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At this point I don't know if they're fans, or if they're paid shills. There is no way to know that anything on the Internet is posted by a real person. I've started assuming otherwise, and only trusting those I know personally. HN is one of the few places I think real people converse with each other, but even then I wouldn't be surprised of there are bots and paid shills here sometimes.

View on HN

it's like this with NFTs and all those controversial topics on twitter as well.

All the accounts in support comes from accounts with pseudonymous names, yet get reported as credible witnesses.

I don't know if it's a shortcoming on my end, but whenever China comes up on HN, my antennae extend a little farther out.

I think the more naive belief would be to think that HN is somehow immune to shills and bots...

Reading the comments on HN and comparing to them to the typical wumao comments on YouTube, I don't believe that they're paid shills.

Many of the arguments that pro-China people post are well thought out and consistent across their post history. If they were paid shills, they'd be very well-paid specialists.

Looking purely at the ROI, it would make so much more sense for them to target influential overseas Chinese with such targeted attacks, rather than an online forum full of mostly white, libertarian-leaning contrarians.

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