How China’s army of online trolls turned on Sweden
Online trolls attack the country’s enemies... by flooding Facebook pages with angry messages
The call to attack came just after midnight.
Their target? A Swedish comedy host.
A Chinese family of three tried to check in to a hostel 14 hours early, and when told that they couldn’t, asked to stay in the lobby overnight. When hotel staff asked them to leave, they refused, and the police were called to remove them.
That incident set off a flood of criticism on either side. And then Rönndahl’s segment took things to a new level. His network, SVT, argued that it was satire. But China’s foreign ministry said that it was full of discrimination, and China’s embassy in Stockholm called it “outrageously insulting”.
It’s not the first time Di Ba has struck out at what it sees as enemies of China.
The Di Ba community started from an online forum created in 2004 about Chinese football player Li Yi. Li was constantly mocked by netizens because he compared himself to the famous French player Thierry Henry, who was dubbed as King Henry by his Chinese fans. So the Li Yi forum was given the nickname “Di Ba”, which loosely translates to “King forum”.
Over the years, the forum expanded their satirical interests widely in other issues, and has generated some of China’s most popular internet slang including “Diaosi”, a self-deprecating term for being a loser.
In its QQ chat group of nearly 900 people, members exchange their patriotic views, share VPN files and occasionally, someone asks when the next attack will happen.
Some even joke it’s a good thing that they’re stuck inside China’s tightly-controlled internet.
“The Great Firewall was built to protect foreign internet users,” several users said on Weibo.
China looks to ban foreign TV shows at prime time and restrict online streaming
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For more insights into China tech, sign up for our tech newsletters, subscribe to our Inside China Tech podcast, and download the comprehensive 2019 China Internet Report. Also roam China Tech City, an award-winning interactive digital map at our sister site Abacus.