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A chilling read. I use WeChat because I have a few friends in China. I am glad I have read this. I have never talked to them about China's internal politics for

by magpi3 9y ago

A chilling read. I use WeChat because I have a few friends in China. I am glad I have read this. I have never talked to them about China's internal politics for fear that something like this might exist. Now I know it is worse than I even thought possible. I cannot even tell them this article exists. I believe (hope?) that this will be the death of social media in the long run, at least in authoritarian states. No one is going to use these forums if it means they or their family members can be put in jail for a joke. This is straight out of 1984, and that can be said with 0 hyperbole. When they start using ML to detect dissidents who speak in coded language, we will truly have a real live thought police. Christ almighty.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
opportune 9y ago
It's heading there in other countries, it's just not done by the government yet except in extreme cases. I already can't do anything on social media which could piss off my employer. It makes sense that I can't talk shit about them or leak info, but I also can only share certain political opinions - for example, while I'm sure my employer would be fine if I told them I voted for Hillary and supported gay marriage, I'm not so sure they would be fine if I told them I voted for Trump or was involved in union/labor politics. Of course there would be no direct consequences to either, but HR and managers would know (because they check) and it would affect their opinions of me negatively. And now it's happening with advertisement too. Tell your friend you just took a pregnancy test via FB messenger and now every advertiser on the internet knows just what to sell you. Most people don't really care about this yet, but most people don't realize that this kind of thing could be used in the future for all sorts of dystopian shit. All this data is being stored. I think Google is treating my data pretty responsibly at the moment, but I could see it being used for anything from background checks (e.g. checking search history or message logs for indicators of illegal activity) to blackmail. On a tangential sidenote, I read an article about Snap recently about how they're trying to position themselves as a different kind of social media company. They don't (yet) perform highly sophisticated targeted advertising and don't save a lot of actual content data. You typically are only connected to your actual friends, not some random guy from your high school class, your aunt, your ex-girlfriend, and your coworker. There's also no public profile for employers to search for and snoop around. Of course these are typically the case for any tool focused on direct messaging but I hope as Snap expands they can be both successful and keep these fantastic qualities.
- golergka 9y ago
  > Of course there would be no direct consequences to either, but HR and managers would know (because they check) and it would affect their opinions of me negatively. It's one thing to fire someone for having a political opinion (like Google recently) and just to have an opinion about people you work with. You can't help having an opinion. We're not logical robots. All we can hope to do is to be aware of or decision making process d not to let irrelevant opinions influence it.
  - opportune 9y ago
    I agree with you, I'm just saying that the reality is that people will have worse opinions of you / treat you worse if you have political opinions they consider unsavory. So practically speaking, if you are interested in your career, you shouldn't voice any controversial (given your employer) political opinions on public social media. I don't want to give HR any more reasons to mistrust me: say I supported candidate X, and HR think's X and their supporters are racist/misogynist/anti-immigrant. Now if someone raises a complaint about me, legitimate or not, and HR sees that, they're more likely to assume I'm guilty. And at the end of the day, all else being equal (and it often is with HR because they aren't really able to evaluate technical work well), who gets the promotion: the person HR sees as edgy, controversial, and potentially an asshole because of their political views, or the person who doesn't share their political views? Things shouldn't be this way, but they are.
    - golergka 9y ago
      > And at the end of the day, all else being equal (and it often is with HR because they aren't really able to evaluate technical work well), who gets the promotion: the person HR sees as edgy, controversial, and potentially an asshole because of their political views, or the person who doesn't share their political views? You are correct. However, I don't think that it can is even remotely close to China's censorship.
- dunkelsten 9y ago
  Sorry to be the party pooper, but Advertisers can and do target individual users on Snapchat by simple means of uploading mobile Ad IDs. So while Snap takes the high road here and tells people they're not bleeding or collecting information on their users (which is true), what they don't say is that still all the info that has been bleeding from mobile users through any other of their weather and emoji apps can and will be used against them in Snapchat Advertising campaigns. If they didn't play along, they'd be quickly out of any media planners' heads, and they're already struggling hard against Facebook in the ad ecosystem. Source: I do this stuff for business. Throwaway obviously.
pavlov 9y ago
The practices of the Ministry of Truth — “memory hole” and constant revisioning of history — also become trivial to implement when all data is on centralized servers owned by companies whose continued existence relies on the benevolence of the government. The censors didn’t like Jane’s posts? With the aid of some text generation AI that captures her writing style, rewriting her post history is much less conspicuous than deleting it outright.
- opportune 9y ago
  Or you only show Jane's posts to her closest friends, to minimize the reach of an idea without directly censoring it. Even if those friends share it you can limit the reach to their closest friends too. If users complain that they're getting their exposure limited base on content, just throw up your hands and say "but it's the algorithms that determine the best content to share to your friends, not us!". I'm pretty convinced that Google and Facebook already actively do this. You bring up a good point with text generation, which made me think of what can be ascertained by writing style. Certainly gender, nationality or regional location, education level, probably something akin to IQ. I'm not sure whether there exists such a thing as a "writer's fingerprint" but if there is, you wouldn't even be able to write things anonymously even with a fake/stolen/alternate account.
lewisl9029 9y ago
