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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

Is there a reason this was posted today?

Probably OP trying to "test" if HN is controlled by China.

Some weird logic I've seen recently where if you post something about China being bad, and it gets deleted, then that place is "tarnished".

I mean if everything bad about one country gets deleted, but this treatment is not given to other countries, I would call that a problem. Not saying that’s where HN is at at all.

It's plausible that individual users are simply downvoting for not finding it interesting: information that isn't new, preaching to the choir, etc.

While it's possible, I'd be very skeptical that YC/admins are intentionally silencing anti-China messaging; I've certainly seen many posts critical of CCP. It certainly seems plausible that the Chinese state has agents and/or bots that nudge online content in accordance with the party line; if so, I'd be curious to know to what extent HN is on their radar, compared with more highly-trafficked sites like Reddit.

Yes, I don't think HN leadership is pro-CCP. However, I do think there is some kind of CCP influence at work. Whether it is normal HN participants that are more understanding of CCP, and dislike the blanket dismissal they get, or there are actual CCP agents at work, is unclear to me. It is clear there is dislike of the outright criticism that CCP gets. My comments critical of the CCP get many more downvotes than even I am used to getting.

I also think that HN mods should have access to enough user data to be able to run some tests and see if particular accounts are more targeted towards CCP critical posts and comments than would be expected by a normal HN reader.

There are certain groups and entities that have packs of rabid fanboys who mass-downvote critical comments but in my experience China and Chinese people are not one of those groups of HN. There also tends to be a lot more hard evidence when a company genuinely tows the CCP line like Tiktok, and again there's no such thing for HN.

I have received more downvotes than normal for crticising the CCP. Whether that is due to a pro CCP bias or not is up for debate. I talked with dang (mod), and he says it is due to the thread being high profile and contentious, not due to a sitewide pro-CCP bias. Seems like a plausible counter argument.

Not the OP, but it's possible that the reason was that (according to Wikipedia) the protests began on April 15 1989, so the anniversary was pretty recently.

It's been used as a comparison with some photos of the nurses counter-protesting the stay-at-home protests on some social media sites.

I'm not suggesting they are comparable, just that one evoked images of the other. Might be why it's being posted?

I've been thinking about it a lot lately, in the context of how much to trust the Chinese government's reporting of fatalities.

I think a good rule of thumb is that if the official number is n, the true number is something in the neighborhood of n to the nth power

In these strange times I'm seeing more people question our current setup (Capitalism/Democracy) and wonder about how we should make it better when we eventually re-open. With that in mind, I'm seeing more and more "Socialism/Communism = bad" posts all across the internet.

Even the videos posted yesterday of nurses in Denver blocking protesters showed a lady screaming "If you want communism, go to China!!"

> lady screaming "If you want communism, go to China!!"

the lady was making a very misleading claim. I think the only country with something resembling communism left is NK and probably Cuba.

Among the other things Communism assumes absence of social classes, money and the state. Nothing ever came anywhere close to accomplishing it.

"If you want communism, go to China!!" - They should be yelling it to people who have concocted communism state for large companies/industries. Take airlines for example - they're getting this giant bailout at taxpayer's expense. Those were running profit for the last 10 years and managed to save nothing for the rainy days. Now they're crying and want taxpayers to bail them out.

It's 4/20 so I guess we should expect all kinds of things

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