Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/24/honi-soit-qui-mal-y-pense-2.html
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Useful idiots used and hung out to dry, news at eleven.
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At least they were just holding signs not murdering someone
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So if they were promised money, someone must have recruited them (who needs to be outed, if only so they don’t scam any more people).
this illustrates just how difficult it is to field convincing paid protesters that stand up to even cursory scrutiny
Of course, scams like this don’t need to withstand any scrutiny at all, as the target audience is the Chinese media who will simply ignore any information that comes out that doesn’t support the state narrative. This is, to a large degree, the same problem we have with Trumpism. Trump and his cronies are unembarrassed spewing what are so transparently lies that are totally debunked by even cursory examination (or a moment’s thought). Authoritarian followers just want the reaffirmation of their belief, so they’ll ignore counter evidence, no matter how strong, assuming it even makes it through their Fox-news media bubble.
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Which '80s sci-fi novel is this from?
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That video is like an imaginary episode of “Talking with Canadians”
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Actually I was thinking more Distraction by Bruce Sterling.
Just guessing here, but I wouldn’t be very surprised if they were recruited anonymously on short notice via one of these new cool “gig economy” middle-man websites such as Fivr or Mechanical Turk.
As for who actually commissioned this stunt, it’s very probably Chinese psyops, but good luck on proving it, since there is no actual money trail to follow.
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Surely if that was the case, there would have been some mechanism to make sure they were actually paid (albeit quite poorly), and some sort of document trail? Further reading indicates that at least one of the people was recruited via Facebook by someone who had, in turn, been working for someone else. It seems like that’s probably what happened with the others as well, being organized via social media rather than via legit gig work sites, but through layers of middlemen to hide the actual organizer. That does seem like a complicated scheme that would have required substantial resources to organize (even if they didn’t pay anyone), but it occurs to me that a single person potentially could have put out a call for “workers” somewhere on social media and the people who saw it unwittingly recruited friends and acquaintances into the scheme. (And then that one person shows up at the scene with a handful of homemade signs and then takes off, and everyone who directly responded to the ad and recruited others gets left holding the bag, so speak.)
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I’m pretty sure we’re all being tricked, and everything is a music video…
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