It's chilling indeed. Unfortunately I don't think the masses (anywhere, not just in China) care enough about censorship or surveillance for the trend you described to ever happen. Most of my Chinese friends I've talked to about the dangers of WeChat (in person, of course) just shrug off the censorship aspect of the app as a minor inconvenience that they occasionally run into, one that gets completely outweighed by the overall utility the app provides. And that's probably an accurate assessment for most individuals. Even in a borderline dystopian surveillance state like China, the chances that an average law-abiding citizen could ever see the chilling effects of surveillance and censorship materialize as a life-changing event in their own lives or the lives of someone close is admittedly rather slim. The chilling effects shrouding over their society is rarely ever felt to a significant enough degree by a significant enough portion of the populace for them to want to affect change at the risk of prosecution. That said, the possibility that eventually Chinese internet products could by their own merit compete in the global market, outcompeting western alternatives in some cases, is the even more terrifying aspect to me. I wrote a lengthy post about it a while ago, and have copy pasted it a few times already, but here it is again anyways, because I feel it's still relevant: To authoritarian governments all over the world, the censorship and surveillance frameworks built into many Chinese internet services like WeChat are actually extremely valuable features, rather than something they'd want to opt out of. These features have been battle-tested in the largest and most ruthlessly robust surveillance state the world has ever seen, and have time and again proven their effectiveness in influencing public opinion and quelling dissent. If an app like WeChat were to ever gain foothold in a nation with an authoritarian government, all they'd have to do is strike a deal with TenCent, and with the flip of a switch, that government can then enjoy unprecedented control and visibility into the "private" communications of its populace. All the friction involved in the decidedly difficult and costly exercise of building your own large-scale surveillance/censorship infrastructure will suddenly have been removed. The one thing Chinese internet services can offer that no western counterpart can reasonably compete with also makes them by far China's most dangerous export: authoritarianism as a service. To those of us in democratic nations, we must also remember that authoritarianism usually doesn't manifest itself as a cliff, but rather as a gradual, slippery downward slope. Every government in the past has displayed authoritarian tendencies in their history, to varying degrees, and governments in the future will inevitably continue to do so. The natural tendency of government is to slide down the slope of authoritarianism, because government is power, and power corrupts. It takes diligence and continued effort on the part of the governing body and its citizenship to counteract this natural descent. All it would take is another 911 type terrorist attack to sway public opinion enough to the point where enacting some kind of dragnet surveillance system in the name of national security would become politically feasible, in any democratic nation in the world. At that point, the horrible user experience and PR nightmare in having to rebalance the national budget or raise taxes to make room for improving your domestic spying infrastructure could be the only thing standing between us and an irreversible descent into authoritarianism. And if a significant portion of a democratic populace happens to be using WeChat at that point, well, let's just say I don't have a lot of faith that my own government could resist the temptation and take a principled stand against such a frictionless way to expand its own powers. As Chinese offerings mature and become polished and innovative enough to compete with western counterparts in markets outside of China, we could easily start to see users around the world voluntarily start switching to them. That could very well mark the beginning of the end of this golden age of democracy as we know it. I highly recommend taking a look at Nathan Freitas's excellent talk "The Great Firewall Inverts": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEJGqNf2rgk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEJGqNf2rgk. In it, he explores how China's so-called Great Firewall is actually a bit of a misnomer because it's most crucial functionality is its ability to control the flow of information inside its own borders as opposed of keeping information out, how this ability is readily available to be exported to countries around the world in the form of internet services like WeChat, and what we can do about it (which is unfortunately, not a whole lot, other than to educate others on the very non-obvious non-immediate consequences of using these services, and to be vigilant and proactively take stands against the spread of authoritarianism in our own governments).
odiroot 9y ago
If you use Android I recommend you to use Work Profile (or experimental app Island) for it. You never know what WeChat is actually reading from your phone, having really extensive set of permissions.
fiblye 9y ago
>No one is going to use these forums if it means they or their family members can be put in jail for a joke. Nah, they will. The convenience factor far outweighs the risk for most people. Everyone thinks "well, they must've done something stupid", and if not that, "well, that was just one strange occurrence. It won't happen to me."
- speedplane 9y ago
  Not necessarily. In the US we now have Signal and other secure messaging apps. Why can't those emerge elsewhere?
  - fiblye 9y ago
    Because if someone says they want your facebook/line/whatever to talk to you, you become a bit of an outcast when you say that you only use secure messaging apps like Signal. People here might be willing to put up with those discussions, but most people don't. Furthermore, I have huge doubts whenever any US-based company says it's "secure". It's easy to say that. Even on their security page[1], they don't give a clear, straight "yes" to the "is it private?" question. Ask a farmer if his beef comes from real cows and he'll say "yes." Ask a company that makes secure apps if they read your messages, and they say "we use various encryption techniques to prevent unwanted man in the middle attacks and our specific organization name won't read your messages." So sure, they're safe from unwanted attacks and they won't personally read your messages. Governments, well, we won't reference the clear suspect of this question because you know why. https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/212477768-Is-it-private-Can-I-trust-it- https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/212477768-Is-it...
    - speedplane 9y ago
      I understand the social / cultural problems with moving form Facebook, but the value of privacy is a social / cultural one, not a technical one. If you can't engage people on a cultural level, then you've already lost. My original point was just that technical solutions exist, not that there is a social will to use them.
kercker 9y ago
You can share the articles to your friends in China, and they surely will not be jailed. And I think you can talk with them about China's internal politics through WeChat if they are interested in these talks, if there is not a third person will report your conversations to the authority. The person in the article is 'jailed', because someone publicizes his comment or reports it to authority.
- tonyztan 9y ago
  Why did you put "jailed" in quotation marks? Was he not actually jailed?
issaria 9y ago
It's been like this forever, the police have access to so called "information management system" directly to QQ and later Wechat. There is no other way to talk to people online, you are monitored in all channels. They have no choice, anyone that doesn't cooperate is blocked. Also the sense of "Privacy" is very weak among Chinese, they are brain washed enough to believe "what are you afraid of if you have nothing to hide". So yeah people will continue to use Wechat and other social channels in China.

