Hacker News Reader

Comment by sergiotapia | Hacker News Reader

Take a look at reddit to see how legions of paid government actors are actively shaping the discussion on mainstream platforms.

View on HN

I don’t buy this. Why would governments pay people to shitpost on Reddit when so many of us gladly do it for free?

Many govs use astroturfing, the CCP in particular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

You only need a small force to build the momentum to get people to shitpost for free. But they do it on every major website. I'm sure the US and other major countries do similar things on VK and Weibo. Only difference is VK and Weibo have more control by the government and our companies believe that they should not be in the business of determining what legally is free speech and what isn't.

There’s a lot of value in paying/blackmailing the moderators. You can clearly certain subreddits, such as r/worldnews, becoming increasingly pro-China. The mod team played a huge role in this, as they have been perma banning people who post a lot of anti-China comments. I’ve for instance had several accounts banned (one simply for sarcastically saying “Thanks China”) - there were also a thread on r/China where plenty of people mentioned they had been banned for similar reasons.

If you follow r/WatchRedditDie then you can see this anti-China censorship on a daily basis.. for instance, this is on the frontpage right now: https://i.imgur.com/RuHpkC5_d.jpg

r/China is very much an echo chamber of its own though. These days the line between criticizing the Chinese government and full blown sinophobia is getting rather thin.

/r/China used to be fairly moderate, well, much more than it is now, but then most of the foreigners that posted from China left (either China, or lost access to reddit, or just lost interest) and now it is just a bunch of CPC hate.

The line between criticizing the CPC and full blown sino-phobia isn't thin at all, it has always remained pretty thick. It is the people crossing the line that have changed.

I can't see anything in that image.

I don’t know about you but I find it very concerning that mods of major subreddits like r/worldnews and r/coronavirus are censoring comments like:

> “Yeah but you can’t trust any of those numbers coming out of China. It’s gotta be way worse than they’re letting on”

I am glad that you can see this text because I can't see anything other than blur.

Pretty sure what they mean is the image is illegibly blurry. It is for me, at any rate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com