6 ms·

I think you're being a bit hyperbolic, HN uses the same mechanism (shadow banning) for moderation.

codedokode 10y ago
I think banning a spammer and removing a truthful post because the government did not like it are clearly different things.
jacobolus 10y ago
HN is a small self-contained community of semi-anonymous strangers. If it instead aspired to be the social network for a whole country, full of real names and faces and street addresses, it would be deeply troubling to have government censors tracking the actions of every person on the site and shadow-banning anyone matching some undisclosed criteria (but keeping evidence of their comments for potential uses in later crack-down).
- olalonde 10y ago
  It wouldn't be deeply troubling, it is deeply troubling. The Chinese government has been at it for many years, on WeChat, Weibo, Renren, Qzone, QQ, etc. Having lived in China for ~5 years, it sucks but it is absolutely better than nothing. It also is not remotely like being "blindfolded, speaking to a room you don't know is empty or not". I don't feel that way on HN either though I know getting shadow banned is a possibility. The fact is, there is some censorship and surveillance in China, and Facebook can't do anything about it nor is it exerting any sort of pressure by staying out. I understand that it is scary for us, westerners, to watch this unfold, but for the Chinese people, gaining access to a censored Facebook would be a step forward overall (right now, Facebook it is essentially 100% censored).
  - jacobolus 10y ago
    Building these tools for the Chinese government would give every other government grounds to demand that Facebook provide the same. It’s a step down a slippery slope toward worldwide total surveillance and censorship. These tools can and will be used against activists, members of minority political parties, dissidents, business rivals, etc. When some African dictatorship jails some journalist’s whole family without charges, the engineers at Facebook who built the surveillance software will be complicit.
    - olalonde 10y ago
      I can empathize with this sentiment but it is very self centered in a way. It basically comes down to "I hope Facebook doesn't build censorship tools because it might lead to my government using them, too bad for those >1B Chinese people who won't gain access to Facebook". I can accept that but please, get off the moral high horse (not you specifically).
      - jacobolus 10y ago
        Why is Facebook so much better than the dozens of native Chinese social networks?
        olalonde 10y ago
        I think that's beside the point and couldn't answer because I don't use Facebook. I was trying to make the larger point that foreign companies refusing to comply with the Chinese censors is not necessarily a good thing for the people of China because it results in total and complete ban. I doubt that Facebook would be hugely successful in China but it would encourage competition and serve as an alternative.
      - quanticle 10y ago
        What's the use of Chinese people getting access to Facebook if it's no better for speech than Weibo, WeChat or any of the other Chinese social network? I don't see any benefit at all here for the public. Not the Chinese public. Not the global public. The only benefits I see are for governments who wish to control and surveil their citizens, and Facebook. The governments get a nice automatic dissent control toolkit, and Facebook gets a nice payday from being able to enter the Chinese market. I might sound like I'm being a bit hyperbolic, but I find it deeply scary that Facebook is applying its considerable engineering talent towards building censorship and monitoring at scale. Facebook has some of the smartest engineers in the industry as well computing power that only the richest governments can match, and they have a good shot at cracking the problem of doing efficient censorship at scale. China manages to scale its censorship by employing more and more people to censor. If Facebook builds a plug-in system that allows governments to censor automatically, then every country could censor like China, at a fraction of the cost.
  - hcarvalhoalves 10y ago
    > gaining access to a censored Facebook would be a step forward overall (right now, Facebook is essentially 100% censored) I don't think it's a step forward at all, because users won't ever know how much censorship their Facebook has. So they'll get the sensation of no censorship while being censored. This is worse than not having access at all, which is at least an explicit censorship and makes citizens wonder, as opposed to something subtle and dishonest.
    - olalonde 10y ago
      The majority of Chinese people know that social networks and the web in general are censored. Worse than that, it's considered common sense that publicly speaking up against the government is a risky thing to do, which results in self censorship and apathy towards politics. I don't think they would assume things to suddenly be different when using Facebook.
  - pmlnr 10y ago
    >, gaining access to a censored Facebook would be a step forward overall Why? Because it's Facebook? Because it's american? Wechat is a better system, but censored. There is nothing to gain with yet another censored system.
    - olalonde 10y ago
      If nothing else, more choice and competition. It also has a large user base outside of China, which the Chinese social networks do not. WeChat is great and I use it a lot.
  - colordrops 10y ago
