I was trying to say that you are using a very black and white view yourself. E.g. you haven't witnessed even one person actually "hitting WP to find reasons to hate China for", but outright state that goes for everybody criticizing China.

And I can't say much about "hate pieces" or whatnot just yet, I only just started to track the rank, score, and comment count of HN stories. So far it seems to go both ways, both things critical of China and positive articles can get penalized. I started doing it because I was suspicious, but then I continued doing it because it helps me find interesting things I would otherwise not have seen (at least not on HN).

For example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18595215 https://i.imgur.com/inbQSJe.png

That was never higher than page 6 (the colored bands are pages). And frankly, that's a more interesting and solid article than anything else I saw on HN about that "CRISPR baby", including comments. Oh by the way, did you know the doctor is now missing? If you do, it's not thanks to HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18594814 https://i.imgur.com/0YTEwj4.png

This one had plenty traction, but wasn't allowed to run its course in peace either:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18591521 https://i.imgur.com/jHZMjBf.png

(all graphs go from right to left, dots are in 5 minute intervals, rising line is number of comments, and there green dots mean < 10 comments, yellow < 100, orange < 1000 comments)

To be fair, here's one example I spotted where something got flagged that was not critical of China, and while I can't judge the quality of the article compared to others on the subject, I would say it's a perfectly fine and interesting topic for HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18600499 https://i.imgur.com/GiduxhB.png

It's too early to tell, ask me again in 3-6 months. Manipulation of public discourse, even if it's by said public itself, by groups flagging what they don't like, by definition has a public effect that can be measured. Drawing conclusions as to why something is happening is much harder than to find out whether it's happening, but even that will take time. Though the end result will probably be "it's a mess, all sorts of fuckery going on, impossible to tell where one sort of fuckery ends and the next one begins". I do not envy the moderators of this site, that's for sure. But it'll make pretty graphs so there's that.