Reddit is like the late Roman Empire. It looks fine on the outside, but it's corrupt all the way down, powered by unpaid labor, and the lead pipes are slowly killing everyone.
Along the same lines, the X-Files was saturated with silly stuff and some real shit just to muddy the waters. X-Files producer had FBI and military advisors. But that's not the real conspiracy. The producer actually had a secret whistleblower advisor who was ex NSA who fed him real world storylines about dodgy shit the US govt was doing. Any time that they tried to censor the show, the producers were like "It's ok, the liaisons said to run it."
Yeah but hong Kong isn't built on sand out of matchsticks and painted cardboard