    While we are using numbers to establish our cred, I lived in China for 9 years, and i also found the metaphor of "blindfolded, speaking to a room you don't know is empty or not" to not describe the situation accurately. But the reason is only that Chinese internet authorities haven't yet perfected their craft, and are absolutely willing to leave people in the dark and do whatever it takes to control the Chinese "intranet".
  - baybal2 10y ago
    And yet, naive western people are registering for wechat in their packloads, uploading all their personal data for commie chairmen to see
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Having been a child of the Carnation Revolution, I don't really see it as a step forward.
  - solatic 10y ago
    What you're basically describing is a free-speech version of war profiteering. Instead of profiting from enabling the physical destruction and submission of a people, you're profiting from enabling their silence. There's a big difference between creating a morally neutral tool (like Facebook itself, which may be used for evil, such as in cases like cyberbullying) and creating a tool for an explicitly immoral purpose to be given to an entity which will obviously use it for immoral purposes. What Facebook is doing is deeply unethical.
    - olalonde 10y ago
      Would you maintain that it is unethical even if the large majority of the people directly affected by the censorship think otherwise? Do you think Chinese people are thinking "I sure hope Facebook doesn't comply with the government so that I can keep not having access to it and therefore keep not being silenced by it. Ah also, I really just wish Baidu/Weibo/Wechat/etc. would close shop already because they are censorship enablers.". My bet is that very few people are and while they're probably unhappy with the censorship in general, they are happy to have access to some form of social media.
      - rayiner 10y ago
        When South Africa had partheid, American companies disinvested themselves of the country. At that time, South Africans probably would have preferred to be able to buy Pepsi products. But economic isolation was the right thing to do.
        cmdrfred 10y ago
        If only they did that in WW2 as well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_during_World_War_II https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_during_World_War_II
        olalonde 10y ago
        China is the second largest economy in the world after the US and expected to surpass it within a couple of years, not really comparable. Its government is also largely supported by the people it governs.
tonyplee 10y ago
Every society, community had ban (shadow ban) for certain type of speech. Didn't someone get beat up on youtube for voting for the one who shall not be named recently in US?
- lmm 10y ago
  Every society or community has bans, but the good kind have public or at least explicit bans rather than shadowbans.
rmc 10y ago
We all know what China is going to use this for. And it's not going to be for fighting spam.
- olalonde 10y ago
  Sure, I didn't mean to compare it in that way. My issue was with the hyperbole: "you are left blindfolded, speaking to a room you don't know is empty or not". Social networks in China are nothing like that: censorship is relatively rare and predictable.
rwmj 10y ago
Shadow-banning in HN works differently in that users can choose to see shadow-banned comments. If I ever felt that a user was being censored then I could (a) read the censored material, and (b) tell the user that they were being shadow-banned. This has never happened so far, I see no evidence that HN is shadow-banning as a form of political control.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- vuanotinu 10y ago
  You can't tell a user he's shadowbanned because posts by shadowbanned users do not have a reply button.
  - rwmj 10y ago
    I can email or contact the other user offline.
  - detaro 10y ago
    You can vouch for dead comments, they become visible and reply-able.
lmm 10y ago
Yes it does, and it's evil when HN does it too.
headmelted 10y ago
I don't think its the same at all. If I post on HN I have an understanding that the post is going to be on HN's system, and subject to the moderation of the site owner. I have the same assumption of Facebook or any other online social service. What's happening in this circumstance is that another actor is going to be in the middle, with Facebook's cooperation and consent, and not mine. That Facebook has found a way to wash their hands of what they're doing here doesn't make it OK. That they're finding a way to remove themselves from censoring the posts directly shows that they know it's wrong.
marcosdumay 10y ago
And shadowbanning has already a bad reputation because of the problems it causes on sites like HN¹. And those are small sites that won't send the secret police into your home at night, and used solely to fight spam - the problems are exclusively because of false positives. It's not hard to imagine a nightmare once governments start doing it. 1 - The complaints here on HN stopped. Are you sure it's still used?
DigitalJack 10y ago
You are right, however a secondary issue with much larger implications is the punishment (prison, labor camps, whatever) of people that the shadow-ban app finds spreading such prohibited information. You might be just talking to yourself on HN, but aren't likely to go to jail for it. (Not impossible, but not likely).
sctb 10y ago
That's not quite true. We'll ban serial trolls or spammers without notice, but otherwise we announce and explain the ban. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12972039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12972039. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13020206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13020206 and marked it off-topic.