by magpi3 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

opportune 9y ago

It's heading there in other countries, it's just not done by the government yet except in extreme cases. I already can't do anything on social media which could piss off my employer. It makes sense that I can't talk shit about them or leak info, but I also can only share certain political opinions - for example, while I'm sure my employer would be fine if I told them I voted for Hillary and supported gay marriage, I'm not so sure they would be fine if I told them I voted for Trump or was involved in union/labor politics. Of course there would be no direct consequences to either, but HR and managers would know (because they check) and it would affect their opinions of me negatively. And now it's happening with advertisement too. Tell your friend you just took a pregnancy test via FB messenger and now every advertiser on the internet knows just what to sell you. Most people don't really care about this yet, but most people don't realize that this kind of thing could be used in the future for all sorts of dystopian shit. All this data is being stored. I think Google is treating my data pretty responsibly at the moment, but I could see it being used for anything from background checks (e.g. checking search history or message logs for indicators of illegal activity) to blackmail. On a tangential sidenote, I read an article about Snap recently about how they're trying to position themselves as a different kind of social media company. They don't (yet) perform highly sophisticated targeted advertising and don't save a lot of actual content data. You typically are only connected to your actual friends, not some random guy from your high school class, your aunt, your ex-girlfriend, and your coworker. There's also no public profile for employers to search for and snoop around. Of course these are typically the case for any tool focused on direct messaging but I hope as Snap expands they can be both successful and keep these fantastic qualities.

