only ever conducted interviews with Chinese media.

What does this tell us? The flagship newspaper of the CCP feels it is perfectly acceptable to fake a commentary by one of the world’s most recognizable public figures if it suits the agenda, in this case talking up “friendship” and people-to-people exchange.

LeBron James. IMAGE: Wikimedia Commons.

It should not surprise readers that this is not an isolated case. In 2016, after a commentary with a byline from a journalism professor in the New York state university system appeared in the paper decrying the falsehood of Western freedom of speech, CMP reached out to the professor in question. In an e-mail exchange, the shocked professor said she had only spoken on the phone with a People’s Daily reporter and raised issues of journalism ethics more generally. Sound familiar?

At the People’s Daily, politics always trump professionalism. In order to have his official press card re-issued back in January, the staff member behind the LeBron James commentary, sports reporter Wang Liang (王亮) would almost certainly have taken refresher courses on the Marxist View of Journalism and fealty to the Party. The most basic ethics and good practice? Not so important. The People’s Daily has issued no public correction on the LeBron James commentary. Don’t bother waiting for the buzzer.