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.

At the risk of being labeled one myself... there are no examples. I've seen dang respond to complaints like this many times and every time it was real people with real profiles being accused of shills, trolls etc.

Also, if you look it up it's almost all politics threads wrt China this year on HN with overwhelming anti-China sentiment, yet here we are, arguing about pro-China influence being too strong.

Then the question is no longer about how many shills are objectively out there that can be quantifiably measured, because this fact is obviously not what people have been basing their accusations on, but what results in the very question of shills being raised in the first place.

The only theory I can think of would be Chomsky's fifth filter, that is, a common external enemy that helps maintain consensus and divert ideological stress from internal antagonism, be it terrorists, Russian trolls, Chinese shills. This is compounded by the universalist belief that it is impossible to hold "genuine" political thoughts other than the End of History liberal democracy project, which is in itself beset on all sides already, making it all more intense.

So in this discussion [1] Checkout all the replies from 'baybal2'. Like this one [2].

Now look at the submissions for that account [3].

Now read more of the comments [4].

That account has been around a while, so I'm not sure it qualifies as "shill", but it certainly seems suspect to me.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21124115

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21126141

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=baybal2

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=baybal2