Or there are agents from those places with paid motives to post those things. I've noticed whenever a China topic comes up, there are a suspicious number of apologist/whataboutist comments beyond even the normal HN-kneejerk-contrarianism.
We've asked you before not to do this. It's against the site guidelines. We eventually ban accounts that keep breaking the site guidelines after we've repeatedly asked them to stop. Please stop.
I've looked at this data extensively. The truth, based on all the data I've looked at, is simply that users disagree. If you want to advocate for some other interpretation, but you need at least a scrap of actual evidence—something objective to go on. Otherwise this is just fantasy, and the site guidelines explicitly ask people to omit their sinister fantasies about other commenters being astroturfers, shills, spies and whatnot, because they poison discussion badly.
Users posting differing views does not count as evidence, and neither does imagination based on things like time zones.
Because it's an intellectually lazy assertion that's never made with any sort of backing evidence and forstalls debate by preemptively painting any opinion you don't agree with as the work of paid shills.
China sending wumao onto Hacker News would go against the vast majority of precedent we've been able to establish about Chinese disinformation campaigns. Overwhelmingly, active Chinese disinformation is produced in Chinese for a ethnic Chinese overseas audience with English only ever being provided as an afterthought.
The Chinese strategy for shaping English debate about China has always involved economic punishment for powerful entities that broadcast "unacceptable" opinions like the NBA with HK or US airlines labelling Taiwan as a country on their websites. However, such pressures scale directly to the amount of financial stakes an entity has in China which means it has effectively no power in anonymous social forums.
This can be evidenced by issues such as Hong Kong where, not only was Western opinion not receptive to the Chinese arguments on the issue, there wasn't even any form of broad awareness of what the Chinese arguments even were. To the extent that the Chinese narrative even made it over to the West (such as claims that the protestors were being paid by the CIA), they were overwhelmingly conveyed via Western media that only described them in order to debunk them.
Like so much other disinformation about China, the whole wumao conspiracy is a bunch of lazy nonsense that is spewed by people with no real knowledge of China nor a desire for accuracy and thus gets reflexively downvoted on HN by people who are sick of lazy, bad arguments made against China when there are so many legitimate, good arguments that fail to be made because they don't fit neatly into a narrative.
Yeah, this is a big problem. I just searched "uighur" on comments... Some pretty appalling stuff, including stuff that seems to justify their genocide by accusing them of terrorism. Clearly something is wrong. Hopefully @dang will look at this at some point. We make a sport of busting FBs chops over policing disinfo, etc. And it looks like there are brazen actors on HN doing worse and we're ignoring it.
