Please don't break the site guidelines by insinuating astroturfing without evidence. Despite the countless accusations people have posted, we've never found any evidence of that on political topics—and we've looked closely. Meanwhile it's a toxic trope that poisons discussion, one that arises for psychological reasons rather than factual ones.

I've specifically written about this recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19485935

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403438

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19404162

That last link is an example of how these accusations hurt the community and individuals.

Plenty more explanation here for anyone who wants it: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

I (an American) ran into this. Centcom was (is?) doing things like whitewashing the No Gun Ri massacre on Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=No_Gun_Ri&diff=185... .

That IP used to resolve to n-mnstci-142.mnstci.iraq.centcom.mil . In my spare time I add information to Wikipedia, then I am taxed and some propaganda minister in the military, being paid by my taxes, gets rid of what I said and does some Orwellian rewrite if history.

These Chinese efforts seem skin to what the US government has been doing.

This breaks the site guideline against insinuations of astroturfing. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do that on HN.

More explanation and links in this post upthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19538691.