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China's New Wave of Internet Censorship: Name Verification for Online Commenting
- ivanstame 9y agoWhat a shitty country to live in...
- jstanley 9y agoIf you were living in China, hearing the Chinese media's propaganda about the west instead of the western media's propaganda about China, you'd probably be saying the same thing about the west instead of about China.
- dublinclontarf 9y agoI lived in China for a few years. Chinese media spends it's propaganda time on talking up life in China and how things are all getting better.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoChinese always talk about biased western media against china but can never point anything out, having to dig back a few years for anything substantial. Here is a clue: a westerner will have even more of a negative impression of china if they restrict themselves to Chinese media only (like chinadaily, globaltimes, CCTV 9). So is Chinese media biased against china????
- Broken_Hippo 9y agoSo is the US at times - and Norway (the places I've lived), and every other place I've visited. The same places are generally very nice in other ways. It just depends on what you are focusing on, who you are, and that sort of thing. This particular facet is a shitty one, though.
- dang 9y agoUnsubstantive name-calling comments, especially putting down other people's countries, will get you banned here. Please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post civilly and substantively, or not at all.
- neya 9y agoThere are a dozen popular live streaming apps in China where one can simply just stream what you're doing to everyone on the site and people can just watch them for hours. You can think of it like Instagram stories or Snapchat per se. Or even Facebook live. This isn't some western media propaganda. I tried one of them very recently (I don't want to give them any undeserved marketing), they allowed me to sign up and the moment I clicked on my camera button it took me to a page asking me to "verify" my profile as apparently it was Chinese government's new regulation. Guess what? They asked me for my passport before I could upload a damn thing on their app. Imagine, Facebook asking you to upload your passport before you do a live stream. Only the Chinese government can get away with something unbelievable like these regulations, while still gaining loyalty from their citizens to the point where these supporters will even defend the govt. everywhere online trying to explain how normal it is to submit your passport and your real identity to some random app company because you know, you just wanted to try it out and it's totally normal.
- jackgavigan 9y ago> Imagine, Facebook asking you to upload your passport before you do a live stream. It wouldn't surprise me if a Western government (probably the UK's) considers introducing legislation to require exactly this in the not-too-distant future, most likely under the guise of preventing the spread of extremist propaganda. If they do, companies like Facebook and YouTube will face a choice between acceding to the new regulation or incurring punitive fines. Guess which option most of them will choose? The only way we can prevent George Orwell's vision from becoming a reality is if we build a more decentralised web. However, that also threatens the walled gardens' revenue streams.
- bitL 9y agoIf it comes to having the same legislation in the UK, it'd likely ban decentralized web as well, perhaps requiring submitting your ID upon connecting to Internet every single time.
- notyourwork 9y ago
- Canada 9y agoThis is already the case for any substantial public posting. In order to get a crappy virtual web host that's not even on your own domain name one needs to supply a national ID number. For a virtual machine a corporation with an ICP license is required. This number must be displayed on every web site. It's evil. Their Twitter copy already requires ID. Anyone with a substantial following is known to authorities. I wonder if this new push to cripple the internet will kick off unidentified WeChat users. Leaving aside political effects, this regime makes it very difficult to innovate. A Chinese developer just starting out can't just just rent a VM to show off his work. I helped someone get a webapp running on one of the big Chinese cloud service and it's really, really awful. Exactly what you would expect from an industry completely protected from competition by government.
- bitL 9y agoSo technology, once a progressive force, is now going to be used to conserve dysfunction. Can't wait to see the latest Deep Learning advancements used to enforce whatever is deemed appropriate. Future generations are done with approved high-school popularity contests enforced everywhere. I am wondering if China is going for another 2000 years of no advancements, like it used to when it exhausted its cultural roots before.
- MikkoFinell 9y agoOn the one hand those advancements are being used to enforce users only view whats deemed appropriate, while on the other hand it's used to maximize your time-on-screen by stealing your attention in increasingly ingenious ways. I believe we are already past the event horizon on a dystopian singularity that will land us somewhere in the middle of Orwell and Huxley.
- socratewasright 9y agoIt's not that bad I believe. With the way PR companies and political parties are using astroturfing/bots to influence public opinion, asking for identification is one way of making sure the person participating in an online discussion is real. It also safeguards against online foreign influence. Additionally, I think anonymity tends to bring the worst in us. Perhaps it is because we feel less pressured by social norms of behavior since we are not held personally responsible for our speech as much as it would've been the case irl. While no one is truly anonymous to the state, asking people to identify themselves makes them conscious about it and I believe less likely to start using a given service under the assumption of anonymity.
