Hacker News Reader

Comment by s_y_n_t_a_x | Hacker News Reader

We're all replying to the article about the Chinese propaganda Twitter has evidence of, do you have evidence of US propaganda to submit into the discussion?

Regardless, I don't see how more wrong it is to call someone a "WuMao" than it is to call them a "trump supporter", they should both be allowed.

View on HN

No I don't have evidence, and I was going to include that I don't have evidence in my comment, but didn't. I was merely stating a possibility in answer to your question. Maybe you should reply to my second paragraph instead.

Edit: I don't know about the intricacies of political correctness, but somehow "trump supporter" feels ok, maybe because it has two words and "supporter" balances "trump". Personally I think "50 cent army" isn't as bad as "WuMao" even though they mean the same thing, go figure.

The essence of my analogy was both are terms that denote the ideology of a person, something they CHOOSE, not are born into like race.

If you believed your government was good, why would you care about a label that targeted you as a supporter for them?

Calling someone a "WuMao" is saying that the person is PAID to support the Chinese government, regardless of their actual opinions, and the target of support isn't in the term itself. Calling someone a "trump supporter" doesn't include the part about getting paid.

There seems to be a negative connotation with getting paid to support something, that you're just in it for the money and don't actually mean it.

Of course there are many nuances to the whole issue of labels which I don't have the knowledge or time to go into.

I agree with the paid part adding an extra amount of bad connotation, that was an oversight in my analogy.

Regardless, being called any form of a shill should not be censored and the root of it's usage comes from a legitimate cause, especially when you're not using the phrase at a specific person, just an event like the GP did.

Using the phrase the way he did, he didn't target anyone but the CCP.

> being called any form of a shill should not be censored

It doesn't need to be censored, but calling people shills just for disagreeing makes a civilized discussion less likely.

The GP didn't call anyone a shill, he called the group of bots shills. I don't see why we're talking about the word he chose to call the bots, not the bots themselves. He didn't attack anyone, he was referencing the high number of CCP bots found by Twitter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com