I think banning a spammer and removing a truthful post because the government did not like it are clearly different things.

jacobolus 10y ago

HN is a small self-contained community of semi-anonymous strangers. If it instead aspired to be the social network for a whole country, full of real names and faces and street addresses, it would be deeply troubling to have government censors tracking the actions of every person on the site and shadow-banning anyone matching some undisclosed criteria (but keeping evidence of their comments for potential uses in later crack-down).

olalonde 10y ago
It wouldn't be deeply troubling, it is deeply troubling. The Chinese government has been at it for many years, on WeChat, Weibo, Renren, Qzone, QQ, etc. Having lived in China for ~5 years, it sucks but it is absolutely better than nothing. It also is not remotely like being "blindfolded, speaking to a room you don't know is empty or not". I don't feel that way on HN either though I know getting shadow banned is a possibility. The fact is, there is some censorship and surveillance in China, and Facebook can't do anything about it nor is it exerting any sort of pressure by staying out. I understand that it is scary for us, westerners, to watch this unfold, but for the Chinese people, gaining access to a censored Facebook would be a step forward overall (right now, Facebook it is essentially 100% censored).
- jacobolus 10y ago
  Building these tools for the Chinese government would give every other government grounds to demand that Facebook provide the same. It’s a step down a slippery slope toward worldwide total surveillance and censorship. These tools can and will be used against activists, members of minority political parties, dissidents, business rivals, etc. When some African dictatorship jails some journalist’s whole family without charges, the engineers at Facebook who built the surveillance software will be complicit.
  - olalonde 10y ago
    I can empathize with this sentiment but it is very self centered in a way. It basically comes down to "I hope Facebook doesn't build censorship tools because it might lead to my government using them, too bad for those >1B Chinese people who won't gain access to Facebook". I can accept that but please, get off the moral high horse (not you specifically).
    - jacobolus 10y ago
      Why is Facebook so much better than the dozens of native Chinese social networks?
      - olalonde 10y ago
        I think that's beside the point and couldn't answer because I don't use Facebook. I was trying to make the larger point that foreign companies refusing to comply with the Chinese censors is not necessarily a good thing for the people of China because it results in total and complete ban. I doubt that Facebook would be hugely successful in China but it would encourage competition and serve as an alternative.
    - quanticle 10y ago
      What's the use of Chinese people getting access to Facebook if it's no better for speech than Weibo, WeChat or any of the other Chinese social network? I don't see any benefit at all here for the public. Not the Chinese public. Not the global public. The only benefits I see are for governments who wish to control and surveil their citizens, and Facebook. The governments get a nice automatic dissent control toolkit, and Facebook gets a nice payday from being able to enter the Chinese market. I might sound like I'm being a bit hyperbolic, but I find it deeply scary that Facebook is applying its considerable engineering talent towards building censorship and monitoring at scale. Facebook has some of the smartest engineers in the industry as well computing power that only the richest governments can match, and they have a good shot at cracking the problem of doing efficient censorship at scale. China manages to scale its censorship by employing more and more people to censor. If Facebook builds a plug-in system that allows governments to censor automatically, then every country could censor like China, at a fraction of the cost.
- hcarvalhoalves 10y ago
  > gaining access to a censored Facebook would be a step forward overall (right now, Facebook is essentially 100% censored) I don't think it's a step forward at all, because users won't ever know how much censorship their Facebook has. So they'll get the sensation of no censorship while being censored. This is worse than not having access at all, which is at least an explicit censorship and makes citizens wonder, as opposed to something subtle and dishonest.
  - olalonde 10y ago
    The majority of Chinese people know that social networks and the web in general are censored. Worse than that, it's considered common sense that publicly speaking up against the government is a risky thing to do, which results in self censorship and apathy towards politics. I don't think they would assume things to suddenly be different when using Facebook.
- pmlnr 10y ago
  >, gaining access to a censored Facebook would be a step forward overall Why? Because it's Facebook? Because it's american? Wechat is a better system, but censored. There is nothing to gain with yet another censored system.
  - olalonde 10y ago
    If nothing else, more choice and competition. It also has a large user base outside of China, which the Chinese social networks do not. WeChat is great and I use it a lot.
- colordrops 10y ago
  While we are using numbers to establish our cred, I lived in China for 9 years, and i also found the metaphor of "blindfolded, speaking to a room you don't know is empty or not" to not describe the situation accurately. But the reason is only that Chinese internet authorities haven't yet perfected their craft, and are absolutely willing to leave people in the dark and do whatever it takes to control the Chinese "intranet".
- baybal2 10y ago
  And yet, naive western people are registering for wechat in their packloads, uploading all their personal data for commie chairmen to see
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Having been a child of the Carnation Revolution, I don't really see it as a step forward.
- solatic 10y ago
  What you're basically describing is a free-speech version of war profiteering. Instead of profiting from enabling the physical destruction and submission of a people, you're profiting from enabling their silence. There's a big difference between creating a morally neutral tool (like Facebook itself, which may be used for evil, such as in cases like cyberbullying) and creating a tool for an explicitly immoral purpose to be given to an entity which will obviously use it for immoral purposes. What Facebook is doing is deeply unethical.
  - olalonde 10y ago
    Would you maintain that it is unethical even if the large majority of the people directly affected by the censorship think otherwise? Do you think Chinese people are thinking "I sure hope Facebook doesn't comply with the government so that I can keep not having access to it and therefore keep not being silenced by it. Ah also, I really just wish Baidu/Weibo/Wechat/etc. would close shop already because they are censorship enablers.". My bet is that very few people are and while they're probably unhappy with the censorship in general, they are happy to have access to some form of social media.
    - rayiner 10y ago
      When South Africa had partheid, American companies disinvested themselves of the country. At that time, South Africans probably would have preferred to be able to buy Pepsi products. But economic isolation was the right thing to do.
      - cmdrfred 10y ago
        If only they did that in WW2 as well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_during_World_War_II https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_during_World_War_II
      - olalonde 10y ago
        China is the second largest economy in the world after the US and expected to surpass it within a couple of years, not really comparable. Its government is also largely supported by the people it governs.