- jokoon 9y agoI agree with you, although people should have the choice to be anonymous or not. Users should also be able to make the difference, and have less trust towards anonymous individuals. I agree that there should be places where anonymity should not be authorized, but it should not be mandatory. Even if the state need people's identity it doesn't share that data with private companies (in general). > Additionally, I think anonymity tends to bring the worst in us. Perhaps it is because we feel less pressured by social norms of behavior since we are not held personally responsible for our speech as much as it would've been the case irl. You're right, but what you are describing is the pressure of the politically correct, which can be toxic. Anonymity let people express their opinion without fear of retaliation. It's a double edge sword. The best solution is to educate people so that they can make the difference, and let people use platforms with strong identification where it's better.
- yorwba 9y agoI'm pretty sure the Chinese government will give its astroturfers a free pass on the identity requirements. And the social norms that pressure people when they are not anonymous include not making the government look bad. While anonymity-enforcing environments can be useful when users have the freedom to choose, as soon as they become mandatory under an authoritarian regime, they turn into a strong silencer against all dissent.
- avaika 9y ago
- asdfologist 9y agoNot condoning this, but isn't this true in South Korea as well?
- yladiz 9y agoYes, to sign up for pretty much any service you have to have either a cell phone contract or a bank account, both of which require a government ID. You don't need to do this to sign up for a forum, but if you want to sign up for something like a movie theater loyalty program, you need to.
- SCHiM 9y agoLeaving aside subjective judgments if doing this is right/wrong, good/in-line with the Chinese culture or whatever else. If you view the societal/political cohesion/consensus as a process of behavioral survival of the fittest (eg. requiring a certain flexibility to adapt) then taking away the flexibility that anonymous online communication affords your citizens might not be so good when/if it becomes time for the system to adapt. There will be less space to communicate and plan gradual change, skipping that possibility and going straight for more bloody forms of change. Say like the way we did things 200 years ago. Personally and subjectively, I think this is a dumb and evil thing to do. But not unexpected.
- paradite 9y agoYou make some very interesting points on flexibility and the ability to adapt. I also wonder how China is able to keep adapting to circumstances and survive if the voice of people is not heard. But then I realize China has a different system to allow that to happen. In modern China, the only way for politicians to go up the ladder of leadership is to slowly rise from the bottom. In this sense, they were once a normal citizen as well, and through working closely with the local community in the early political career, they should have a good understanding of the impact of policies on average citizen. The fact that China is still strong in terms of economics despite being one-party is largely due to the economic reform pushed by the highest leadership Deng Xiaoping.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoYou are excluding princelings like Xi Jinping, who only started from the bottom in theory, but have a lot of family connections to help them rise quickly. In fact, as time goes on, princelings are becoming more dominant in Chinese politics and even the economy (many companies and industries are controlled by red families).
- paradite 9y agoOn that front, I can only hope that they have learnt the lessons from South Korea politics.
- chairmanwow 9y agoI'm frightened by how a seemingly pragmatic government has been able to spiral into dogmatic, protectionists policies so rapidly. I suppose that I mistook the recent decades of economic development as evidence of true ideological reform taking place. Now I feel naive for expecting more from the government that imprisoned the father of their ubiquitous high speed rail system. The Eastern desire to require "harmonious thoughts" is so at odds with the skepticism required to birth true innovations. I was once convinced that China was on the verge of becoming a new force in modern technology. But after seeing a long line of regulations meant to increase the echo of their political echo chamber, I doubt technological innovation can linger much longer.
- donatj 9y ago> I was once convinced that China was on the verge of becoming a new force in modern technology They have amazingly intelligent people and a wonderful hacker community, the problem is it stands entirely at odds with the government's "what's best for society" attitude. The problem most overtly controlling government's aren't willing to accept is that what's best for society this exact moment might not be what's best for it overall. This is why there's no Chinese technology leaders, no Chinese Apple. Communism brews mediocrity.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- darpa_escapee 9y agoOTOH, Alibaba, wechat etc
- Elect2 9y agoAnyone interested in how to get identified? You need to download an app (or a built-in feature in an app), it open your camera, you need to make it focus your head. And then you need do what the speakers(a bot) tell you to do: "Shake your head. Good!", "Blink your eyes. Good!", "Open your mouth. Good!", "...", Then your videos will be uploaded for review.
- golemotron 9y ago> China to forbid unidentified citizens from posting on internet platforms This is inefficient. They just need to incentivize companies to identify citizens like we have.
- The_Notorious 9y agoAttack on anonymity is the endgame for the powers that be. "It's just like a license plate! You have nothing to fear if you aren't doing anything wrong!" I fully expect the same regime to eventually come to the US. SOPA was just the first attempt.
- Samuray 9y agoWe have the Chinese government deciding what ONE FIFTH of the worlds population is allowed to see and express. If a Chinese person steps out of line they are "invited for tea" and maybe never come back. They are even censoring academic's access to western papers. It's barbaric and should not be excused even in passing.
