With regard to China, we usually maintain our focus on those clever Chinese hoaxsters who invented the climate crisis to make American climatologists filthy rich and make oil billionaires cry. But as the Washington Post reports, there are other shenanigans afoot there, this time on social media.
The operations spanned nearly 2,000 [Twitter] user accounts, some of which purported to be located in the United States, and weighed in on a wide variety of hot-button issues, including election-rigging claims about the 2020 presidential election and criticism of members of the transgender community. Two of the three networks favored the U.S. right and one skewed left. At least some repeated pro-China narratives aimed at an American audience.
Twitter also took down three networks that were based in Iran but often claimed to be based in the United States or Israel, the data shows. At least one of the accounts involved in the Iranian efforts, 10Votes81, endorsed candidates even in local races. An account named 10Votes and using the same logo as an avatar was also active on YouTube, TikTok and especially Reddit, said Renée DiResta of Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, one of the data’s recipients.
Not only that, but many a fond illusion was shattered.
While the network was small, some of its users attracted high levels of engagement. One of those accounts, which went by the name Ultra MAGA BELLA Hot Babe, author of the Obama tweet, attracted 26,000 followers, more than 400,000 likes and more than 180,000 retweets before it was taken down. In May, Ultra MAGA BELLA Hot Babe tweeted a meme with a photo of someone holding paper near a purported ballot drop box with the caption “MULE TAKING PICS! PROOF OF CRIME REQUIRED TO GET PAID BY THE DNC.” In June, the account tweeted a comment implying that children from the transgender community are simply impressionable and being abused by their parents, according to archived copies.
Ultra MAGA BELLA Hot Babe wasn’t real!? I may never recover. Oh, and the “Obama tweet” referenced above concerned the former president’s being a lizard person in the service of the Illuminati. As is the fashion, I guess.
But the Chinese cyber-villainy isn’t all political. A lot of it is plain, old-fashioned international thievery, with a bit of an Old South twist—namely, slavery.
From the Los Angeles Times:
In a dystopian nightmare come to life, the Cambodian government has given Chinese crime syndicates free rein to bring in tens of thousands of foreign men and women who — according to human rights organizations and their own accounts — are held captive to work in crowded cyber scam mills. Lured by the promise of legitimate employment, they are instead forced to run online and telephone rackets targeting people around the world with gambling, money lending and romance schemes, to name a few. Other scams have included fake real estate developments and bogus initial coin offerings.
Workers who meet their targets are rewarded. Those who fail are tortured, abused and sold like chattel to other gangs on private messaging apps such as Telegram. Reports of murder, depression and suicidal ideation are rampant. The syndicates run their operations not unlike private companies trying to motivate a sales force. The big difference: Employees aren’t allowed to leave. "Instead of getting fired for poor performance, you get physical punishments — forced push-ups and squats, tased, beaten, deprived of food, locked up in dark rooms or worse," said Jacob Sims, country director for International Justice Mission Cambodia, a rights group that has helped rescue more than 100 victims.
The State Department is aware and seems to be doing what it can, downgrading Cambodia on its human-trafficking scale. Meanwhile, Cambodia is dancing as fast as it can.
Finally, in September, Cambodian law enforcement raided dozens of compounds in the capital, Phnom Penh, and the seedy resort city of Sihanoukville. Thousands of foreigners were sent home. Experts said the raids were mostly for show and that many workers were bused to new facilities in less visible areas of Cambodia or to neighboring Laos and Myanmar. “It was only after incontrovertible video evidence in media reports emerged combined with a chorus of diplomatic demands for nationals to be returned that the Cambodian authorities realized something needed to be done,” said Sophal Ear, a political scientist and Cambodia specialist at Arizona State University. “Cambodia’s international standing has fallen several rungs as a result of this.”
Sometimes, the globalized economy seems not well thought out at all.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
