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Reddit Has Become a Battleground of Alleged Chinese Trolls

(www.buzzfeednews.com)
142 points mzs | 6 comments | 15 Mar 19 15:33 UTC | HN request time: 0.881s | source | bottom
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zachguo ◴[15 Mar 19 16:54 UTC] No.19401562[source]▶
The number of gov-backed trolls is overestimated. Majority of those are simply real people using VPNs. It may sound hard to believe, but think twice about the huge size of population and high rate of Internet penetration.

Chinese population is largely nationalistic and conservative, and some hawkish groups are very active online. There is a joke that Great Firewall is not for controlling Chinese people but protecting Westerners from Chinese netizens.

replies(1): >>19401879 #
908087[dead post] ◴[15 Mar 19 17:19 UTC] No.19401879[source]▶
Your post history is pretty much exactly what I was expecting it to be after reading this.
1. ggggtez ◴[15 Mar 19 17:47 UTC] No.19402203[source]▶
Thanks for mentioning it. It's the kind of thing that everyone suspects, but reminding people that the history is right there is helpful.

The above user (zackguo) comments seemingly exclusively on China, including ... "Results won't change even if [Uyghurs] are able to participate". Yikes!

replies(1): >>19402326 #
2. zachguo ◴[15 Mar 19 17:55 UTC] No.19402326[source]▶
I'm bewildered that you are upset about the post, because I genuinely think it's a sound inference if you do the math...
replies(1): >>19402575 #
3. ggggtez ◴[15 Mar 19 18:17 UTC] No.19402575[source]▶
In Germany, there is only about 212k Chinese people. Since that's less than 1% of the German population, I guess they should just throw them all in jail since their opinions don't matter (mathematically, of course).
replies(3): >>19402830 #>>19405083 #>>19406067 #
4. zachguo ◴[15 Mar 19 18:41 UTC] No.19402830{3}[source]▶
"throw them all in jail" is your sensationalized interpretation, which BTW is what I hate to see on HN. I was just talking about the poll results would not change.
5. yorwba ◴[15 Mar 19 22:55 UTC] No.19405083{3}[source]▶
In the event that Germany indeed imprisoned all its Chinese people and a survey found that average life satisfaction was still pretty high, whether the opinion of those people was included in the survey wouldn't change the result. That doesn't mean that minorities don't matter, just that averages don't tell you anything about their situation. Sometimes you need to know the context of a statement to understand it.
6. echaozh ◴[16 Mar 19 02:37 UTC] No.19406067{3}[source]▶
Yeah, Germans did something similar in the past, right? And those in jail, or something similar, their opinions didn't actually matter, did they? /s