[JumpCrisscross]

"In contrast to prior claims, we show that the Chinese regime's strategy is to avoid arguing with skeptics of the party and the government, and to not even discuss controversial issues. We show that the goal of this massive secretive operation is instead to distract the public and change the subject, as most of the these posts involve cheerleading for China, the revolutionary history of the Communist Party, or other symbols of the regime."

Sensible. Cuts, however, against my mental caricature of an astroturfing shill.

[reaperducer]

Kind of makes you wonder how many of these operatives on here on HN.

There are certainly blocs of people who downvote certain topics en masse.

[rdlecler1]

The more influential HN is perceived the greater the problem will be.

[kolpa]

Cutting through the rhetoric, that means simply that CCP does bog-standard PR rhetoric. No professional in PR would deign to acknowledge the existence of critics, unless those critics are too loud to ignore.

[zug_zug]

> Sensible. Cuts, however, against my mental caricature of an astroturfing shill.

Interesting. The confirmed astroturfer Monsanto[1] is a fairly active one, and though I can't prove some of the people I saw were Monsanto shills, I've never met a person in real life advocate on behalf of that company.

Anyways, their tactics were incredibly distraction-centric and ad-hominem. As soon as anybody brought up the scientific research on pesticides, they'd start comparing this position to anti-vaccine, even completely out-of-context.

It's not hard to debase a conversation so much it falls apart entirely online, which is why the technique seemed effective.

[1] https://usrtk.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/MDLLetNothingGo...