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To answer your "Why the downvotes?" question, two possibilities occur to me:

1) They may be folk concerned with the justice of the situation invested enough in this issue that they're reacting to your question with something like "Are you living under a rock?".

2) There may be folk invested enough in the mainland Chinese government's position that they take issue simply with the existence of these statements, and rather than engage with the substance of them, simply try to make them go away.

Whether either of these are a fair reaction is a different discussion.

I have read a ton of articles about the subject and the information I mentioned never came up. I think it’s not widely known. I checked with my wife and a friend just now, who both has followed the story over time, and they didn’t know those details either. I’m not blaming the media, I’m trying to highlight something I suspect isn’t widely known

You're correct that the US MSM has poor coverage on China because of pressure from the CCP, ad placements from the CCP, and journo-leftist solidarity.

To learn more, you can watch the NTD media Youtube channels, especially China Uncensored and Crossroads. NTD is affiliated with Falun Gong, so they don't pull any punches - their reporters are based in the US, but still get death threats from the CCP.

https://www.youtube.com/user/NTDChinaUncensored

Also, there's a few vlog channels like serpentza/ADVChina that provide more background from people who lived in China long-term. Note these vloggers have all been forced to leave China in the past 2 years by the CCP, or face imprisonment.

https://www.youtube.com/user/serpentza

The reality is that most people can't handle the truth about what the CCP is doing - who wants to study the horrors of a 2021 version of Auschwitz?

For example:

- women are in the camps to disrupt their reproductive cycle (live births are down 90%)

- the camps are organ harvesting pools. China's hospital system is funded by organ medical tourists and organ exports.

So ... how much do you really want to know?

This would be my guess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

There's often wild voting in China related comment threads.

Every time this post got to +1, it got hammered to -2 within seconds until a few minutes ago. This happened every few minutes for the last hour until the story left the front page, and now it’s +9 and there are no downvotes to be seen. I know we’re not supposed to talk about downvotes, but I think I maybe just got suppressed. It was really, really weird watching it. Is it possible to report it for investigation? I don’t care about my karma or even being told the results of the investigation, but I’d love it if a mod looked into this

I guess they could look into it but it's going to be tricky to do much and China politics isn't really HNs specialist area. Maybe it's easier to put up with weird downvotes on such things?

I made comments critical of this institute's credibility and not only they were immediately downvoted but people then went through my comments history and downvoted all my previous comments they could.

Clearly your 50 cent party works both ways.

Now I think it's insulting to suggest that commenters who dissent are paid by someone as if there was an obvious correct opinion and any other was obviously faked, but there is also a general problem with allowing things like 'downvotes' because they are always weaponised and they kill discussion. Unfortunately the same goes with flagging as that can automatically suppress a comment.

I looked at your comment history and it’s true, your previous posts did get attacked with downvotes. That’s lousy, it isn’t the right way to challenge somebody

I wonder how that works. I guess one guy with multiple accounts?

Why the flood of downvotes? Are the quotes offending people? They are directly from the executive summary of the report

It seems you are Just Asking Questions about a subject whose answers are readily available in a Wikipedia Article with 300 citations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide

Nobody but you knows where you get your information from, but it would help if you showed some effort of why you think it has not been reported before (when it has).

You’re doubting the source of my quotes and saying I shouldn’t have posted them if there is already online documentation on it?

No, from my perspective this is why you get down-voted:

> I had not heard of any of this before today. The news only talked about internment, surveillance, and forced labour.

You seem to lay blame on the media for not telling you about this when it has previously been reported. For example BBC has consistently reported on this, so you apparently do not read BBC or check Wikipedia when a new subject arises where you find something you have not heard about before.

> China forcing birth control on Uighurs to suppress population, report says > https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-53220713 BBC 2020

> China Muslims: Xinjiang schools used to separate children from families > https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-48825090 BBC 2019

It is medias job to report stuff, but it is also our job to actually read it and not blame media when we fail to do so.

I’m not blaming anyone, I’m saying I’m surprised and that it’s new information for me. Stop mind reading

Serious question here. How could I attempt to answer your questions without at least attempting to be emphatic to where you are coming from? Does it not require a modicum of "walking in your shoes" and trying to see things from your perspective?

It just looks like you are taking an antagonistic stance by saying "Stop mind reading" to my attempts at contributing to answering your question here.

(by the way, I see my own points go down negative here, just like yours so I also wonder)

To clarify the OP Just Asking Questions[1] is a slimey rhetorical tool that's meant to cast doubt on the statements it's like saying "The Nazis ran concentration camps? Oh I haven't heard anything about that from the papers I read." that statement is subtly (or not) implying uncertainty in the veracity of the existence of concentration camps by pointing out that they aren't being universally decried.

I think that reading your original comment as JAQ is a bit of a bad faith action, but this is also a topic that produces a lot of vitriol on both sides so I can see why the commenter read it in such a manner.

1. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions

Frankly, this thread is filled with stuff that's getting downvoted for no reason, and some really off-topic comments.

I think it might be partially due to the fact that while none of your quotes are inaccurate you didn't really add anything to the quotes. I didn't downvote your comment as it's a pretty reasonable statement that seems to have been made in good faith but comments should add to and build on the contents of the article and, while many people don't RTFA here the assumption is that folks should be doing so. So just reposting a snippet of the article without any commentary or analysis isn't really adding anything to the discussion.

HN does have some very good posting guidelines if you're unfamiliar: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The vast majority of people don’t actually read the articles that get posted. I would have appreciated having a few lines highlighted for myself because after reading dozens of articles about this, this information still came as surprising

I think that's quite a fair stance - I don't particularly appreciate snippeting without commentary so it's not something I'd upvote but also not something I'm going to downvote.

Threads like this aren't going to reach the top of HN very often (or in my experience, other social networking sites either), they get flagged and downvoted to oblivion. HN policy prohibits me from speculating why, but you can fill in the blanks.

There have been multiple media reports, but it's reasonable you might not have run into them outside of the context of "the PRC is vaguely doing something bad to Uyghurs". But yeah, the reality of what's going on is kind of horrifying, and I think the reaction from other nations (including the US) has been underwhelming.

I can also fill out the blanks without violating HN policy. Nobody wants political controversity on their site because it attracts a lot of related problems. It is obiviously part of the spiral of silence and therefore I don't like it much, but one can kind of understand why.

China is the sole exception for our "no politics, only tech" rule.

They are a unique evil that must be destroyed.

I understand it but reject it.

If it's a problem for the platform owners, I'll be even more political. Screw them.

China is the sole exception to hackernews's "no politics, only tech talk" rule.

They are a unique evil that must be destroyed.

That isn't really the rule. They say

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting...

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon...

I guess a Uyghur genocide could qualify as something like an 'interesting new phenomenon' though I wouldn't normally describe it that way.

> China has simultaneously pursued a dual systematic strategy of forcibly sterilizing Uyghur women of childbearing age and interning Uyghur men of child-bearing years,

I hadn't heard about this. I wonder if these are people who have already had more than two kids and this is China taking actions in compliance with their two-child policy, or whether they are sterilizing people who have had two or fewer.

Regardless, I doubt the policy is being enforced equally as stringently among Han Chinese.