There is OBVIOUS astroturfing going in this thread. Is it really accomplishing anything to stick our head in the sand?
Comments like this poison the commons badly. The overwhelming majority are pure imagination, born out of humans' inability to listen to others with different perspectives from their own. If you have any evidence for the accusations you're making, send it to hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate, as the guidelines ask. Comments you strongly disagree with are not evidence of anything other than that people in an international forum have very different perspectives.
Really? How deeply have you looked into this? Usernames follow patterns, entire names with only comments defending China from bad PR, voting happening in bursts, etc. The same thing happens on other sites and the same patterns happen with other areas with well known disinformation and social media teams.
The people bringing attention to things like this gave their reasons. Not only that, this is a thread about Chinese propaganda.
I would love to be shown that I'm off base, there is plenty of information that users don't have to that should make these things pretty obvious. Instead of looking into the extremely suspect patterns here though, you just called my comments 'poison' and 'pure imagination'. If you are going to say that, show me that it's true. Why are so many names in this thread named the same way and only used to counter negative stories about China?
These are all hallmarks of disinformation campaigns from other groups and the same patterns happen on other sites. I think that is worth a discussion. A moderator jumping in to say it's 'poisonous' to point this out while giving no information to support that is pretty disgusting.
If you're worried about abuse, you should be doing what the guidelines ask and email hn@ycombinator.com instead of posting off-topic and destructive insinuations in the thread, where the odds are we won't even see them. We don't come close to reading everything here. I looked at some of the accounts with similar names and didn't find anything. That doesn't mean I looked at everything you saw; I probably didn't. If you want your concerns taken seriously, we're happy to look into specific links that you send. Occasionally we do find evidence of abuse, and in such cases we crack down hard. But we need you to follow the site guidelines, and not react to our requests to stop breaking them by breaking them further.
It is indeed poisonous to accuse other users of posting in bad faith, merely because their views seem preposterous to you. Users accusing other users of astroturfing, shilling, meddling, propaganda-ing, foreign-agenting, spying and so on is the most common internet trope there is right now. It's painfully clear that almost all of that is simply made up, and obviously we can't have HN discussions degenerating to that level.
The only approach to dealing with abuse that makes sense is to look for actual evidence. Someone else having an opposing view, even a completely wrong view, isn't evidence of abuse. It's just evidence that people have different views on divisive topics. As for "voting happening in bursts", "hallmarks of disinformation campaigns", and so on, all that kind of thing is notoriously in the eye of the beholder. People mostly see whatever they've primed themselves to see, and that is a function of how strongly they feel about their views: the ones who feel most passionately about a topic are inevitably the ones who see the most convincing 'patterns'. Still, if you're concerned about it, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com with specific links and we'll look into them. We always do. Just please follow the site guidelines from now on.
I've posted about this countless times, and anyone who wants more explanation can consume arbitrarily much of it here: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...