Chinese Anti-CNN Campaign

Note: I won’t touch the politics behind this campaign in this post. If you were looking for any political opinion on this subject, feel free to skip this post.

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been getting increasing amounts of propaganda material spam (pardon: information) related to China’s campaign against the CNN.

(When I say “China”, I’m referring not necessarily to the government, although I suspect it’s a driving force here, but to the origin of the messages. Same goes for CNN: The news channel is just a name for Western media, both in said campaign and in this post. End of disclaimer.)

Just to name a few pieces I found noteworthy:

Anti-Riot and Anti-CNN shirts: Anti-Riot shirts (I have to admit, I kind of like the slightly oddly translated slogan “Anti-Riot & Explore The Truth”.)

A Twitter account called Jack Cafferty, supposedly by the CNN anchor. The profile links to Anti-CNN.com where you can find the real deal, like campaign propaganda videos suggesting that the situation in Iraq and U.S. involvement there has relevance to what’s going on in Tibet. (Err. Ok. No politics, right?)

Twitter Anti-CNN hasn’t said a lot yet, but follows a motley crew of folks including: Putin, Mao, Jack Cafferty, Jiang Zemin, and – oddly enough – Jeremiah Owyang.*

One thing all of them have in common: The words truth and lies are used rather inflationary, and usually in upper case. Always a good sign, right?

Apart from that, I do find it interesting how quickly social media are deployed in this campaign. And I can’t help but wonder: Is this a centralized, orchestrated campaign or some kind of decentralized, bottom-up movement?

Have you experienced any elements of the Anti-CNN campaign? What did you think?

  • Update: As Jeremiah notes correctly, it’s not strange that folks are following him (many do, he’s a thought leader in social media), and it doesn’t indicate his endorsement of his followers. However, when I checked Anti-CNN’s Twitter account, they were following only (or to a large extent) fake profiles of dictators, political leaders, media figures. It’s that not-being-fake part that made Jeremiah stand out. Sorry for the misunderstanding, J.!

3 Comments

Hey Jeremiah,

No offense! It’s just that they’re following only a group of 25 or so through their Twitter account – most of whom are fake profiles of dictators, political leaders or journalists. I never had you down as a fake (dictator or otherwise)? ;-)

Glad you’re back from Hawaii safe and sound & hope you’ll feel better soon!

Cheers, Peter

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