So by this reasoning, if commenter responded with a emphatic "Am not!", that would somehow validate he's not a CCP agent?

His response was a link to support a contentious claim which is that the security threat is overstated. That's a reasonable position.

A flawed assumption: A new account does not mean it's a throwaway. The heretofore anonymous user may simply have found a topic worth commenting on. Secondly, my user is over 6 years old and I've not made any comments in favor or against the CCP in my entire history. I simply commented on what I find to be a logical fallacy. So I'm curious what you base your assumptions on.

Then why has every person questioning this account has been Silenced by flagging?

This is another fallacy as proven by the fact your comment, while downvoted, still exists. But even if it were true, I wouldn't know the reason and neither would you.

> The lack of response on being called a troll is pretty deafening. I think it is easy to see this account is a byte-dance or ccp paid troll.

You're not allowed to actually say that here.

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

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and we'll look at the data.

That's not anywhere near accurate, and you can't break HN's rules like this. We have those rules for the simple reason that people vastly overinterpret what they see and jump to wild and sinister conclusions, as indeed you're doing here.

I don't know if other sites work the same way that HN does. I just know that I've spent countless hours studying the HN data on this, and the conclusions are extremely clear: the vast majority of comments like what you're posting here, insinuating astroturfing or brigading etc., are entirely made up based on what people imagine they see. Therefore we ask users not to post them unless they have some evidence to point to (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Running into views that you disagree with does not count as evidence. This is a widespread community with millions of members from all sorts of places and backgrounds. It's inevitable that opposing views show up here, including about China. That's entirely natural.

If you need more explanation, there's tons at these links:

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

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