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Comment by justicezyx | Hacker News Reader

I do not meant to defend either side. But the first comment on the NYT article has the following statement:

""" Well dear reporters, you failed to mention the fact that the story actually first started on Facebook. Some guy who claimed himself the victim’s brother posted on FB saying his sister was actually shot by her fellow protesters accidentally. This incident is now heartedly discussed on a popular online community in HK(https://www.discuss.com.hk/viewthread.php?tid=28439217). Those who can understand written Cantonese can take a look. Anyway dear reporters, those above may not qualify to be a reliable source but still...the “state-run” media didn’t make up the story out of nowhere. """

My feeling is just that the news report in modern time is simply no longer fact-driven.

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My feeling is that I'm seeing a lot of comments from people whose usernames are a common word plus three characters that defend China in a backhanded way.

It's just a feeling, but I'd say that's about as credible as these comments.

In terms of feeling, we know which government can easily out number any other country on this planet...

It's hard to even know what you're trying to say here.

You feel your country can beat up Hong Kong?

It doesn't have to be a feeling. It's been well documented that the Chinese government has a group of people that it employs to spread pro-Chinese propaganda and downvoted perceived threatening speech on social web sites around the world.

HN has been a target of this brigade for years.

I guess Chinese gov needs to pay me then ;), mind sharing out the "well documented" reference?

It's a common way for Chinese to pick up an username, a common word plus few characters from their name. I created mine since high school and I use it like a charm for almost a decade. I'm not defending China, I just wanted to let you know NYT is not telling the full truth. I've done biz in HK for 5+ yrs, the conflict and tension between China and HK can't be simply explained in two or three sentences.

The protest is out of control right now, you can't imagine how scary and horrible the current HK is, protestors hit people if they don't want to join, they forbid people from going to work, they rush into airport, train station to interfere public transportation, etc. I was lucky to return back earlier, but it's really disappointing to see NYT only reports whatever favors them. People visiting HK for holidays or biz are not the right ones the protestors should blame. If you don't believe what I said, you can go to HK and take a look (I hope not, at least not now), or talk to anyone who just came back.

This comment breaks the HN guideline against insinuating astroturfing. If you have evidence, I'd like to see it—we take actual evidence seriously and always look into it. But the overwhelming majority of comments like this one turn out to be nothing more than the commenter imagining an explanation for comments they disagree with. Such imagination feels extremely convincing, but it is imagination nonetheless.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yeah this has become a serious moderation issue. Having a policy that forces people to pretend it isnt happening is also totally counterproductive.

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