Also worth mentioning: Five Eyes is an older concept. That's an inner circle, but the outer circle is at least 14 countries strong[1].

[1] https://restoreprivacy.com/5-eyes-9-eyes-14-eyes/

When I was at uni (in the 80's) we used to laugh about echelon, and ridicule the idea that everything was being recorded and stored under Cheyenne mountain, only the tin foil hat people would treat it seriously - who knew.

Similarly I remember reading a comment on Slashdot in the late 90s warning how much of a dystopia the Web would become. I also remember myself mostly dismissing the comment as buzz-kill.

It's important to remember that those posts are only relevant now because of hindsight bias. If the web had moved in a different direction, we would be looking back on posts with different predictions with the same hindsight bias.

Hypocrisy on ethical concerns fosters abuse and corrupts the host.

The key bias here is normalisation of deviance, both on an individual and regime level.

Usually China is brought up in order to deflect and avoid discussing how much power our government has accumulated and how disturbing the parallels are.

This is one of the rare cases when China has been brought up in the opposite direction.

It has to do with China as the parent comment made clear:

We’re constantly told China is a threat, and that’s probably a reasonable bit of advice.

We’re not constantly told our own governments are a threat, and that forms the basis of propaganda and misinformation.

And just to be clear; in the normal case a local government is much more of a threat than a foreign government. The experience in the 20th century made it very clear - if a government causes you to die, it was probably your government. Not a foreign government.

The experience in the 21st century has thankfully been a little bit milder but (1) we're only 20 years in and (2) if you are going to be persecuted it is still far more likely to be by a local government than a foreign government.

> We’re constantly told China is ...

> We’re not constantly told our own governments are ...

When I read these statements, I can't help to substitute these nouns with "a used car salesperson".

Of course a used car salesperson will talk up the cars on their lot and won't go out of their way to point out the defects or bad value. That's exactly why we should look for sources other than the salesperson and their allies. Look for data supplied by neutral third parties who have a slight adversarial stance. Also look for data from strong adversaries and evaluate the likelihood of truth versus pure propaganda.

> We’re not constantly told our own governments are a threat, and that forms the basis of propaganda and misinformation.

On the contrary I'd say a very notable feature the US culture is the adversarial view people have of the government. It's practically part of every major party's platform.

> We’re not constantly told our own governments are a threat

That has not been my experience living in America. Not even remotely.

Please "remember that the community is divided on divisive topics and that the person disagreeing with you is probably not a spy, but just someone who disagrees with you." [1]

Also, specifically about astroturfing: "[T]he overwhelming majority of the insinuations and accusations [of astroturfing] that people come up with about it lead to precisely nothing when we investigate. It's like flipping a coin and having it come up tails a thousand times in a row: you start to look for simpler explanations, and there are clear, simple explanations for why this might be." [2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23835613

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23837456

I've spent countless hours looking into these things. I've found no evidence for what you're saying. Literally zero.

I'm not saying that to pick an argument—it's just the factual situation. Meanwhile, there's enormous evidence that people imagine things based on what they believe they see in internet threads. That's why the site guidelines ask you not to post such insinuations unless you have something objective to go on. The appearance of a comment getting upvoted doesn't count—that's simply an indication that people have different views.

In addition to the links Confiks posted, I suggest https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... And there are hundreds of past explanations, going back many years, at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

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

Then why do I regularly see an anti-west china post pushed to the top (without even much to say). Typically it gets pushed out later but odd how often that happens.

Why does anything critical of china get met with downvotes rather than responses? - I've pointed this out before.

Why, if I try to argue with pro-china people does a pattern of rebuffing or denial occur followed by, when pushed into a corner, posting some nebululosty with little meaningful content followed by them going quiet?

If this is not government sponsored shilling, there are a bunch of people who are quite willing to behave against HN rules but don't get banned in a hurry - should I be flagging these more or something?

I have no problem with people being pro-china, it's a question of honesty.

You're probably running into the notice-dislike bias: you (not you personally, of course, but all of us) are more likely to notice the things you dislike and weight them more heavily, whereupon they become your dominant image of the site. People with the opposite preferences have the opposite image, I guarantee you.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Quite possibly. Or not. So how do we find out?

We already find out a lot from the presence of exactly the opposite complaints by the opposite side. This happens on every single divisive topic. Moreover the feelings people have about their perceptions, the language they use to express them and so on, are identical, even when they're claiming opposite things.

This shows that these perceptions are not objective. That's the main point. Why such perceptions routinely arise, and why people are so intensely convinced of them, is an interesting question but a secondary one.

> exactly the opposite complaints by the opposite side > This happens reliably, even universally, on every single divisive topic > the language they use to express them and so on, are identical

I just don't see, or at least recognise, this type of behaviour elsewhere. See a post on guns or free speech and the flames that erupt amongst USAians, they have a very different character to the ones about china.

> This shows that these perceptions are not objective

Inevitably, but that does not in itself eliminate their being actual differences, and these being of a nature different from other flames ie. being backed not by ultranationalistic citizens of some country, but by a concerted centralised interference.

So again, how do we determine this, or disprove it, in an empirical way?

Is it so strange to think that not everyone buys into the anti-China propaganda that's relatively recently popped up in US media? It's only in the last few years that you see every other person on the internet go on a frenzy about China and it's not too crazy to think that there will be people skeptical of this frenzy.