Comment by _iyig | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _iyig | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I don’t know what the comment to which you’ve replied said originally, but it’s true that China pays thousands of people to astroturf comments on the Internet. This fact has been established by the international press and also by the Chinese government. Furthermore, people in China aren’t stupid, and many are aware of this phenomenon as it is quite prevalent on the domestic Chinese Internet (Weibo, WeChat, etc).

Are all positive comments about China made by the “wumao army?” Of course not. Are many such comments astroturfed (Edit for clarification: speaking of the broader Internet)? Absolutely. Would it be racist to point out the existence of the large and well-funded groups paid to make such comments? I don’t think so.

Obviously, this isn’t a cudgel to be used against any pro-Chinese government comment or argument. “Wumao” is often employed as a slur. But it is 100% a real phenomenon.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7783640.stm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Water_Army

https://youtu.be/yCnnPf2OnHo

Everyone knows that's a real phenomenon. The issue I was addressing was people's tendency, unfortunately very common, to conflate every Chinese commenter, indeed anyone advocating a Chinese perspective, with CCP astroturfers. That's a serious problem on HN. (I don't think it was colanderman's intention to do this and I'm sure that's why he edited his comment after I replied to it.)

The temptation is strong, when encountering views one dislikes, to regard the person expressing them as disingenuous and pushing some sinister agenda. This is why the site guidelines explicitly say "Please don't impute astroturfing or shillage. That degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried, email us and we'll look at the data."

As geopolitics between China and the West heat up for reasons totally beyond this site, users here need to remember that HN is an international community where all are welcome. Being welcome, among other things, means not being slurred because of your national origin, language, race, and so on. It's nice that HN feels like a small and intimate place, but it's not a living room—when you post here, you're broadcasting to an audience of millions. Many come from very different backgrounds than you or I or any of us does, and they have just as much a right to be here as you and I and any of us does.

The image of "warding off Chinese commenters", which you invoked in your comment upthread, is dismaying and exactly what we don't want here. People need to listen to each other more, not less, when there is distance between them. I don't want to be part of any site that works against that.

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

Perhaps my initial word choice evoked the wrong assumptions. Allow me me rephrase.

I’ve related a dismaying image because the reality is dismaying. One group of (mostly awful and hateful) Internet users “wards off” another by copy-pasting what are to them, for all intents and purposes, magical runes. Scribe them down and the others disappear, banished by some arcane and unseen force. The crazy thing is that these runes may actually work, because the targeted users live under a system of censorship and surveillance unprecedented in its scope, scale, and level of detail.

That’s nuts. It’s utterly fascinating. It’s (the block-text posting) not behavior to be emulated anywhere on HN. It is absolutely dismaying. And as a story, it’s also completely on-topic and within site guidelines.

For context, the comment I edited out was a joke on the "magical runes" aspect. But, thinking it in poor taste to use the Chinese people in general as the butt of the joke, I framed it specifically about astroturfers. In context (and, given that said "runes" don't recognize such a distinction), the joke did (unintentionally) read as an implication that all Chinese are astroturfers, as dang rightfully indicated; hence my redaction.

Yes, I agree.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com