It's a shame, I feel like it's our duty to boost these things - it's the least we can do.
Maybe the HN team could manually do "flag locks" for certain articles that are being brigaded?
Reddit has a "controversial" indicator on posts and comments that can help users identify that this is happening(heavily downvoted, but also heavily upvoted and interacted with).
If there were a way to transparently share coordinated activity I'd be supportive. But, I've never seen the evidence shared and I trust the reason is because sharing such evidence would lead the actors to change their methods. The best we can do as users is discuss the possibility it may be occurring.
This is way beyond being "controversial". First thing probably, HN team can investigate all China related posts and gather users who flagged these posts and take action accordingly.
If this is being flagged, it's likely because it's against the submission guidelines. It's hard to see how this gratifies intellectual curiosity, and it's a political topic without an interesting new phenomenon.
I don't recall ever flagging a submission, if I have it's infrequent.
That personal attack aside, political submissions don't have a blanket ban, but it's reasonable to see why this one would get flagged without blaming paid state actors.
you need some amount of points in order to downvote something on this site; only someone who has a stake in this community can yield his influence in order to downvote something here; this means that a lot of people here are subjects to the whims of the CPC.
Quick link : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party
They also flag posts to take down from the first page. Just look how many votes do this post have but barely on the first page, about to fall down.