It's worth noting that American censorship in, say, 1960, was at close to the same level.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_censorship_in_the_United_...
replies(6):
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_censorship_in_the_United_...
I personally tire of this pattern:
1. Article submitted to an international forum about X country doing Y bad thing
2. "Well the USA is just as bad, they also did/doing/will do Y bad thing"
Well yes, that is true, but people are voting up the submission because they found that X-doing-Y-today was interesting and don't care to rehash the history of the US every single time. YES the US has plenty of blemishes in its history. Yes it has censored, warred, raped, extorted, and imprisoned. Yes the US persists in directly doing some of those today, and through malice or ineptitude it fails to prevent others.
But the regularity with which this pattern repeats feels so much like state sponsored astroturfing I'm just tired of it.
I don't think it implies that, but to be honest, the general implication here on HN is that China is the current Big Bad and everything they do is uniquely bad. It's not spelled out, exactly, but that's how I read many comments here.
It may be just me, but that' s the vibe I get from HN in relation to China.
> But the regularity with which this pattern repeats feels so much like state sponsored astroturfing I'm just tired of it.
I think this is unfair. I also don't think you truly think people asking about US behavior here are Chinese agents. That's just silly. China hasn't infiltrated HN.
Maybe my thinking is misguided, but this is exactly what I think. China has an abundance of labor and a strong appetite to perform just such tasks.
> That's just silly. China hasn't infiltrated HN.
It's not like you have to "infiltrate" anything here, it's an open forum and China would need to do little more than pay 2 people to take rotating shifts and they have essentially full coverage to counter any content critical of the country.
Since the readership of HN likely holds much more power than the average American, I'd think China silly to not make that investment.
This kind of assumption is naive (no offense) and reminds me of the denialism regarding Russian disinformation. You do not need to "infiltrate" the site with "agents". It's fairly easy to write a script checking the front page for mentions of China and manually checking the thread to possibly respond with a comment. Before dismissing concerns like this as conspiratorial or silly, you should do some research on the topic:
[1] https://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/50c.pdf?m=146479...
[2] https://www.info-res.org/post/revealed-coordinated-attempt-t...
[3] https://www.techdirt.com/2021/12/15/how-china-uses-western-i...
[4] https://www.state.gov/prc-efforts-to-manipulate-global-publi...
[5] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/05/dozens-of-fake-news-websites...
[6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/28/china-m...
[7] https://www.lawfareblog.com/understanding-pro-china-propagan...
[8] https://mediamanipulation.org/case-studies/astroturfing-how-...
> the general implication here on HN is that China is the current Big Bad and everything they do is uniquely bad
The CCP is hostile to many Western values (e.g. free speech) and they are a primary geopolitical antagonist to the U.S. It's not unreasonable for a mostly U.S. user base to see the worst in CCP behavior or be biased against the CCP.
> The CCP is hostile to many Western values (e.g. free speech) and they are a primary geopolitical antagonist to the U.S. It's not unreasonable for a mostly U.S. user base to see the worst in CCP behavior or be biased against the CCP.
That's neither here nor there. This is what I'm actually replying to:
> Did the article imply somewhere that China is unique in it's censorship?
And my answer is: maybe not the article itself, but everything that gets said here on HN (where the article got quoted) has that implication. In fact, your very answer has that explicit implication! So you are proving my point.