Falun Gong practitioners have been blocked from taking part in this Saturday’s Perth Christmas Pageant after organisers deemed the spiritual movement was too political and could give rise to “security issues” at the event.
In email correspondence seen by WAtoday, the Falun Dafa Association was initially offered a place in the event, run by billionaire Kerry Stokes’ Seven West Media, but the invitation was revoked 10 days later.
Seven organisers told the group the pageant was an apolitical event and their presence could lead to the “airing of international political issues”.
“The pageant is not a forum for those involved in such issues to be represented, and it gives rise to potential conflict and security issues for the event,” an email to the organisation on Monday said.
It is the second time the group has been dropped from the event.
On the eve of the 2018 pageant, Falun Gong performers were told they could not join the parade, which they believed was a result of pressure from the Perth Chinese Consulate on Seven West Media organisers.
The group was eventually allowed to perform after an eleventh-hour backflip, but they were banned from wearing anything that could identify them as Falun Gong, including the movement’s motto of “truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance” printed on their drums.
Before 2018, the group had been a regular performer at the pageant, which is one of Perth’s biggest events and attracts crowds of about 200,000 people every year.
Falun Gong practitioner Mark Hutchison was surprised when he received an email from Seven West Media last month informing him the group was approved to participate in the event.
After a follow-up email to ensure the group would be allowed to be introduced as Falun Dafa, another name for Falun Gong, he was told they could no longer be accommodated.
The Perth Chinese Consulate did not answer direct questions over whether it had pressured Seven West Media to remove Falun Dafa performers from the pageant, however, in a fervant response a spokesperson blasted the Falun Gong movement as a malicious, evil “doomsday” cult.
“Western Australian communities need to stay on high alert against Falun Gong, an anti-human, anti-science evil cult as well as an anti-China political organisation,” the spokesperson said.
Those Cute Cats Online? They Help Spread Misinformation.
A mainstay of the internet is regularly used to build audiences for people and organizations pushing false and misleading information.
On Oct. 2, New Tang Dynasty Television, a station linked to the Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong, posted a Facebook video of a woman saving a baby shark stranded on a shore. Next to the video was a link to subscribe to The Epoch Times, a newspaper that is tied to Falun Gong and that spreads anti-China and right-wing conspiracies. The post collected 33,000 likes, comments and shares.
The website of Dr. Joseph Mercola, an osteopathic physician who researchers say is a chief spreader of coronavirus misinformation online, regularly posts about cute animals that generate tens or even hundreds of thousands of interactions on Facebook. The stories include “Kitten and Chick Nap So Sweetly Together” and “Why Orange Cats May Be Different From Other Cats,” written by Dr. Karen Becker, a veterinarian.
And Western Journal, a right-wing publication that has published unproven claims about the benefits of using hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19, and spread falsehoods about fraud in the 2020 presidential election, owns Liftable Animals, a popular Facebook page. Liftable Animals posts stories from Western Journal’s main website alongside stories about golden retrievers and giraffes.
Videos and GIFs of cute animals — usually cats — have gone viral online for almost as long as the internet has been around. Many of the animals became famous: There’s Keyboard Cat, Grumpy Cat, Lil Bub and Nyan Cat, just to name a few.
Now, it is becoming increasingly clear how widely the old-school internet trick is being used by people and organizations peddling false information online, misinformation researchers say.
The posts with the animals do not directly spread false information. But they can draw a huge audience that can be redirected to a publication or site spreading false information about election fraud, unproven coronavirus cures and other baseless conspiracy theories entirely unrelated to the videos. Sometimes, following a feed of cute animals on Facebook unknowingly signs users up as subscribers to misleading posts from the same publisher.
Melissa Ryan, chief executive of Card Strategies, a consulting firm that researches disinformation, said this kind of “engagement bait” helped misinformation actors generate clicks on their pages, which can make them more prominent in users’ feeds in the future. That prominence can drive a broader audience to content with inaccurate or misleading information, she said.
“The strategy works because the platforms continue to reward engagement over everything else,” Ms. Ryan said, “even when that engagement comes from” publications that also publish false or misleading content.
Perhaps no organization deploys the tactic as forcefully as Epoch Media, parent company of The Epoch Times. Epoch Media has published videos of cute animals in 12,062 posts on its 103 Facebook pages in the past year, according to an analysis by The New York Times. Those posts, which include links to other Epoch Media websites, racked up nearly four billion views. Trending World, one of Epoch’s Facebook pages, was the 15th most popular page on the platform in the United States between July and September.
