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Comment by the_af | Hacker News Reader

> Did the article imply somewhere that China is unique in it's censorship?

I don't think it implies that, but to be honest, the general implication here on HN is that China is the current Big Bad and everything they do is uniquely bad. It's not spelled out, exactly, but that's how I read many comments here.

It may be just me, but that' s the vibe I get from HN in relation to China.

> But the regularity with which this pattern repeats feels so much like state sponsored astroturfing I'm just tired of it.

I think this is unfair. I also don't think you truly think people asking about US behavior here are Chinese agents. That's just silly. China hasn't infiltrated HN.

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> I also don't think you truly think people asking about US behavior here are Chinese agents.

Maybe my thinking is misguided, but this is exactly what I think. China has an abundance of labor and a strong appetite to perform just such tasks.

> That's just silly. China hasn't infiltrated HN.

It's not like you have to "infiltrate" anything here, it's an open forum and China would need to do little more than pay 2 people to take rotating shifts and they have essentially full coverage to counter any content critical of the country.

Since the readership of HN likely holds much more power than the average American, I'd think China silly to not make that investment.

Do you also believe people shilling for US here are government agents?

Of course you don’t. You hadn’t been indoctrinated _that_ way.

> That's just silly. China hasn't infiltrated HN.

This kind of assumption is naive (no offense) and reminds me of the denialism regarding Russian disinformation. You do not need to "infiltrate" the site with "agents". It's fairly easy to write a script checking the front page for mentions of China and manually checking the thread to possibly respond with a comment. Before dismissing concerns like this as conspiratorial or silly, you should do some research on the topic:

[1] https://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/50c.pdf?m=146479...

[2] https://www.info-res.org/post/revealed-coordinated-attempt-t...

[3] https://www.techdirt.com/2021/12/15/how-china-uses-western-i...

[4] https://www.state.gov/prc-efforts-to-manipulate-global-publi...

[5] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/05/dozens-of-fake-news-websites...

[6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/28/china-m...

[7] https://www.lawfareblog.com/understanding-pro-china-propagan...

[8] https://mediamanipulation.org/case-studies/astroturfing-how-...

> the general implication here on HN is that China is the current Big Bad and everything they do is uniquely bad

The CCP is hostile to many Western values (e.g. free speech) and they are a primary geopolitical antagonist to the U.S. It's not unreasonable for a mostly U.S. user base to see the worst in CCP behavior or be biased against the CCP.

People arguing here about US foreign policy or censorship are neither bots nor Chinese agents. I'm not naive in believing this.

> The CCP is hostile to many Western values (e.g. free speech) and they are a primary geopolitical antagonist to the U.S. It's not unreasonable for a mostly U.S. user base to see the worst in CCP behavior or be biased against the CCP.

That's neither here nor there. This is what I'm actually replying to:

> Did the article imply somewhere that China is unique in it's censorship?

And my answer is: maybe not the article itself, but everything that gets said here on HN (where the article got quoted) has that implication. In fact, your very answer has that explicit implication! So you are proving my point.

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