tonyplee 10y ago

Every society, community had ban (shadow ban) for certain type of speech. Didn't someone get beat up on youtube for voting for the one who shall not be named recently in US?

lmm 10y ago
Every society or community has bans, but the good kind have public or at least explicit bans rather than shadowbans.

rmc 10y ago

We all know what China is going to use this for. And it's not going to be for fighting spam.

olalonde 10y ago
Sure, I didn't mean to compare it in that way. My issue was with the hyperbole: "you are left blindfolded, speaking to a room you don't know is empty or not". Social networks in China are nothing like that: censorship is relatively rare and predictable.

rwmj 10y ago

Shadow-banning in HN works differently in that users can choose to see shadow-banned comments. If I ever felt that a user was being censored then I could (a) read the censored material, and (b) tell the user that they were being shadow-banned. This has never happened so far, I see no evidence that HN is shadow-banning as a form of political control.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
vuanotinu 10y ago
You can't tell a user he's shadowbanned because posts by shadowbanned users do not have a reply button.
- rwmj 10y ago
  I can email or contact the other user offline.
- detaro 10y ago
  You can vouch for dead comments, they become visible and reply-able.

lmm 10y ago

Yes it does, and it's evil when HN does it too.

headmelted 10y ago

I don't think its the same at all. If I post on HN I have an understanding that the post is going to be on HN's system, and subject to the moderation of the site owner. I have the same assumption of Facebook or any other online social service. What's happening in this circumstance is that another actor is going to be in the middle, with Facebook's cooperation and consent, and not mine. That Facebook has found a way to wash their hands of what they're doing here doesn't make it OK. That they're finding a way to remove themselves from censoring the posts directly shows that they know it's wrong.

marcosdumay 10y ago

And shadowbanning has already a bad reputation because of the problems it causes on sites like HN¹. And those are small sites that won't send the secret police into your home at night, and used solely to fight spam - the problems are exclusively because of false positives. It's not hard to imagine a nightmare once governments start doing it. 1 - The complaints here on HN stopped. Are you sure it's still used?

DigitalJack 10y ago

You are right, however a secondary issue with much larger implications is the punishment (prison, labor camps, whatever) of people that the shadow-ban app finds spreading such prohibited information. You might be just talking to yourself on HN, but aren't likely to go to jail for it. (Not impossible, but not likely).

sctb 10y ago

That's not quite true. We'll ban serial trolls or spammers without notice, but otherwise we announce and explain the ban. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12972039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12972039. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13020206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13020206 and marked it off-topic.