We don’t really have to bring the US into this, do we?
HN is hosted in the United States and that's where most of the readers are. It's natural for a person to use their own country as a comparison in discussions about governments and countries that are foreign to them.
There's no conspiracy, and the same thing happens on any discussion site where a majority of users are from a specific country.
When you look at something objectively, it's hard to know how sinister (or lack thereof) it is. Because most folks here live in the U.S., it makes the comparison easier.
"Correct the Record was a super PAC founded by David Brock. It supported Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. The super PAC aimed to find and confront social media users who posted unflattering messages about Clinton and paid anonymous tipsters for unflattering scoops about Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, including audio and video recordings and internal documents."
Thankfully, though, there are very important differences to what it looks like in China. Correct the Record has only the resources of one political party, not the entire government, and it exists in opposition to a bunch of equally well funded forces from the other party. You're free to call CTR out on their bullshit, whereas calling the CCP out on its bullshit can easily lead to prison camp or death.
In the US there are meme wars, but in China there are none -- just a boot stamping on the face of a Pepe forever.
I dislike the way much of our media talks about “bad” things China does without discussing how the US does similar things. “Hacking” is the one I hear about China doing all the time, despite it being well known that the US government is heavily involved in global hacking efforts and is in fact the strongest player in the field. Yet I hear little about that and too much about China and Russias efforts there.
Perhaps if we acknowledged that all nations do these things, we’d have a different outlook on the issue than we would if we imagined this was a problem with “them”.
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[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2006/nov/20/mondaymediasec...
[2] HBGary was contracted by the USG to build a tool that is "creating an army of sockpuppets, with sophisticated "persona management" software that allows a small team of only a few people to appear to be many, while keeping the personas from accidentally cross-contaminating each other. Then, to top it off, the team can actually automate some functions so one persona can appear to be an entire Brooks Brothers riot online."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2231471
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...