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> Before you use this as an excuse to accuse the commenter you disagree with as being a Wumao Well, most people generally shouldn't be doing that in the first

> Before you use this as an excuse to accuse the commenter you disagree with as being a Wumao Well, most people generally shouldn't be doing that in the first place (it's against the HN guidelines in particular and bad form in general, with the exception of blatant repeated bad-faith low-effort posts). Even so, using "is this propaganda a distraction or direct engagement" as a heuristic for "is this post propaganda" is also not a great thing to do. Any large organization engaging in propaganda will have multiple large sub-orgs, stakeholders, and inconsistencies due to misaligned incentives, miscommunications, and the squishiness that comes along with propaganda.

Aunche 5y ago
>Well, most people generally shouldn't be doing that in the first place I'm mostly reminding them for when they post on Reddit, where I occasionally get accused for taking a Realpolitik stance of China issues. Even here, someone mentioned the pervasiveness of the "50 cent meme" as evidence of China's state sponsored propaganda. >Even so, using "is this propaganda a distraction or direct engagement" as a heuristic for "is this post propaganda" is also not a great thing to do. I agree it's not a perfect heuristic, but I don't think it matters in practice. A spammer is a spammer regardless of whether they're working for the CCP, and should be treated as such. There's no need to make a spicier accusation that you have no evidence for.