It certainly is a propaganda tool. I don't have concrete proof just yet, but I suspect subs like /r/blackpeopletwitter are being heavily manipulated. Comments deleted en mass and rabid vote manipulation are a regular occurrence.
Interesting tidbit is that the Falun Dafa believe their rituals improve their organs so they have the most desirable organs to have harvested.
I too have noticed more pro-China voices on worldnews, but I've monitored and tagged via redditprotools and from my observation these pro-China regulars have been participating for a while, they just used to be more drowned out (suppressed by downvotes) by relatively more dominant anti-China voice. For example, the amount of anti-China users who also actively posted in /r/hongkong has dramatically reduced - hundreds of thousands of low effort HK virtue signallers lost interest. The conversation is balanced now or returned to pre HK drama / post tradewar balance, where pro-China views occasionally get positive reception, whereas before they'd be lucky to be downvoted but controversial.
There's still handful of anti-China HKers/TWers making substantive posts, but mostly indian nationalists or generic anti-China-lifers shitposting now. Bluntly, most anti-China voices are low-effort, ignorant haters with poor boilerplate China-bad rhetoric. Pro-China voices are typically Chinese national, or diaspora or adjacent, they have actual experience and knowledge on Chinese related issues from Chinese perspective. At the end of the day /r/50k sino users can't out astroturf 500k /r/hongkong, 200k /r/china and comparably numerous india nationalist. But they do have better rhetoric and are more invested in the debate compared to lol chinabad tier commentary turned persecution complexes because their debunked GFW banned words copypasta didn't cost 50c shills social credit points. Being anti-China isn't immunity from being unhinged.
For anyone unfamiliar with r/sino:
They believe the Tienanmen Square massacre was justified
They believe the Uighur concentration camps are justified
They believe an invasion of Taiwan is righteous, and there is generally a lot of extreme vitriol directed at Taiwan and the Taiwanese
They believe in and spread a lot of misinformation concerning the HK protests, and there is generally a lot of vitriol aimed at Hong Kongers
You are banned if you question the CCP at all, with a most ridiculous ban message.
They are just as bad as r/t_d was.
Being anti-ccp is also not being an ignorant hater. Looking at their actions, it is a pretty reasonable stance.
Also, should be of note to other HN users, there is a reddit account with the name "dirtyid" which has a pro-CCP bias and a very strong anti HK democracy stance.
Sino's an unfortunate echochamber because 50k pro-China voices can't withstand brigading of vastly numerous anti-China voices. It's understandable to adopt siege mentality, plenty of other places soft/hard ban pro-China opinion. Also you list a bunch of pro China views that are consistent with pro-China interests like... that's a problem? Regardless, I don't care much for Sino, at minimum they do good counter-propaganda work. I'm more partial to china_irl which is gated by Chinese fluency.
https://www.themarysue.com/reddit-fake-account-origins/
"...when Reddit was first started, it was populated almost entirely with content submitted by fake users."
Around the time of Cesar Sayoc's, the "MAGABomber"[1], mail bomb campaign, even Wikipedia articles like "Terrorism in the United States"[2] were banned in comments, and posts that contained it would have the AutoModerator shadowban the comment instantly.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAGA_Bomber
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States