[reaperducer]

On HN it's not unique to China. Anything negative about India is downvoted into oblivion. You can almost time it to the rising of the sun in India Standard Time.

I'm not saying that it's being orchestrated by the Indian government, but it does happen.

[vthallam]

This is the distraction the linked study was talking about. I'm not sure if it happens about articles related to India, but since we are on the topic about China's article getting down-voted (anecdotally I have seen multiple times), I think we should focus on that atm.

[reaperducer]

Agreed. Not trying to divert attention from the topic at hand (like the people cited in the Harvard study do).

[Theodores]

How many Indian people live in India and in the global diaspora?

How many Chinese people live in China?

How many Americans are there?

I have not counted them all myself, however this discussion has not talked the numbers and there are a fair few Chinese and Indian people and not so many American people, therefore some presence online is to be expected by people that don't go along with what Washington says.

Regarding whether it is bots or not, the guys in the China office where I work sometimes send out company wide emails that do not look like they have been written by humans. Particularly salient are the 'employee of the month' nominations that should be sent to HR and not 'cc all'. These emails definitely look like they could be written by an auto-translating bot. Reflected in these emails are different values and different ways of praising people that cause us in the UK to chuckle a bit.