Hacker News Reader

Comment by hktruth | Hacker News Reader

Throwaway account to talk about Hong Kong.

Look at the downvotes I'm getting.

Fair enough - sorry to be personal.

Personally I am very skeptical of the western media coverage of the Hong Kong demonstrations. I do not think for a minute that it has the popular support now that it had earlier (2 mios in the streets etc.).

And a lot of the pro-China support online gets categorised as bots or Chinese agents because it is in broken English and comes from the same few vpn ip-addresses.

But it is quite real.

Is the distinction between propaganda spread by a bot and propaganda spread by a human that was indoctrinated by propaganda important anymore?

I think society should accept "bot" as a term for any human or automated entity who uncritically 'retweets' propaganda.

In truth, I find that most Westerners have a much more distorted view of China than Chinese people do. That may seem strange and obvious to say, but there are so many Westerners who know next to nothing about China, yet confidently talk about Chinese people being brainwashed. The thing is, those "brainwashed" people have a much better informed and more nuanced view of China. The people calling them "brainwashed" are typically just regurgitating whatever they read in the newspaper this morning, which is usually sensationalized (imagine a non-American's impression of the US being formed entirely by news accounts of mass shootings).

My previous comment was mostly based on my personal experiences discussing US politics online - and seeing people on both sides retweet ideas that are not logically consistent but make them feel good about their team. I'm sure this common in most political discussions, but I'm not well versed in Chinese politics personally.

So any opinion different than yours is automatically "propaganda"?

Throwaway accounts get throwaway respect.

Why are you "acting" indignant? you created a throwaway for this exact purpose.

("Acting", because it's funny to think about robots acting)

Turing test in 3..2..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com