China's Hong Kong Protester-Targeting 'See Something, Say Something' Hotline Is A Big Success

from the local-tiktok-officials:-oh-um-noooo-i-guess dept

The protesters in Hong Kong have a point: the Chinese government is supposed to stay the fuck out of managing Hong Kong's day-to-day governance for 50 years after its securing of this profitable market sector from the British in 1997. We all love to see colonialism dismantled, but when the recipient is China, caution should be deployed. The Chinese government agreed to not turn Hong Kong into China 1.5 for fifty years.

The clock runs out in 2047 but the Chinese government isn't interested in letting the good faith agreement remain in place. It has directly targeted pro-democracy protesters and government critics in Hong Kong, leveraging its "national security" law to create life sentences for people who rightfully think the Chinese government should back off for at least another seven years.

Throw enough oppression at people and you'll unearth the percentage of the public that would rather lick boot than support their fellow Hong Kong residents. "See something, say something" works everywhere, even in a free market paradise like Hong Kong. As the BBC reports, the snitch hotline set up by Hong Kong's subservient quote/enquote "public servants" has proven popular with those attempting to ingratiate themselves to their new overlords.

Hong Kong's new hotline to report breaches of the controversial national security law has received more than 1,000 calls within hours of going live.

Residents can anonymously send in images, audio and videos if they suspect someone has violated the law.

The law, introduced earlier this year, criminalises secession, subversion and collusion with foreign forces.

It has already led to several arrests of activists, and has silenced protesters.

The maximum punishment under the law is life in prison.

It has gotten no less popular as time goes on. A report by the Guardian says it's as least twice as popular as the BBC's early report indicates.

A police spokesman told the Guardian that by Friday morning the force had received more than 2,500 pieces of information. The hotline can accept audio, videos, photographs and texts, and contributors will remain anonymous and receive no replies once they have submitted their tips, police said.

And, while it seems like the protesters have the upper hand and represent a majority of Hong Kong residents, there is, of course, a ton of insults and latent threats to be found on local social media.

The police post on Facebook had more than 700 comments on Thursday afternoon, with some welcoming and others condemning the initiative.

“Great! Now the cockroaches have nowhere to run,” wrote one user, using a pejorative term for democracy supporters.

A certain percentage of the public will always welcome the cool touch of a jackboot to the neck. We see them here in the United States -- citizens waving the Gadsden and Thin Blue Line flags with maximum cognitive dissonance. In this eventual Chinese holding, citizens are already ingratiating themselves with a foreign power that isn't supposed to take control for another seven years.

In China, the threat isn't existential. It's real. Overseas companies helping the government shut down dissent is making things worse.

Filed Under: china, hong kong, see something say something, snitch, snitchline, surveillance

Dallas PD Asks Residents To Snitch On Protesters, Gets A Load Of K-Pop Videos Instead

from the broadening-officers'-horizons dept

Once again, the people that serve the public have failed to understand the public. Trying to turn citizens into narcs never works out as well as government agencies envision. The end result is almost always a useless waste of limited resources.

Eons ago when the coronavirus was still a concern, the mayor of New York City set up a snitch line for residents to report social distancing violations. Instead of hot neighbor-on-neighbor action, the city's 311 line received a bunch of middle fingers, dick pics, and Hitler memes.

When Ohio's government set up a snitch line for employers to report employees who were collecting unemployment instead of coming to their COVID-encrusted workplaces, an enterprising coder put together a script that clogged the tip bin with algorithmically-generated garbage.

Now that it's civil unrest all over the place in response to the latest killing of a black person by a white police officer, the Dallas PD is asking citizens to step up… and report other citizens for exercising their First Amendment rights. It has not worked out well for the police, as Caroline Haskins reports for BuzzFeed.

In response to the tweeted request from Dallas Police, hundreds of K-pop fans replied with photos and videos of their favorite artists. Many people also claimed to have submitted videos of the police harming protesters, as well as fan edits of K-pop artists, to the iWatch Dallas app.

It took less than 12 hours for the public to run the iWatch Dallas snitch app into the ground. The app's listings (for both Google Play and the iOS App Store) were flooded with one-star reviews while the Dallas PD was flooded with footage of foreign celebrities. It's unclear whether the app was trolled to death or if the PD simply got tired of wading through K-pop footage to find recordings of, um… "perps" participating in First Amendment protected activities. Either way, the app is down and no further submissions are being accepted.

Behold the power this social medium:

The digital protest started when a tweet from Twitter user @7soulsmap, which showed a screenshot of the original Dallas PD tweet, got retweeted thousands of times. A few hours later, @7soulsmap responded to their own tweet with a video and said, "If y’all post this one on their app I’ll send you a $1, I promise."

Who would win: a well-funded police department or a single account waving dollar bills at Twitter randos? (Since we already know the answer, I will be removing this question from the final exam.)

If you want citizens to contribute to your efforts, you might want to make sure you're all working towards the same goal. Asking people to turn in other people for stuff most people don't think other people should be turned in for is never going to work out well.

Filed Under: dallas, dallas pd, dallas police, kpop, snitch, snitchline, texas, tipline