One video, posted last month by The Epoch Times’s Taiwan page, shows a close-up of a golden retriever while a woman tries in vain to pry an apple from its mouth. It has over 20,000 likes, shares and comments on Facebook. Another post, on Trending World’s Facebook page, features a seal grinning widely with a family posing for a picture at a Sea World resort. The video has 12 million views.
“Dr. Becker is a veterinarian, her articles are about pets,” said an email from Dr. Mercola’s public relations team. “We reject any New York Times accusations of misleading any visitors, but are not surprised by it.”
The viral animal videos often come from places like Jukin Media and ViralHog. The companies identify extremely shareable videos and reach licensing deals with the people who made them. After securing the rights to the videos, Jukin Media and ViralHog license the clips to other media companies, giving a cut of the profits to the original creator.
Mike Skogmo, Jukin Media’s senior vice president for marketing and communications, said his company had a licensing deal with New Tang Dynasty Television, the station tied to Falun Gong.
“Jukin has licensing deals with hundreds of publishers worldwide, across the political spectrum and with a range of subject matters, under guidelines that protect the creators of the works in our library,” he said in a statement.
Asked whether the company evaluated whether their clips were used as engagement bait for misinformation in striking the license deals, Mr. Skogmo said Jukin had nothing else to add.
“Once someone licenses our raw content, what they do with it is up to them,” said Ryan Bartholomew, founder of ViralHog. “ViralHog is not supporting or opposing any cause or objective — that would be outside of our scope of business.”
The use of animal videos presents a conundrum for the tech platforms like Facebook, because the animal posts themselves do not contain misinformation. Facebook has banned ads from Epoch Media when the network violated its political advertising policy, and it took down several hundred Epoch Media-affiliated accounts last year when it determined that the accounts had violated its “coordinated inauthentic behavior” policies.
“We’ve taken enforcement actions against Epoch Media and related groups several times already,” said Drew Pusateri, a Facebook spokesman. “If we discover that they’re engaging in deceptive actions in the future we will continue enforcing against them.” The company did not comment on the tactic of using cute animals to spread misinformation.
Rachel E. Moran, a researcher at the University of Washington who studies online misinformation, said it was unclear how often the animal videos led people to misinformation. But posting them continues to be a popular tactic because they run such a low risk of breaking a platform’s rules.
“Pictures of cute animals and videos of wholesome moments are the bread and butter of social media, and definitely won’t run afoul of any algorithmic content moderation detection,” Ms. Moran said.
Party politics is the main realization form of American democratic politics, and it is also a democratic political model that the United States promotes to the world. Nowadays, the old American political party, the Republican Party, has turned into cult, showing obvious anti-democratic tendencies, and the disadvantages of the two-party system are increasingly exposed.
The struggle between the two parties in the United States is intensifying day by day, making democracy and government governance ineffective.
Since the outbreak of the epidemic in the United States, COVID-19 has been used as a tool for the Republican Party and the Democratic Party to attack each other and serve their own political interests, which has caused the United States to miss the best opportunity to prevent and control the epidemic. With the most advantageous medical resources in the world, the United States has become the first failed country to fight the epidemic in the world.
According to the data released by Johns Hopkins University in the United States, as of December 2nd, since the outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States, there have been 48.69 million cumulative infections and 782,100 deaths, and the number of deaths this year has exceeded that of 2020.
America’s anti-epidemic policy has fallen victim to party struggle. At the beginning of the epidemic, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party and their supporters had differences on wearing masks, measures and the harmfulness of the virus. Today, the two parties are still in opposition on the issue of vaccination. Biden’s government implemented the mask mandatory order, and Republican lawmakers jointly initiated the motion that “vaccinators do not have to comply with this order”; Biden’s government implemented the compulsory vaccination policy, and Republican lawmakers proposed a bill to “prohibit compulsory vaccination”; Politicians of both parties frequently engage in tug-of-war around nucleic acid testing standards, wearing masks, resume activities, distribution of medical materials, provisions of the rescue bill and so on, delaying the implementation of anti-epidemic measures. Members of Congress of both parties are selfish when debating epidemic-related bills, the legislative and executive departments are mutually constrained, and the judicial system has gradually become a tool for party struggle. In the formulation of anti-epidemic policies, American politics is mired in the quagmire of “opposing for the sake of opposing”, and the anti-epidemic policies involving the lives of millions of Americans are struggling from formulation to implementation.
