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Comment by okasaki | Hacker News Reader

We're not supposed to question it, but in this case it seems salient: your account was created just to post this and it's got a lot of upvotes for something seemingly banal.

Is this part of a competing "diplomatic program"?

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No, it's not salient at all. It's a research report from the University of Oxford:

https://demtech.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/127/20...

If you want to criticize something, criticize that. We can do without baseless accusations.

First, there point was that this post seems to engage in similar tactics. The report existing doesn't mean this isn't some counter information campaign.

Second, the post links to an article about that report, and though the article mentions 189 twitter accounts the report only lists 62. Similarly, they don't show close to the 62000 tweets mentioned in the article from what I could see.

1) The point is bogus. The upvote trajectory is typical for a HN frontpage submission. If you think there's an upvote ring, the appropriate behavior is to message moderators. The expected value of throwing around a random accusation without proof is zero.

2) I don't know where they took the 189 from, but the other numbers match what the report says. It could be that the article is garbage, but that is a very minor point. It's referencing research from a reputable institution, if you want to criticize the research or methodology, do so upstream.

1 is a fair criticism of that post. Posting the report isn't.

>It could be that the article is garbage, but that is a very minor point. It's referencing research from a reputable institution, if you want to criticize the research or methodology, do so upstream.

It's not a minor point, the article was what is posted here for discussion. No matter how reliable the report is the article may be suspect.

I figured out how they got the 98000 too, it's the total number of interactions the Ambassadors tweets got. Using that number in the bullet point when the report claims well under half of them were part of the campaign is intentionally misleading.

> The report existing doesn't mean this isn't some counter information campaign

But it uses the name/rep of an actual university, and presumably is data is open for peer review? a "counter information" campaign that fights falsehood with truth is fine in my book. I'd call that an "awareness campaign".

> this post seems to engage in similar tactics

In what sense?

You are only looking at the report. As a comparison, the report is like the Ambassador's tweet, though it may be biased it's unlikely to be part of any disinformation campaign. The article and the article being posted here are like the bot retweets and replies, taking one legitimate piece of information and both distorting it and spreading it wider than it normally would go.

This. Even the website bitterwind just looks like an attack site against China. It seems to just have “articles” that just say negative things about China. This is just seems to be another play in an influence campaign.

... or just really nothing good happening on the religion side of China.

And Amnesty International rarely publishes good new either.

A lot of people are concerned about their online history based on what is happening in Hong Kong with people being arrested and charged for things they said in the past.

Once you set foot in China and now even Hong Kong, all bets are off.

Remember when Wikileaks revealed the US has plans for cyberattacks that would be blamed on another country?

These days it's China this, China that. I bet it's West this, West that in China, too.

Everyone's been so polarized on this, this is exactly what warmongers in power want.

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