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Information operations directed at Hong Kong

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1116 points whatok | 1 comments | 19 Aug 19 18:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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groundlogic ◴[19 Aug 19 18:58 UTC] No.20740667[source]▶
I don't think HN is immune to these kinds of CCP ops.
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vkou ◴[19 Aug 19 19:05 UTC] No.20740740[source]▶
The problem is that calling someone a paid, or unpaid shill on HN is unproductive.

There's a world of difference (But little way for a third party to tell apart) between:

A paid shill.

An unpaid troll.

Someone who genuinely believes what they are posting, because they do not have the same information you do.

Someone who genuinely believes what they are posting, despite having the same information as you, because they prioritise different bits of that information differently. That is called a 'political opinion'.

For reference, I have been called a CCP shill at least once. I have never been to China, I have no affiliation with the CCP, I am not trolling, and I have not received a penny for posting nonsense here.

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1. lucb1e ◴[19 Aug 19 21:55 UTC] No.20742182[source]▶
The difference between a paid person and an unpaid person may not be so large. I heard from someone who looked into the anti-vax accounts on Facebook (in ~2013, when the comments on HN about this news would have been about preserving free speech on Twitter rather than good on them for doing this) that she found some people believed it so strongly that they wrote bots to respond to public messages that use certain keywords. These weren't government sockpuppets, they were concerned citizens.

I'm pretty sure this was the podcast where I heard that: https://samharris.org/podcasts/145-information-war/ (Relatively near the beginning of where the guest comes into the podcast, if I remember correctly.)