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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

Vancouver, BC / Richmond BC area here, which has a >30% Chinese-ethnicity population: Whenever Falun Gong makes the press here, there is a relatively active English language social media astroturfing campaign, and fake news campaign that has been going around for at least 15-20 years which attempts to equate Falun Gong with known harmful cults which Westerners are familiar with. I've seen it compared to Heaven's Gate, the Branch Davidians, and Jim Jones' Peoples' Temple.

As best I can determine it's a buddhist/meditation group that disagrees with the Chinese government on principles of fundamental human rights.

View on HN

Falun Gong is pretty harmless. I used to go along to mooch off the free meditation and qigong during my salad days. While there is a fundamental cult of personality around the leader, the values seemed morally sound and in accordance with your meat-and-potatoes buddhism.

Would actually recommend to fellow cheap-skates. Definitely no hard-sell from the believers to recite their scripture (which they call 'The Fa').

Falun gong is basically Scientology of the east. Whether you would call them harmless is debatable but they're definitely not just your meat-and-potatoes Buddhism.

They believe in spiritual healing, reject modern medicine, and believe that one can gain superpowers and that only the leader of Falun gong can activate them.

So Falun Gong has celebrity drop-in centers? Aggressively pursues you if you leave? Has a central structure to where people donate all of their money? I'm not sure you know what you are talking about.

No, yes, yes. Does it really answer your question though? I don't know what you're assuming but I frequently have encounters with Falun gong practitioners in China and Taiwan.

Fair enough. All that I can say is that the people I've met have certainly been devout, but not to a degree as extreme as a scientologist.

> meat-and-potatoes buddhism

an ironic and somewhat unclear turn of phrase

I get the joke, but not all 'mainstream' (non falun gong) buddhists are vegetarian, google "tibetan buddhism meat eating" for example.

That same campaign seems pretty active in this very HN post. Lots of apologists for the communist regime here, with some not so subtle approvals of racism and genocide.

https://imgur.com/a/HPJgSoq

Speaking of tracking, is there a site that tracks and draws a graph of the position of a stories on the front page, their score and number of comments?

http://hnrankings.info does at least some of what you ask.

I'm sure it has nothing to do with YCs new partnership in China.

I can't speak for anyone else but YC's activities in China have zero to do with how we moderate HN.

FWIW I didn't mean to imply any moderator action, just user flagging. And I know there are many reasons for that, some people don't want political things period, and so on. But just going by sheer quality of this article, I think it's sad that people who don't want to discuss it impede on the ability of those who do want to discuss it. When it went to #1 instantly I thought "this won't last" and made some screenshots... got distracted, looked again and saw it had sunk like a brick.

I made myself a little scraper, I hope it's okay to grab the front page HTML once a minute, or is that too often?

Once a minute is just fine. I think the robots.txt says 2 per minute.

This comment breaks the site guideline against insinuating astroturfing and bad faith, and it adds to nationalistic flamewar. Please don't post like this again. HN has plenty of users with legitimate reason to be on either side of this debate. Both sides need to respect each other, and if they can't, they can't post here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

All: if you really believe you're seeing organized manipulation on Hacker News, that's obviously a bannable offence, and you should alert us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. But please don't insinuate it in comments just to take a swipe in an argument. That's offside, and also mind-numbingly tedious.

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