HN is inundated with recently created or recently reactivated accounts posting CCP propaganda. These accounts don't necessarily belong to bots or shills, but they are nonetheless part of a state orchestrated social media influence campaign. Reddit has addressed this with mass purges and browser extensions that allow shared tagging of users to disclose their affiliations.
What is HN going to do? A purely neutral platform is easy pickings for state propaganda.
I'm not calling for any particular action, but highlighting the increasing need for a call to be made by HN moderators. This forum is exhibiting the same symptoms that Reddit did during the first wave of Russian media influence campaigns. This was initially met with dismissal and accusations of racism/etc if anyone called out the accounts in question. It took another 8 months for the Reddit team to admit what was going on and take action.
The only defence currently available is downvotes and a higher snr ratio, but those only work as long as the influence effort on any particular topic is smaller than the userbase that tends to discuss said topic.