Convening a hearing on a specific subject (silly as it as in this case) then making it an open season for all other grievances is another despicable aspect of these hearings.
I hope it's obvious to everyone that it doesn't matter whether it's Google, $BigTechCo, or anything else being pushed this way. We have nothing against Google, this has nothing to do with what's in the press or making the rounds this week, and I'm sure that the many Googlers here are as put off by this behavior as the rest of HN. Plus they have an additional reason to be angry at you, for tarnishing their reputation.
Given that we spend our days asking HN users not to accuse each other of astroturfing without evidence—because doing that is such internet poison—few things make more steam come out my ears than finding actual evidence of this abuse. You couldn't do anything worse to wreck the cohesion of this community (edit: or put Google's standing in it more at risk—users here really care about this).
It's one thing to say "I won't censor and that's that", one could argue about which approach does more good/harm for the Chinese citizens affected, but it's an argument.
But the argument I'm seeing go around is a lot more like "fuck China specifically". Which doesn't seem to square with the other views activists generally espouse about foreign countries/cultures.
This thing became about political retribution after google dropped maven.
[0] https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/08/28/open-letter-google-repor...
I'm sure these organizations are great and are doing wonderful work but they are not government entities and Google has no obligation to respond to them, further more these are non profits, attaching themselves to a high profile subject like Google gives them more exposure and potentially more donations.
They promised not to pursue "technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of [...] human rights".
1. A seemingly willful disreguard for the facts. 2. Another striking commonality that I can't aledge but a trip through your comments will bear out. The topic always seems to be common. The timing of the account creation is of course purely circumstantial. Draw your own conclusions, but to say that you are constructively adding to discussion would be a reach.
Please don't insinuate astroturfing in comment threads. If you think you're seeing abuse, email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. We ban accounts when we find evidence of abuse (I've banned that one), but just dropping a comment in the thread makes it unlikely that we'll ever see it. It also poisons discussion in the case where the insinuation wrong, which is far more common.