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Comment by milofeynman | Hacker News Reader

There is an active Chinese propaganda campaign on HackerNews. New account, upvoted to the top despite all comments disagreeing with them. I've noticed this over the past several months. This example perfectly encapsulates it. I have been avoiding talking about it because it's part of the rules to bring up astroturfing etc. but this comment was too much. You think the people running hackernews have time to fight a disinformation campaign? Twitter, reddit, facebook, etc can't, I can't imagine the minor resources that go into HN even have a chance.

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Please "remember that the community is divided on divisive topics and that the person disagreeing with you is probably not a spy, but just someone who disagrees with you." [1]

Also, specifically about astroturfing: "[T]he overwhelming majority of the insinuations and accusations [of astroturfing] that people come up with about it lead to precisely nothing when we investigate. It's like flipping a coin and having it come up tails a thousand times in a row: you start to look for simpler explanations, and there are clear, simple explanations for why this might be." [2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23835613

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23837456

I've spent countless hours looking into these things. I've seen no evidence for what you're saying.

I'm not saying that to pick an argument—it's just the factual situation. Meanwhile, there's enormous evidence that people imagine things like astroturfing, shillage, foreign agents, etc., based on what they believe they see in internet threads. That's why the site guidelines ask you not to post such insinuations unless you have something objective to go on. The appearance of a comment getting upvoted doesn't count—that's simply an indication that people have different views.

In addition to the links Confiks posted, I suggest https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... And there are hundreds of past explanations, going back many years, at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Then why do I regularly see an anti-west china post pushed to the top (without even much to say). Typically it gets pushed out later but odd how often that happens.

Why does anything critical of china get met with downvotes rather than responses? - I've pointed this out before.

Why, if I try to argue with pro-china people does a pattern of rebuffing or denial occur followed by, when pushed into a corner, posting some nebululosty with little meaningful content followed by them going quiet?

If this is not government sponsored shilling, there are a bunch of people who are quite willing to behave against HN rules but don't get banned in a hurry - should I be flagging these more or something?

I have no problem with people being pro-china, it's a question of honesty.

You're probably running into the notice-dislike bias: you (not you personally, of course, but all of us) are more likely to notice the things you dislike and weight them more heavily, whereupon they become your dominant image of the site. People with the opposite preferences have the opposite image, I guarantee you.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Quite possibly. Or not. So how do we find out?

We already find out a lot from the presence of exactly the opposite complaints by the opposite side. This happens on every single divisive topic. Moreover the feelings people have about their perceptions, the language they use to express them and so on, are identical, even when they're claiming opposite things.

This shows that these perceptions are not objective. That's the main point. Why such perceptions routinely arise, and why people are so intensely convinced of them, is an interesting question but a secondary one.

> exactly the opposite complaints by the opposite side > This happens reliably, even universally, on every single divisive topic > the language they use to express them and so on, are identical

I just don't see, or at least recognise, this type of behaviour elsewhere. See a post on guns or free speech and the flames that erupt amongst USAians, they have a very different character to the ones about china.

> This shows that these perceptions are not objective

Inevitably, but that does not in itself eliminate their being actual differences, and these being of a nature different from other flames ie. being backed not by ultranationalistic citizens of some country, but by a concerted centralised interference.

So again, how do we determine this, or disprove it, in an empirical way?

Is it so strange to think that not everyone buys into the anti-China propaganda that's relatively recently popped up in US media? It's only in the last few years that you see every other person on the internet go on a frenzy about China and it's not too crazy to think that there will be people skeptical of this frenzy.

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