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Nearly always, commenters who post like this underestimate how large the HN community is, and therefore how divided it is. This causes them to see a huge unexplained hole when comments show up which strike them as outrageously wrong and biased, and then the mind finds it impossible to resist filling in the hole with sinister imaginations: cloak-and-dagger brigades, astroturfing, and all the rest.

When you rush to HN to post those suspicions, you end up undermining and dividing the community even further, as well as changing the topic to something useless, since it's founded on imagination. The solution is not to post such insinuations unless you have objective information that goes beyond how you feel. By "you", of course, I'm not picking on you personally—I mean all of us. This is a bias we all have, and it's super hard to resist when the feeling is strong, because it seems almost impossible that the outrageous comments could be appearing in good faith. In reality, though, what you're experiencing is how intense the underlying social divide is. HN has many users in Brazil. As Brazilian politics is divided, Brazilian politics on HN is divided. And HN has been split down the middle about Greenwald for a long time.

There's an endless stream of prior explanations at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme..., because this problem is perennial.

p.s. I wish I didn't have to add this, but probably do: this is not a pro-Bolsonaro or anti-Greenwald comment. It is simply pro-HN, based on what makes threads higher vs. lower quality.

> Don't be deceived, Greenwald is a political prisoner.

He's not arrested, nor his passport.

To be political prisoner you need to be in prison first.

This might be a political persecution, but saying he is a political prisoner is a bit of stretch.

It will take several years for his case to be appreciate by every last instance (in Brazil we have 3 instances). Even if he is found guilty, he won't be sentenced to jail.

Usually talk of astroturfing on HN gets you and admonishment from the powers that be. Let’s see what happens.

We've entered an era where hounding and intimidating journalists is considered a legitimate political position. So they probably really are genuine far right users, Brazilian and otherwise, swept up by the reality distorting extremism of the day.

And their influence will continue to expand so long as they are able to shout down, spam and vandalize venues that might have been used to find solutions.