Information operations directed at Hong Kong

Good on Twitter and Facebook.

On top of blocking thousands of websites (which includes Facebook, Google, Twitter) China's government employs thousands of government employees just to purge even the most mild criticism of the CCP on Weibo [1]. They also employ tens of thousands to export their propaganda overseas, using sock puppet accounts to push their worldview[2]. And their worldview is fiercely anti-democratic.

The Internet cannot remain free if we allow governments to use their power to control narratives and suppress the truth. US-based Social media companies are not ideal judges, but at least they publish their methodology and allow public criticism of their platforms.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sina_Weibo#Censorship [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

Even here on Hacker News, a week or so ago I saw someone being chided for “breaking the HN guidelines” by calling out a sock puppet. When I looked at the comment history of the account doing the chiding, all of its comments were on China related articles, taking a pro-China view.

I mostly only comment on China related articles, with a pro-China view. Sometimes I find it necessary to comment because it is rare to see pro-China comment here. I am definitely not state-sponsored, I might be brainwashed in your opinion, but definitely not getting paid for those comments, and those comments are from the bottom of my heart :)

I don't really like to read political posts on Hacker News, I am mostly interested in technology, but those posts with China in their title are just a click bait for me because I knew they are probably biased.

Edit: yeah, a downvote when I am just expressing myself. you want me to shut up and leave, right?

I believe you, but it's against the site guidelines to use HN primarily for political battle (which includes nationalistic arguments), and it seems you have been doing so exclusively. We ban accounts for that, not because we think they're insincere, but because political flames will take over the entire site if we let them, and there's a big difference between accounts that use HN this way and accounts that use HN as intended.

The way to fix this is to use HN as intended, which means posting on an diverse range of topics for reasons of intellectual curiosity. Would you please do that instead?

More explanation here: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html