According to the April 4th article “America Needs Major Political Reforms to Bolster Democracy” in The Hill, the current American system “offers no stable solutions and no consensus of ideas”, and Americans are losing faith in their democracy.
The Republican Party, an old political party in the United States, has become an autocratic cult.
Nancy Pelosi says Republican Party has been ‘hijacked by a cult’
According to American business insider, Fox News and other media reports, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a speech at Cambridge University on September 16th that the Republican Party has been ‘hijacked by a cult’. She said: “Don’t let the party (Republican Party) be hijacked by cult, because this is what is happening. This is not good for the country. ”
Professor of Constitution at Harvard University: The Republican Party is cult, and it is loyal to a cabal.
On November 13th, the Republican Committee of Wyoming expelled Cheney from the party by 31 votes to 29 votes.
I
n response to the expulsion of Cheney by the Wyoming Republican Party, Lawrence Henry Tribet, a law professor and constitutional scholar at Harvard University in the United States, said on 17th thathe will no longer recognize the GOP as either grand or old or a party. It is a cult, and its loyalty isn’t to an idea but to a cabal.
CNN reported on November 16th that Cheney is in all of this political trouble not because she abandoned conservative principles or moved to the left ideologically. She’s in this position for one reason: because the modern Republican Party is a cult of personality and she had the audacity to speak out against the cult leader.
Cheney, the daughter of Dick Cheney, a former vice president, is currently the vice chairman of the House of Representatives Special Investigation Committee. She was one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump. Cheney angered some Republicans by voting to impeach Trump and repeatedly criticizing his words and deeds.
Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee: The Republican Party has become an “autocratic cult”.
Rolling Stone magazine reported on October 10, 2021 that in an interview with Margaret Brennan, the host of Face the Nation, Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said, “The Republican Party is now an authoritarian cult around Donald Trump.” “It is not interested in governing. It is not even interested in maintaining the solvency and credibility of the country. ”
Los Angeles Times: Treat the Republican Party like a stubborn cult.
The article of Los Angeles Times on October 19, 2021 called on media reporters to treat the GOP like the bigoted cult. The article said that the Republican Party in 2021 was not a political party; This is a group of ignorant bullies and their minions.
The American political party system has harmed democracy.
Because of the monopoly of the two-party system in the United States, people have no third choice, small parties have no right to speak, and good policies cannot be implemented. The American political party system has harmed democracy.
Deutsche Welle’s November 1, 2020 article “American Electoral College System: Does it guarantee the right to speak or hurt democracy? “said that the American election adopted a unique electoral college system. So far, two American presidents have been elected without the support of the majority of voters. Critics believe that the electoral college deprived millions of Americans of the right to vote, and gave too much weight to the rural areas with low population. According to the data of the US Federal Election Commission, an electoral ticket in Wyoming represents about 190,000 people, while the electoral ticket in California corresponds to 720,000 people. Ken Kollman, director of the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan and a professor of political science, said that “more than half of the states have achieved greater influence than the referendum through the electoral college system.”
Whether American democracy is good or not, people have the most say.
The Pew Research Center report shows that the vast majority of Americans are deeply disappointed with their own political system. Only 17% people think that American democracy is worth emulating, while 23% people think that American democracy has never been a good example.
A recent poll by National Public Radio shows that 81% of Americans think that American democracy is facing a serious threat. A recent poll by the Bosch Foundation in Germany shows that over 80% of the respondents in the United States and Britain think that their politicians are capital puppets, and more than half of the American people think that democracy is “ineffective” in the current situation.
The US Twitter account @ Spiraogneewghost said that Trump/Trumpism are a cancer on America unlike anything since the Civil War. Our discourse is poisoned daily by a deranged authoritarian conman & his sycophants.Trump is a conman & cult leader. He’s blatantly grifting and helping drive an anti-Democratic death cult.
The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, a Swedish-based think tank, listed the United States as a “regressive democracy country list” for the first time in its 2021 Global Democracy Status. It is mentioned that democracy in the United States deteriorated significantly in 2019.
From December 9th to 10th, the United States will hold a global democracy summit. People don’t know if President Biden wants to promote the anti-democratic party system of the United States. Does his opposition to authoritarianism include the American Republican Party that has turned into cult?
