So regarding to my "bombshell"...it's perhaps a bit less dramatic than many presumed, yet it still troubles me a lot, to the point that I wondered whether I should stop posting on certain things

You see, I realized in the last few months that, by translating information and news related to one of the fastest growing spaceflight powers of the world...I inadvertently became a spreader of PRC propaganda.

And with me exactly 180 degrees away from them, I feel scared.
It actually started a few years ago - it's not hard to meet Chinese Twitter users interested in spaceflight, either those living overseas or find a way to climb over the wall. Not surprisingly, many of these S/F enthusiasts are interested in their own military too.
This steadily grew with my followers' count until the flagship Chinese spaceflight missions of 2020 (Chang'e 5 especially but also many others) brought in dozens of them liking/re-tweeting my info tweets sometimes, and similar no. of such followers every month.
I do casually check these new followers/users sometimes. To my horror, far too many of them routinely insults, attacks, mocks others who they see as "anti-China" or spread potential mis-information, even blatant attacks, that started off w/ their state media/spokesperson.
I always expect some of such people to be very nationalistic. What I DIDN'T expect is that the percentages of them are extremely high lately, up to 90%!

And it's absolutely awful and disgusting in seeing some of the words they use, in many cases in English & replying to others.
For a recent example dozens of them follow my tweets while at the same time happily mocking a certain Down Under nation on their case of soldiers murder of civilians, after *the* PRC foreign spokesperson take a distasteful propaganda satire drawing & mock that country on Twitter.
And that's just one tip of a giant iceberg - never mind how much insults and fake info they have thrown out on my very own city & people of 1 certain island. This cohesive behavior, often below Western media and politician accounts in English, are hardly explain by bots.
These people often post their own lives in Chinese - what to eat, college life, even a dozen or two liking the same anime girls that I like too. Yet they just can't keep the mouths shut when it comes to international affairs & keep attacking using disgusting words.
I simply do 2 things to such accounts - block and report. Unfortunately the no. of these accounts following my Chinese spaceflight news simply grow w/ time. Just for Chang'e 5 alone I've blocked 100+ in the last 2 months, that's just how bad it is.
As someone who's as close to 180 degrees away from their directions (you'll be surprised in many of my stances I would say) I'm disheartened that - whether they followed me because they really like my info translations or they think I'm a threat - my tweets are used in such ways.
I always think that gathering/translating as much info and data on *the* independent spaceflight power of the 21 Century - regardless of how they are twisted or modified or presented - is crucial for independent analysis of the current and future of Chinese developments in S/F.
It's like past time spaceflight enthusiasts gathering news & tracking Soviet space missions for fun, or today's armchair analysts looking at Iran and North Korea. No-one would think that they are transmitting these places' propaganda.

But I overlooked 1 thing about the PRC.
The cases above are for nations where they don't have people roaming around social media platforms/in the streets actively promoting opposite views of the globe.

For China though, their aggressive active spreading of their views of the world means such effects would occur.
I have briefly thought of suspending reporting on Chinese spaceflight to stop my tweets from being used as such. I've decided to go on for the time being, as I really believe "any twisted news/info is better than no news as long as you analyze it".
But I'm not sure "they" will allow me to do so. I could very likely lose my account if I say a few more alphabets/words a bit farther than here, words that are normal for 80+% of world's population but literally lighting up liquid hydrogen for the remaining ones.
Even this thread may attract random attacks like moths to lightbulbs. I've seen far too many similar cases in all corners of the world because of such affairs. It's really awful and w/ the state of the largest economical power of the world by 203X behind, it's going to get worse.
Hopefully my account would continue to stand after writing what I really feel must be communicated. If something happens soon, please help stand with me.

Have a happy 2021 everyone.

More from Twitter

The twitter ban on 45 is a victory in some sense for the immediate but a warning in the long term, not on the curtail of free speech but as gesture towards the expansive power commercial tech has on every aspect of our governance and our lives, I don’t quite have the words but-

What I’m trying to get at, is not just that Twitter’s decision allows us to see—in ways that have been obscured—how much control they have over content moderation—

but as @Elinor_Carmi points out “platforms don’t just moderate or filter “content”; they alter what registers to us and our social groups as “social” or as “experience.”
https://t.co/GSByAOoDWg changed

I’m worried that the celebration of Twitter’s intervention on fascist rhetoric-however too little and too late- directs us to desire tech companies enforcement of liberal and democratic procedures rather than towards an investigation of

how they’ve developed computational infrastructures which exceed the power of the nation state, are hollowing out our institutions for frictionless (see removing human contact) optimization and are insufficiently described by neoliberalism
This is why I'm not a critic of "cancel culture." It's crucial to impose social costs for the breech of key social norms. The lesson of overreaction is that we need to recalibrate judgment to get it right next time, not that we need a lot more bad judgment in the other direction.


Obviously, people will disagree about which norms are important, about how bad it is to violate them, and thus about how severe the social cost ought to be. That's just pluralism, man, and it's good.

It's important to openly talk through these substantive differences, which is why derailing these conversations with hand-waving moral panic about "cancel culture" is obnoxious and illiberal.

Screaming "cancel culture!" when somebody pays a social costs other people have been fighting hard to get others to see as necessary is often just a way to declare, with no argument, that the sanction in question was not only unnecessary but in breach of a more important norm.

It's impossible to uphold social norms without social sanctions, so obviously anti-cancelers are going to want to impose a social cost on people they see as imposing unjustly steep social costs on others.
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: ADT insider threat; Billionaires think VR stops guillotines; Privacy Without Monopoly; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/nu1HbReiEX

#Pluralistic

1/


This Wednesday, I'm giving a talk called "Technology, Self-Determination, and the Future of the Future" for the Purdue University CERIAS Program:

https://t.co/po5IivZyr4

2/


ADT insider threat: If you build it they will spy.

https://t.co/kJrmtu8L3S

3/


Billionaires think VR stops guillotines: TARP with tasps.

https://t.co/MIKwvsICkr

4/


Privacy Without Monopoly: Podcasting a reading of the latest EFF whitepaper.

https://t.co/R2sl75y4rb

5/

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