- Overtonwindow 9y agoThis sounds similar to South Korea, or perhaps the scheme Russia is attempting to implement.
- EGreg 9y agoI remember being freaked out when I read THE DIGITAL IMPRIMATUR, which was authored in the early 2000s. I thought it was already reality, but it was just describing what COULD happen with a determined censorship / police state that can use the power of regulations to make it happen. So I wrote this: http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=114 http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=114 I am going to post it on HN actually right now.
- alistproducer2 9y agoAt least here in the states, social media + anonymity hasn't exactly been a boon for human progress. I will never support the laws being proposed in places like the u.k and China, but I like the fact that we are forced to grapple with these ethical issues when laws like this are proposed. Humanity is mainlining an experimental drug in social media. What makes it insideous is that most don't realize it. Governments are grappling with how to insulate themselves from the threat this tech represents; when will regular people do the same?
- eighthnate 9y ago> At least here in the states, social media + anonymity hasn't exactly been a boon for human progress. I'm geniunely astounded at the small but vocal pro-censorship group on hackernews of all places. Where did this come from? Just 5 or 10 or 15 years ago, the idea of any tech minded person being anti-anonymity would be incredibly shocking. Just in the past 2 or 3 years, there has been quite a small vocal group advocating against anonymity and advocating for censorship. Why? Not only that, there have been a rise in anti-open source software, anti-GNU, anti-linux rhetoric that is slowly rising on social media as well. I'm just curious what the mindset or rationale is? Is it because hackernews has grown in popularity beyond the programmers/IT crowd?
- tnone 9y agoThe new generation is more censorious and intellectually sheltered than before. Blame schools and colleges who decided to focus on providing a safe space, and the tech companies those students moved into.
- imhoguy 9y agoNothing surprising. At least they state it officially in the law. But Western goverments approach providers to open backdoors (e.g. Lavabit case) and keep users fooled that they still have any anonimity.
- pas 9y agoFalse equivalence. Look how the 8 years Dem controlled spooks were insufficient to get 4 more years. Yes, US law enforcement and security services are doing a lot of dumb things (TSA security theatre, NSA sitting on 0-days and playing cyber instead of helping the civilian sector patch up), but they don't arrest troublemakers. (They arrest you for weed, but not for running an anti-establishment site.)
- zaro 9y ago> They arrest you for weed, but not for running an anti-establishment site Funny you say that, because arresting people for weed started as a way to arrest people running antiestablishment sites ;) http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-r...
- pas 9y agoThat link doesn't work for me, but I guess this is it: http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-r... And yes, of course, there's a clear bias in the Controlled Substances Act, and its enforcement.
- gergdgdfg 9y agoI grew up in China and came to the U.S. more than 10 years ago. What I have been seeing is the decline of the United States. That's said, I'm worrying about China a lot more. I think it's on track to repeat the mistakes it had done before. You often see articles here saying China will surpass the States in A.I. and science. I doubt it. I doubt a country without freely accessible information will be competent. I doubt true intellectuals would like to live in a place like this. soviet union was an example. I used to get angry at these things (censorships, corruptions). But now I'm tired, not because China is clearly drifting away from what I want it to be, but because I saw many fellow Chinese really believe in government propaganda, and justify its wrong doings. They have the Stockholm syndrome, decorating a nightmare into a beautiful dream (of China being the new world leader and all the censorship shit is necessary to fence off the invasion of western culture. such a bullshit!). And there are also many others who simply don't care. Now I just want to hide somewhere and mind my own things. Who will be replacing the States? Europe is weak and is at its bottom, Russia is no better than China. Maybe Australia or Canada.
- beojan 9y ago> Who will be replacing the States? Europe is weak and is at its bottom, Russia is no better than China. Maybe Australia or Canada. Their population is much too small. In the case of science, if anyone surpasses the US, it'll be Europe. However, the trend now is toward co-operation rather than competition.
- klibertp 9y ago> Europe is weak and is at its bottom Weak in what sense?
- Markoff 9y agoplus i think we already bottomed and now higher than that
- guscost 9y agoI'm cynical about a lot of things, like our dysfunctional mess of a government, a Fortune 500 saturated with exploitative bullshit, and the silly summer-camp that college has turned into. And people have been telling me about the decline of America for my whole life (admittedly not a long life). But I think they are just overwhelmed with worry because we have access to so much information, and I think America easily has another couple hundred years of prosperity ahead, even if it won't be smooth sailing the whole time.
- brudgers 9y agoSo kind of like Facebook...
- real-hacker 9y agoI am from China. Call me selfish, but I really hope China Internet censorship is not discussed on HN. HN is one of the few sites I like that GFW (Great Fking Wall) doesn't block. More threads about the 'sensitive' stuff about China, will almost surely get hacker news blocked. Github has been blocked before. An outcry from the dev community finally got it unblocked. But that seldom happens.