China has a propaganda machine and plenty of people who'll participate with any site enough to see anti-Chinese anything and will downvote, flag, whatever. This is not surprising.
What would be surprising, though, is if this site didn't see through the flags and allowed the removal of completely legitimate discussion because it upsets some.
Please don't break the site guidelines like this. These comments are beyond a dime-a-dozen, more like a nickle-a-thousand, and they're basically all the product of breathless internet user fantasy. HN users need to have a little more self-control than that if we're to preserve this site for interesting conversation. I've been trying to explain this to this community for years, so if I seem a little irritated and impatient, I hope you can understand why:
I'm trying to figure out what happened (I don't keep track of these things while I'm asleep), but having taken a quick look so far I can tell you for sure that the flags were from legit, longstanding, entirely boring HN users. (Edit: I did not mean to insult those HN users. I meant that if people saw the list of usernames, they'd find it boring because there would be nothing sinister in it.)
When the topic of discussion is censorship and disinformation online (that includes HN), no one is pulling out astroturfing as rhetoric to shutdown a conversation, it is literally part of the conversation. A moderator coming in here to tamp down on our discussion of disinformation is ironic and self-defeating. This conversation was interesting until you showed up telling us to stop.
19 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 44.7 ms ] threadWhat would be surprising, though, is if this site didn't see through the flags and allowed the removal of completely legitimate discussion because it upsets some.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
I'm trying to figure out what happened (I don't keep track of these things while I'm asleep), but having taken a quick look so far I can tell you for sure that the flags were from legit, longstanding, entirely boring HN users. (Edit: I did not mean to insult those HN users. I meant that if people saw the list of usernames, they'd find it boring because there would be nothing sinister in it.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(The guy who stood in front of military tanks at Tiananmen Square)
https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=hombre%20del%20tanque
No anti-China searches return the images you'd expect, although the recommended other searches do.
https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Tank+mang+tian
https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/4/22519418/microsoft-bing-ch...