by r721 on 5/27/2020, 4:32:18 PM
by dependenttypes on 5/27/2020, 6:24:09 PM
Recent and relevant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223219
by lancesells on 5/27/2020, 4:31:23 PM
This is even more strange than the NBA tweet that started all of the controversy at the beginning of the year.
Censoring messages about an arm of a government where YouTube is banned has me wondering what is going on behind closed doors.
by FooBarWidget on 5/27/2020, 5:35:39 PM
I think this is just a case of fighting low-quality comments rather than deliberate censoring of anti-CCP political speech.
Youtube is not supporting CCP. They regularly delete videos that are even mildly supportive of CCP, for example https://twitter.com/rachw82451432/status/1265308476034519040
Another example is the 'Fighting terrorism' documentary by CGTN, which has been deleted and reuploaded many times now.
Heck, I don't even call the above examples 'pro-CCP'. They just show a different point of view that isn't anti-CCP.
I see people here claiming something along the lines of: all anti-CCP comments are valuable examples of freedom of speech. But let's be honest here. Were it any nearly any other topic, people's usual opinion of Youtube comments is that it's a cesspool. While there is indeed valuable anti-CCP commentary out there, some really is not worth reading and just degrade the quality of the website.
by shadowgovt on 5/27/2020, 6:15:39 PM
"Who at Google decided to censor American comments on American videos hosted in America by an American platform that is already banned in China?"
Probably no individual. There are enough Chinese pro-nationalists using YouTube to generate noticeable signal if they all, independently based on their political creed or as an organized brigade, decide to start flagging posts. Once the flagging begins, the relative rarity of the characters in question combined against the flagging signal would generate a Bayesian prior that the word in question would tend to get flagged, and would preemptively start killing those comments.
This is one of the ways to train an automatic moderation system that is capable of discovering novel words the community decides are swears, and brigading is a known pathology that those systems are susceptible to.
by guscost on 5/27/2020, 4:50:10 PM
Congress should revoke immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, for any online community the size of YouTube that imposes their own "code of conduct" independent of US law. This is a very controversial idea but anything else will lead to censorship, as we're seeing again and again.
by vuln on 5/27/2020, 4:27:02 PM
Please keep upvoting.
by daveytea on 5/27/2020, 5:35:47 PM
Before I got my pitchfork ready, I decided to test with a comment on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufrR98sR7XY&lc=UgyRmEKscwt_U... (scroll down to highlighted comment).
9 hours later it is still there... ️
by koheripbal on 5/27/2020, 5:02:56 PM
Google has major investments in China. Looking at "Youtube" in a bubble doesn't tell the whole story.
I don't think "conspiracy theory" is correct - it's simply a private business doing what's best for itself financially.
Google isn't some government institution. ...or is it?
by FooBarWidget on 5/27/2020, 4:58:12 PM
This claim is misleading. Youtube doesn't just delete anti-CCP comments, they also delete pro-CCP videos. For example https://twitter.com/rachw82451432/status/1265308476034519040
by jjordan on 5/27/2020, 4:52:20 PM
We so badly need decentralized alternatives to these services. Unfortunately I don't see anything on the immediate horizon that is up to the task.
by ggggtez on 5/27/2020, 6:19:28 PM
Someone below pointed out that when other random users post these phrases, their comments are not deleted.
Possible alternative explanations:
1) The CCP is autoflagging comments from known anti-ccp users
2) The CCP is autoflagging comments only on chinese language videos
etc...
Given that this doesn't reproduce (i.e. there is a comment with this phrase up for over 9 hours) I'm skeptical of the explanation above that it's an automated system inside of YouTube's backends.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufrR98sR7XY&lc=UgyRmEKscwt_U...
by m0skit0 on 5/27/2020, 5:57:03 PM
Nice hypothesis. Would be a shame if someone were to test it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbV_lMS0R6U&lc=UgyIxFgZnPM8T...
by DiogenesKynikos on 5/27/2020, 5:06:01 PM
The linked tweet complains that the phrase 五毛 (50 cents) gets deleted. Does the much-discussed 50-Cent Army even exist on non-Chinese sites?
I have a hard time imagining the Chinese government finding people who speak fluent English willing to post for 50 cents a comment, and I've never run across an English-language forum where such activity was apparent. The terms "五毛" and "wumao" are usually just spammed at anyone perceived as insufficiently anti-Chinese.
by koiz on 5/27/2020, 5:46:37 PM
So we're calling spam filters censorship now?
by abiogenesis on 5/28/2020, 1:02:34 AM
YouTube says that an error caused comments to auto-delete:
https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/26/youtube-china-comments-wum...
by fossuser on 5/27/2020, 4:28:29 PM
YouTube claims this is an accident [0] which I find a little hard to believe.
Is it crazy to think this is CCP state actors? [1] Both in the form of teams of people or bots reporting anything that they dislike to trigger Google's automation, or even just getting people hired by these companies to work on the inside for their interests.
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21270290/youtube-deleting...
by at_a_remove on 5/27/2020, 7:06:44 PM
This has been all over 4chan for a while now.
by bobmcbobface on 5/27/2020, 6:24:23 PM
Well, this is kind of horrifying.
by alexmingoia on 5/27/2020, 4:52:18 PM
It’s not just those words. They’re deleting any comment with the English words “idiot communists” too.
by jialutu on 5/27/2020, 4:33:57 PM
Didn't Palmer Luckey literally pay people to defame Hilary Clinton in the 2016 presidential campaign? I guess he knows all about how 50-cent army works, especially US ones.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/23/oculus-pa...
Edit:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/03/31/oculus-rif...
by andarleen on 5/27/2020, 6:47:47 PM
Somehow China manages to control directly or indirectly companies, individuals, and sometimes politicians, in the US on a far bigger scale than the Soviet Union did. Oddly enough on a scale even higher than under Obama.
by MichaelMoser123 on 5/27/2020, 5:06:59 PM
will they also ban me if I something against the CPSU?
by bzb3 on 5/27/2020, 4:48:11 PM
Twitter censoring good, YouTube censoring bad.
by trasz on 5/27/2020, 4:28:41 PM
Those are not "anti-CCP comments", it's just spam. They don't convey any information or opinion.
by socrates1998 on 5/27/2020, 5:37:45 PM
It's amazing to me that this isn't against a US law. An American company is actively helping spread propaganda of a hostile, foreign country.
Just insane. Google's new motto should "we do what we want"
by knzhou on 5/27/2020, 6:24:26 PM
I’m all ready to bring out the pitchforks, guys, but I’m confused. Didn’t we all agree literally yesterday that Facebook not doing enough to reduce division was a moral catastrophe? Isn’t deleting what hundreds of millions of people see as a foreign propaganda slogan a textbook example of reducing division? Is the rule that we should delete only what you in particular find divisive?
by techntoke on 5/27/2020, 4:30:40 PM
In other news, that should be front page, but doesn't follow the Google hate that Hacker News accepts as front page material:
Recent discussions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23317570
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223219
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221264