[Gareth321]

It's strange because my impression has been pro-Chinese comments on HN. I suppose it depends on the topic, the time of day, and how many bots each government is employing on a given day for the key words and their compute budget. This submission seams rather balanced to me.

[bob778]

Is there evidence of any state-sponsored bots at all? It seems like this has become an accepted fact but I don’t see any data indicating it’s actually real.

[versteegen]

Pretty sure there isn't.

HN has lots of hellbanned bots lately (I have showdead on [1]) but I never notice ones pushing a political slant. But I suppose nation states conducting a campaign on Hacker News would be much too cunning to make the bots obvious

[1] because many posts get wrongly flagged, apparently in part by trigger-happy users who will flag anything with incidental similarities to AI prose (everyone, PLEASE STOP DOING THAT), in part because HN's automoderation is severe for new users, and in part because plenty of people get hellbanned either unfairly or although they do still write plenty of worthwhile posts. I even rescued someone who it turned out had been hellbanned by a mod by accident.