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by gavinray 1641 days ago

  > This sort of bullshit (sponsored videos) should not be promoted on HN.

Promoted or not, this is generally a community for having level-headed discussions about things.

The original commenter says "China is X way".

Someone responds and says "China is Y way."

Everyone ought to be able to upvote/downvote, and argue + discuss to their hearts content.

I have no horse in this race, but I would have expected the person to just get downvoted into oblivion or responded to with posts like yours, containing responding counter-arguments/links, if the majority of people disagree with or hold contrary evidence to.

My reaction was less to do it about it being anything specifically related to China, and more about the principle/premise of the matter.

It could equally have been "Person 1 says eggs are bad for you, Person 2 says eggs are good for you." and I would have had the same reaction.

1 comments

There is a big difference between real debate on real issues - the example egg nutrition lol. Versus trying to refute or distract with a 'debate' on reality & facts.

Some things shouldn't be up for debate and calling doubt on reality is a weapon used by those who have political stakes.

China is a tough one too because as we saw on a top HN post from a few days ago we know the CCP has a large, active operation to comment and engage in online forums to sway opinion.

Article gave examples of typical straw man, whataboutism, handy wavy redirection.

The kind of comments exactly like what got flagged.

This HN post?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29661475 "Spamouflage: CCP-Aligned Disinformation Campaign on Facebook Twitter YouTube"

I think same news source! but this was the big thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29654137

There have been a few over the years. One I remember talked about a gamified app which is like so innovative and sad at the same time