golergka 9y ago
> Of course there would be no direct consequences to either, but HR and managers would know (because they check) and it would affect their opinions of me negatively. It's one thing to fire someone for having a political opinion (like Google recently) and just to have an opinion about people you work with. You can't help having an opinion. We're not logical robots. All we can hope to do is to be aware of or decision making process d not to let irrelevant opinions influence it.
- opportune 9y ago
  I agree with you, I'm just saying that the reality is that people will have worse opinions of you / treat you worse if you have political opinions they consider unsavory. So practically speaking, if you are interested in your career, you shouldn't voice any controversial (given your employer) political opinions on public social media. I don't want to give HR any more reasons to mistrust me: say I supported candidate X, and HR think's X and their supporters are racist/misogynist/anti-immigrant. Now if someone raises a complaint about me, legitimate or not, and HR sees that, they're more likely to assume I'm guilty. And at the end of the day, all else being equal (and it often is with HR because they aren't really able to evaluate technical work well), who gets the promotion: the person HR sees as edgy, controversial, and potentially an asshole because of their political views, or the person who doesn't share their political views? Things shouldn't be this way, but they are.
  - golergka 9y ago
    > And at the end of the day, all else being equal (and it often is with HR because they aren't really able to evaluate technical work well), who gets the promotion: the person HR sees as edgy, controversial, and potentially an asshole because of their political views, or the person who doesn't share their political views? You are correct. However, I don't think that it can is even remotely close to China's censorship.
dunkelsten 9y ago
Sorry to be the party pooper, but Advertisers can and do target individual users on Snapchat by simple means of uploading mobile Ad IDs. So while Snap takes the high road here and tells people they're not bleeding or collecting information on their users (which is true), what they don't say is that still all the info that has been bleeding from mobile users through any other of their weather and emoji apps can and will be used against them in Snapchat Advertising campaigns. If they didn't play along, they'd be quickly out of any media planners' heads, and they're already struggling hard against Facebook in the ad ecosystem. Source: I do this stuff for business. Throwaway obviously.

pavlov 9y ago

The practices of the Ministry of Truth — “memory hole” and constant revisioning of history — also become trivial to implement when all data is on centralized servers owned by companies whose continued existence relies on the benevolence of the government. The censors didn’t like Jane’s posts? With the aid of some text generation AI that captures her writing style, rewriting her post history is much less conspicuous than deleting it outright.

opportune 9y ago
Or you only show Jane's posts to her closest friends, to minimize the reach of an idea without directly censoring it. Even if those friends share it you can limit the reach to their closest friends too. If users complain that they're getting their exposure limited base on content, just throw up your hands and say "but it's the algorithms that determine the best content to share to your friends, not us!". I'm pretty convinced that Google and Facebook already actively do this. You bring up a good point with text generation, which made me think of what can be ascertained by writing style. Certainly gender, nationality or regional location, education level, probably something akin to IQ. I'm not sure whether there exists such a thing as a "writer's fingerprint" but if there is, you wouldn't even be able to write things anonymously even with a fake/stolen/alternate account.

