I wonder how many accounts the chinese state maintains on hackernews to upvote/downvote post and comments. It's an easy way to influence the public opinion and hard to expose.
I am not pro-Chinese, I am French with no ties to China. But I have downvoted/flagged anti-China posts and comments a few times.
There is an anti-China sentiment in the US that just feels wrong, and it shows on HN. Every time something good is said about the Chinese state, or even if it is "not that bad", it is Chinese propaganda. Every time someone says that China is evil, it is the truth, as if US propaganda couldn't exist. I am not saying that China is good, just that it is one-sided enough to raise a few red flags (pun not intended).
So, I downvote, most of it isn't interesting from a tech perspective anyways. It what I think of that submission. In fact, I am only here because I was curious about what "deep blue" meant (for me it meant IBM).
You are free to disagree with me, here I am just telling you that there is at least one person who has nothing to do with the Chinese state and dislike anti-China content.
You could even argue that whenever China does something positive that's note-worthy then it has a much higher chance to be promoted multiple times (e.g. 3/5 are about the Mars rover, all within a month) and less chance that it will be flagged (or at least remain flagged).
I think it's safe to assume the majority of HN support democracy, privacy, freedom of speech & press, and similar civil liberties that China have cracked heavily down upon and not just within their own borders. When you look at what they have done in the past few years with Xinjiang, Hong Kong, SARS2, Taiwan, etc. then it's only natural that there will be a lot of negative coverage, and this negative coverage is understandably and deservedly greater than the positive coverage. If USA or any other country banned under-18s from playing games for more than three hours/week then it would receive the same amount of coverage. Same thing goes for for Swiss Ph.D student’s dismissal, Steam being banned, cryptocurrency deals becoming illegal, blocking Wikimedia from entering World Intellectual Property Organization and every other story you might consider "anti-China". My submission doesn't even mention China so people are not blindly upvoting it because it's "anti-China", but more likely because it's interesting to see proof that one of the largest Asian YouTube channels (which cover a lot more than just China) is planting interviewees to push a certain agenda (keep in mind the channel put a lot of emphasis towards presenting themselves as being 'authentic' and sharing views of random and regular people they meet on the streets).
Not many, I think. I usually look at the new section of HN and check what has been flagged unreasonably. Anti-chinese post are rarely flagged multiple times.
My opinion is that there are honest pro-chinese people on HN, most likely chinese working in the US who don't plan to stay for life and feel patriotic enough to protect the fatherland on internet forums.
Agree, just I'm lacking the evidence. Plus, we might overrate the importance of HN for the CCP. Most of their thought control is for internal use. The external influence is usually based on money and access to the chinese market, not by thrall farms. Exceptions apply to social media, but I think that they concentrate on the large platforms like FB, Twitter and Youtube.
This is almost certainly it. HN is first and foremost a technology website and its userbase is tiny in the grand scheme of things. I get that we like to think we're the center of the universe, but is it so inconceivable that even if the CCP knew we existed, it wouldn't care?
And also non-Chinese people that support the PRC, like myself. Many of us are communists, but not all.
The trend on HN is indeed quite clearly anti-China and anti-communist, so Chinese propaganda is definitely less successful than that of the US and Western Europe.
I'm not a communist (I'm not an ML(M), to be specific) but I do have a self-destructive compulsion to put up tepid contextual defenses of western adversary states like China, Russia, and Iran. I don't think they're universally wonderful places with perfect benevolent rulers, but the way most people here are completely delusional about these countries, from history to present conditions and motivations, can be frustrating. It's a soft (and sometimes hard) chauvinism which is a little sad coming from a group that likes to think of itself as fair and critical thinkers.
Also the implicit dehumanization ("they have no culture") of the people who live in these places can be really disgusting.
You are one public forum. People can disagree with your messages just as you can disagree with others. If you don't want pushback write a blog and disable comments.
There is a difference between "nobody should be allowed to disagree with me" and "it's regrettable that most people hold what I consider to be very regressive positions on this topic." I don't think anyone is expressing the former.
Surely I can critique the collective behaviour of a particular public forum without excluding myself from it? Different fora differ drastically in behaviour, after all.
I am pro Chinese myself, I’m not getting paid by anybody, and I can assure you that posting pro Chinese comments here gets them flagged pretty quickly. But I’m not sure if it is because people don’t like those opinions or because they think it’s unlikely anybody can be pro Chinese so they automatically think you are a propaganda account. It could very well be either, based on my past experiences posting comments that go against the “allowed” politics of the site.
