So... So they ran an information campaign?
this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2026
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Thanks China
Why the fuck make up lies for your propaganda when you dont have to.
classic
Damn the evil CCCCP and their nefarious plot to *checks notes* tell the truth
The best propaganda is always the truth.
Genuinely why I hate anti-america/anti-capitalism propaganda based off lies. You don't need to lie when just telling the truth is damning. The lies just undermine everything when they're exposed, makes people question even the facts.
The best propaganda is always the truth.
When they shut down the RT America studio under the foreign agents law and direct TV intervention, they did interviews with the ex-RT dissident-esq reporters who were working there. I don't remember who, and who was interviewing, so take this with a grain of salt. When they were asked on the lines of how they felt working for Russian propaganda and information campaign. They said along the lines of that of all the networks they had worked on, they were never felt as free as when they worked on RT, and they were quite open that it was all part of bringing up narratives that would disrupt the American mainstream ones and create political disruption and doubt. Their handlers in Moscow knew that the best way to achieve this was just to give them reach and mostly uncensored platform and let them do mostly whatever they want, because they knew that just bringing out the truth was the most damaging thing to American establishment.
they were never felt as free as when they worked on RT
I assume these reporters were not the ones reporting on the state of russia
It was RT USA, I assume that they still never felt that they had a freedom to bite the hand that fed them, but that was not why most of them were there, to focus on dunking on Russia. But not biting the hand that feeds you is the reality for every reporter that isn't totally independent.
Russia and China have a surprising method of psychological warfare: find the dirt-seekers of the world, and make sure they're busy enough finding the uncomfortable truths from their ideological opponents, so they don't bother digging their party's
Honestly, it's the last thing anyone would have predicted.
ChatGPT confirms
They're Chinese Truths, which make them instantly suspect.
"Facts that happened to be true"
Please, shut the fuck up. Fucking shut the fuck up. I am at the end of my wits with this place.
As opposed to, what, facts that aren't true? Those aren't facts at all.
"Alternative facts"
As opposed to just calling them facts because they are.
Facts without context are just words.
The real story is not about Chines influence on data center opinion.
Its openai reading conversations of their customers.
I mean we all already assumed they do before but this is so blatend, it smells like manufactured consent. You need to go from “suspect it happens” to “its normal to be like this”
Their proof is a couple accounts in China asked the chatbot how to convince Americans to not want datacenters in their backyard...
If I asked a chatbot how to convince someone to not like getting punched in the dick, them not wanting to get punched in the dick doesn't mean there's a grand conspiracy and that's why Bob got mad after being punched in the dick.
Bob didn't need anyone to tell him not to like getting punched in the dick to have that response.
If you think Bob is a person with his own opinions and autonomy, yes. If you think Bob is just a nameless cow in the herd with no capability of autonomy and actualization, Bob's dislike of being punched in the dick couldn't possibly be anything except the neighbor farmer trying to fuck with your profits.
Image generation tech in the open source world has skyrocketed in the last few years, and yet OpenAI still has some of the worst image generation models out there. It continues to produce the most generic infographic bullshit that takes any human with half a brain 0.25 seconds to recognize as AI generated. The bias is so heavily-skewed towards this "obviously AI generated" style that I don't think their engineers even give a shit about improving their image model.
If you aren't even going to take the time to actually produce something that looks halfway decent, and you know, doesn't fucking look like AI, why the fuck should I bother taking this "report" seriously?
Yeah data center bad, but what kills me is the water use thing.
It really seems to rankle peoples bungle, and in both directions, that yes data-center water use is bad, but its just utterly dwarfed in comparison to forms sources of water use. And this is something I can speak to with a fair bit of expertise, in that I've worked extensively in developing water-use analyses for water districts, cities, counties, states, etc. Its just a scale issue and like with that recent Hank Green video about recycling, people truly don't understand how many people there are.
For example, take the MAWA equation (mean average water allowance). Typical indoor water allotment (and there is alot of data to back this up) is about 200 gallons (750 liters) per person per residence per day. That includes toilets, showers, cooking, washing clothing etc..
So lets take the recent number from that NYT article about its data centers water use. I think the number was 2.5 billion gallons?
73,000 gallons would be the average per-person-per-structure indoor only water allotment, which again, is pretty well established.
2.5 billion divided by 73k is about 35k, which is a bit of an over estimate but makes no matter.
All of Amazons datacenters combined "used", and I use "used" lightly here because its not like the water disappeared, but it used less water than a small American town. All of their datacenters combined.
Using duckduckgo to get numbers on this..
Just.. put it into context. Say 1lb of beef takes about 2k gallons of water to produce. The average American consumes 50lbs of beef per year. So an average town of say.. 35k people would go through 3.5 billion gallons of water in beef consumption alone, annually.
And the same equations are going to hold for practically everything else humans consume. Its just... its all a matter of scale. And I agree, datacenters are not good. But the water-use argument is weak when you consider just.. something basic and well established like beef consumption, or golf courses. 2.5 billion gallons is like, 120 golf courses worth of water. Its practically nothing.
I can eat a beef.
I cannot eat a datacentre, no matter how much I try it doesn’t digest.
I agree about golf courses.
completely agree, always thought the water use argument was weak, we are terrible at internalizing large numbers
there are way better arguments against datacenters, like the fact that onsite natural gas generators are now the norm for new datacenter builds where the grid can't supply the load needed, those things are fucking terrible for people and the environment
Data centers typically use evaporative cooling, so the water is consumed (released into the air). If they used closed loop systems it would be different.
Data centers typically use evaporative cooling,
Yeah so do lawns.
They asked ChatGPT about how to influence Americans views on AI, apparently.
Sure thing.
Imagine how fucking dumb our world has gotten that the discussion is, "china used our specific software to plot the destruction of our specific software using propaganda that accidentally turned out to be true" and not, "company uses VPN to blame China for their shitty practices."
at least it beats the russian propaganda that use lies that happen to be false
Uhm, you can run covert compaigns with true facts?
Yes, 99% of propaganda relies on contextualizing true facts so the audience accepts a favorable narrative and believes they're informed so they'll reject any counter-programming.
Also you can lie to people with facts. Using facts is not the same as facts existing but people don't seem to understand this more often than I'm comfortable with
True or not, I, a canadian also agree that excess data centers are bad for our lives. I don't know if that's a chinese propaganda or me realizing the water & electricity costs of it