lewisl9029 9y ago

It's chilling indeed. Unfortunately I don't think the masses (anywhere, not just in China) care enough about censorship or surveillance for the trend you described to ever happen. Most of my Chinese friends I've talked to about the dangers of WeChat (in person, of course) just shrug off the censorship aspect of the app as a minor inconvenience that they occasionally run into, one that gets completely outweighed by the overall utility the app provides. And that's probably an accurate assessment for most individuals. Even in a borderline dystopian surveillance state like China, the chances that an average law-abiding citizen could ever see the chilling effects of surveillance and censorship materialize as a life-changing event in their own lives or the lives of someone close is admittedly rather slim. The chilling effects shrouding over their society is rarely ever felt to a significant enough degree by a significant enough portion of the populace for them to want to affect change at the risk of prosecution. That said, the possibility that eventually Chinese internet products could by their own merit compete in the global market, outcompeting western alternatives in some cases, is the even more terrifying aspect to me. I wrote a lengthy post about it a while ago, and have copy pasted it a few times already, but here it is again anyways, because I feel it's still relevant: To authoritarian governments all over the world, the censorship and surveillance frameworks built into many Chinese internet services like WeChat are actually extremely valuable features, rather than something they'd want to opt out of. These features have been battle-tested in the largest and most ruthlessly robust surveillance state the world has ever seen, and have time and again proven their effectiveness in influencing public opinion and quelling dissent. If an app like WeChat were to ever gain foothold in a nation with an authoritarian government, all they'd have to do is strike a deal with TenCent, and with the flip of a switch, that government can then enjoy unprecedented control and visibility into the "private" communications of its populace. All the friction involved in the decidedly difficult and costly exercise of building your own large-scale surveillance/censorship infrastructure will suddenly have been removed. The one thing Chinese internet services can offer that no western counterpart can reasonably compete with also makes them by far China's most dangerous export: authoritarianism as a service. To those of us in democratic nations, we must also remember that authoritarianism usually doesn't manifest itself as a cliff, but rather as a gradual, slippery downward slope. Every government in the past has displayed authoritarian tendencies in their history, to varying degrees, and governments in the future will inevitably continue to do so. The natural tendency of government is to slide down the slope of authoritarianism, because government is power, and power corrupts. It takes diligence and continued effort on the part of the governing body and its citizenship to counteract this natural descent. All it would take is another 911 type terrorist attack to sway public opinion enough to the point where enacting some kind of dragnet surveillance system in the name of national security would become politically feasible, in any democratic nation in the world. At that point, the horrible user experience and PR nightmare in having to rebalance the national budget or raise taxes to make room for improving your domestic spying infrastructure could be the only thing standing between us and an irreversible descent into authoritarianism. And if a significant portion of a democratic populace happens to be using WeChat at that point, well, let's just say I don't have a lot of faith that my own government could resist the temptation and take a principled stand against such a frictionless way to expand its own powers. As Chinese offerings mature and become polished and innovative enough to compete with western counterparts in markets outside of China, we could easily start to see users around the world voluntarily start switching to them. That could very well mark the beginning of the end of this golden age of democracy as we know it. I highly recommend taking a look at Nathan Freitas's excellent talk "The Great Firewall Inverts": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEJGqNf2rgk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEJGqNf2rgk. In it, he explores how China's so-called Great Firewall is actually a bit of a misnomer because it's most crucial functionality is its ability to control the flow of information inside its own borders as opposed of keeping information out, how this ability is readily available to be exported to countries around the world in the form of internet services like WeChat, and what we can do about it (which is unfortunately, not a whole lot, other than to educate others on the very non-obvious non-immediate consequences of using these services, and to be vigilant and proactively take stands against the spread of authoritarianism in our own governments).

odiroot 9y ago

If you use Android I recommend you to use Work Profile (or experimental app Island) for it. You never know what WeChat is actually reading from your phone, having really extensive set of permissions.

fiblye 9y ago

>No one is going to use these forums if it means they or their family members can be put in jail for a joke. Nah, they will. The convenience factor far outweighs the risk for most people. Everyone thinks "well, they must've done something stupid", and if not that, "well, that was just one strange occurrence. It won't happen to me."

speedplane 9y ago
Not necessarily. In the US we now have Signal and other secure messaging apps. Why can't those emerge elsewhere?
- fiblye 9y ago
  Because if someone says they want your facebook/line/whatever to talk to you, you become a bit of an outcast when you say that you only use secure messaging apps like Signal. People here might be willing to put up with those discussions, but most people don't. Furthermore, I have huge doubts whenever any US-based company says it's "secure". It's easy to say that. Even on their security page[1], they don't give a clear, straight "yes" to the "is it private?" question. Ask a farmer if his beef comes from real cows and he'll say "yes." Ask a company that makes secure apps if they read your messages, and they say "we use various encryption techniques to prevent unwanted man in the middle attacks and our specific organization name won't read your messages." So sure, they're safe from unwanted attacks and they won't personally read your messages. Governments, well, we won't reference the clear suspect of this question because you know why. https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/212477768-Is-it-private-Can-I-trust-it- https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/212477768-Is-it...
  - speedplane 9y ago
    I understand the social / cultural problems with moving form Facebook, but the value of privacy is a social / cultural one, not a technical one. If you can't engage people on a cultural level, then you've already lost. My original point was just that technical solutions exist, not that there is a social will to use them.

kercker 9y ago

You can share the articles to your friends in China, and they surely will not be jailed. And I think you can talk with them about China's internal politics through WeChat if they are interested in these talks, if there is not a third person will report your conversations to the authority. The person in the article is 'jailed', because someone publicizes his comment or reports it to authority.

tonyztan 9y ago
Why did you put "jailed" in quotation marks? Was he not actually jailed?

issaria 9y ago

It's been like this forever, the police have access to so called "information management system" directly to QQ and later Wechat. There is no other way to talk to people online, you are monitored in all channels. They have no choice, anyone that doesn't cooperate is blocked. Also the sense of "Privacy" is very weak among Chinese, they are brain washed enough to believe "what are you afraid of if you have nothing to hide". So yeah people will continue to use Wechat and other social channels in China.