> flat out deny things like the Tienanmen Massacre
I'm fairly active on Reddit and I've literally never seen that happen. That's because the Chinese people so deep in historic revisionism often don't even care to begin with and can't even access Reddit in the first place, at least not "easily".
It's usually people with a "anti-China" position who bring up Tienamen square, to conflate it with whatever a given submission is about. As in: "Huweai must be spying because the Chinese government is authoritarian evil because Tienamen square".
> This is another tactic used by propagandists.
Just like conflating issues to give the impression to fight for the only "just cause" [0].
I made a comment a few weeks ago criticizing the Chinese government[1]. No flame war came of it, it wasn't flagged, downvoted to oblivion, or result in an "automatic ban." I'm not sure what you're saying to cause those things to happen, but it doesn't seem to be what you think it is.
It's the rampant moral relativism and whataboutism.
It's why comments are frequently getting killed for pointing out China's early actions caused this global disaster, while simultaneously hundreds of comments are allowed to praise China (while they refuse to take any responsibility as a nation, even denying that it originated in China, and aggressively campaign with propaganda to blame the US for invading Wuhan with the US army to apparently launch a war against China and to attack China with a bioweapon and blah blah fucking blah).
I agree that there's no point in arguing with low-quality comments, but for different reasons.
The other kind of comment that predictably appears in threads about China are suspicions that astroturfing is going on. When dang bothers to respond asking for proof, it usually later turns out that the comments in question were made by completely ordinary members of the community who happened to voice a dissenting opinion. (Those kinds of accusations are against the guidelines, by the way.)
There is also not just one group making such comments, but at least two different ones:
The first are all about whataboutism. Whenever the topic is the Chinese government doing evil thing X, they start talking about the US government doing something similar to X. Those people are highly likely to be US citizens (their obsession with US politics is a strong hint) and they only use China to segue into the topic they're actually interested in discussing.
The second are Chinese cheerleaders. They think that China is overall on the right track and point to rapid economic growth as proof. You don't usually see them in threads about Chinese human rights abuses (because even they agree that those are evil), but in other cases, like here at the bottom, they make an appearance. There's no need for the government to pay those supporters, because the natural supply of nationalist types is large enough.
There is a third kind that's easily confused with the second. Some people will agree with specific developments because they feel that the previous situation was even worse. For most people, Google censoring search results would be a bad thing, because for them the change is (uncensored Google -> censored Google). But for Chinese people who see the change in terms of (censored Baidu/Bing -> censored Google) it's still an improvement.
Then there's a fourth kind on the opposite side, for whom everything about China is connected to everything else. They're somewhat of a mirror image of the first group; instead of using China doing X as a prompt to talk about the US doing X, they'll talk about China also doing Y and Z instead.
I think none of those trends are much to worry about, though. Although HN voting on political topics tends to be quite a bit noisier, well thought-out responses are still more likely to end up closer to the top than to the bottom.
I made a comment with a very light disagreement, but went along with the China=dictatorship premise anyway and you blew your top, didn’t engage with the original comment.
It’s the way of the internet, people think they smell blood in the water, get all riled up and lose sight of the actual topic
> when the anti-China-goverment narrative spills into an anti-China-people one
other than sloppy posting I don't think I've ever seen that (that I can remember). Whereas I've seen a fair number of pro china posts that freely talk about 'westerners' instead of western governments. They tend to get killed pretty fast though.
I just want to point about the comments on this post. There are literally 3 commenters who posting nothing but whataboutisms and clear falsehoods. That is enough to rile up everyone else and make the thread quite toxic.
This is how Chinese trolls operate across the board. They know they can't win any arguments based on facts and logic so they muddle the waters such that the truth is lost in a sea of lies.
The Chinese wonder why more and more people have negative views of China yet they don't seem to realize their own "wolf warrior" nationalistic falsehood-driven jingoism is the root cause.
Why bother engage if you're just going to get fed the same lies over and over again?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15993956
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