In his previous life, Zhou Yi had clashed with this username many times, so how could he not know that this so-called "Fangfang" was almost certainly Lin Fang, the celebrated public intellectual?
She had certainly gone to great lengths to smear him.
First, she used an alternate account to start the thread. Then a swarm of sock puppets or paid trolls kept it active with a string of empty replies like "Bump," "Bumping," and "Bump for the OP." Finally, "Fangfang" herself stepped in, posing as a rational, neutral observer and launching into lengthy arguments. She deftly deployed the public intellectual's trademark tricks-bait-and-switch reasoning, sweeping generalizations, and notorious double standards-to maliciously stir up the commenters.
A crowd of foreign-intervention cheerleaders and country-haters came flocking in, joining forces to fan the flames.
They clung firmly to one point: the police officer in the video had used excessive force and abused his authority, and that was an indisputable fact. What everyone had seen was only the tip of the iceberg; who knew how many other dark, unjust incidents like this existed across the country?
Then they looked past the surface to the underlying issue, claiming it exposed the inadequacy of the nation's judicial mechanisms for keeping law enforcement personnel in check, and the enormous gap between its policing procedures and those of Western democracies.
Their final conclusion was that the judicial authorities had to take legal action against the officer in the video. Otherwise, they could neither quell public outrage nor uphold judicial justice.
As it turned out, their incitement and provocation had already achieved considerable results.
A whole line of commenters below expressed support for Fangfang and the others, with a few getting so worked up that they demanded blood.
Zhou Yi read through the negative comments one by one, utterly unmoved.