Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

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The pro-china movement on HN is extremely strong. It's fun to look at all the pro-China commenters, and then look through the account history for how long their account has existed, the kind of articles they submit and their comments.

It couldn't be more obvious.

Translation: "Let me dismiss and trivialize that which I'm too scared to admit might be true." Good luck keeping on pretending the opinions of a large chunk of the world don't exist, don't make sense or don't matter.

Or maybe it's you who needs to expand your mind, show a bit of empathy and try to understand the other side?

Sure, I guess it's easier to pretend the other side doesn't really exist, than to come to understand it. Keep arrogant and ignorant at your own peril. But I guess it's easier to close your mind and feel better by pretending it's wrong, than to try to know the rest of the world?

Thanks for proving my point so succinctly!

For the record I'm not complaining about "genuine" Chinese people expressing their opinions. As you said, it's important they have a voice, and we should listen.

What I'm pointing out is the increasing number of accounts that are very, very obviously paid or otherwise government controlled to influence opinions on HN (and obviously elsewhere on the internet)

Do you have some examples? It'd be good if we could keep a list and screenshots of this sort of thing, with some research into the usernames.

I hear people on Reddit talk about 'Russian bots' constantly and I've always wanted to see some examples on a site like HN/Reddit.

The above person lists his Github account and AFAIK he's not a paid shill, just a political contrarian or provocateur for political ends. Which IMO is an important difference if we're going to accuse everyone of being bots and "paid shills".

A green name with a single comment being downvoted immediately isn't influencing opinions here, they can't even downvote. But it'd be interesting to measure their frequency as well for a research project.