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Ask HN: How long has Google been censoring YouTube comments critical of China?
I was just alerted to YouTube censoring comments critical of China. I then tested this by commenting on one of my own videos with random hotkeys that I knew would trigger anything of the sort. About 10 seconds later, my test comments were gone.
Edit: I posted the following comment to my video, and this was deleted too. This could not be a spam filtering false positive:
"The world's sanitisation problem could be helped with more recycling of chinese trash, especially in wuhan. The green waste that's turned into compost in tiananmen square is a bonus to sustainability."
- mcfly1985 6y agoWatching people embrace censorship is the most depressing thing I’ve ever witnessed.
- alfiedotwtf 6y agoTo be honest, I was kind of shocked this happened. Remember when Google used to be cool? You changed man, you changed.
- aboringusername 6y agoI mean, defining "censorship" is kind of difficult. You've got a stream of data, in the form of text, that is being added to a database. It would be logical to apply a 'filter' of sorts because let's be honest, there are bad actors out there (remember penis enlargement/viagra for example). More and more of these filters are being done automatically, based on models of previously removed comments. You could try this yourself, create a simple application that submits 1,000,000 comments per second, of all sorts of varieties including links and disguised motives and try to decide which stays and which goes. Analyze your results, do you have a platform where the comments are meaningful/useful? Are you more "liberal" in allowing comments to stay even if they are obvious spam/unwanted content because "muh free speech!"? If you're lucky, you may end up with something half readable, and not completely overridden with bots or content that is absolute meaningless. Imagine if hackernews or other content sites didn't have the same measures, awful content would over run the site and make it less attractive. All sites need to have some form of moderation. As a result, sometimes, content is removed. Whether that's "malicious" to you depends on your worldview. I appreciate that moderating a large platform is a thankless task, you have potentially millions of comments each and every day, no human could possibly handle that volume of information. Reddit is the same, automoderator can "censor" users, without them even knowing, and allows regex based filters, which may not be perfect but at least allow obviously terrible content to be removed before it's posted. Remember, the bad actors (some might say russian interference during an election is bad) will always be trying to "game the system", so you need to constantly adapt your filters to try and be one step ahead in a cat and mouse game. Just some food for thought not everything is "censorship".
- im3w1l 6y agoThey think they are immune. That it happens to other people.
- bootloop 6y agoWhat video did you comment on? Your own? The owner/uploader can remove comments too so it might not have been YT. Edit: As comments pointed out, I clearly didn't read the post properly, OP already stated it was his own video.
- alfiedotwtf 6y agoI commented on my own video and the comment was gone in about 10 seconds!
- deweller 6y agoParent said "I then tested this by commenting on one of my own videos"
- templain 6y agoWell you didn't care when conservatives were censored blatantly and unfairly for years, did you? You can't even question the official covid narrative without being hardcore censored.
- missosoup 6y agoCame across this recently when posting on someone else's video, the comment wasn't even critical of China but I can see how a pair of words in sequence might have come off that way. Tested on a private video of my own just now, comment gone within seconds.
- alfiedotwtf 6y agoThanks for the confirmation. Can you tell us what words you used?
- ladyanita22 6y agoWhat is going on with Google lately? They're really going downhill
- libertine 6y agoThey're too big for their own sake. That shows on things like this, lack of vision in some products, lack of consistency, abandoned products, products that seem to be detached, etc...
- yorwba 6y ago"random hotkeys that I knew would trigger anything of the sort" Just single keywords? And which ones? The stories I've seen were about people posting just 共匪, and honestly I'm not too bothered if comments that are just name-calling get deleted. If actual well-written criticism disappears, that would be another matter.
- alfiedotwtf 6y agoIt was 5 random words that would I knew would be picked up by a dumb regex if it were done naively
- deweller 6y agoWhich ones?
- alfiedotwtf 6y agoChinese trash wuhan tiananmen square
- mytailorisrich 6y ago"Chinese trash" may have been caught by their anti-harassment/insult/racism filters. If that's the case, I'm glad. Youtube comments are too often absolutely awful. Or maybe the random set of words was caught as spam. There are plenty of content on China, Wuhan, or Tiananmen Square, so these words themselves obviously do not trigger anything.
- alfiedotwtf 6y agoI've seen a clip of someone posting other random words that did not seem at all like harassment/insults/racist, and they were deleted too. Also, my video was of me playing with a synthesizer, so I'm not sure how my comment was anyway related to the video or China. Edit: the comment wasn't deleted when it China was changed to Taiwan
- eastendguy 6y agoLink with more details that I found (I am not sure if this is the original post about this): https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/glr2h4/youtube_google_llc_is_banning_words_that_the_ccp/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/glr2h4/youtube_go... I really hope that is just some stupid bug and not on purpose. The trigger keywords seem pretty harmless to me.
- alfiedotwtf 6y agoReplacing "China" with "Taiwan" did not trigger a deleted comment
- randomanon 6y ago> I really hope that is just some stupid bug and not on purpose Think again, censorship on YT, Twitter, Reddit and few other social media channels is well known for those that dig a little bit deeper. Usually it's applied to anything that can be interpreted as 'wrongthink' but more recently, it's also being applied to any negative comments regarding China...
- mytailorisrich 6y agoThe terms listed in what you've linked to are insults, not "words that the CCP considers offensive". It's like if you called someone a "Republican asshole", "libtard", of whatever the poetic Americann English lexicon has invented. For example, I'm sure someone could write in response to this very comment: "how much are you paid to post, you 50 Cent Commie Bandit". This is not a reply, this is an harassing insult. This has nothing to do with political censorship. This is about insults, harassment, and civility.
- keiferski 6y agoHave you ever read the comments section of a YouTube video? It's rife with insults and always has been.
- alfiedotwtf 6y agoCheck my edit to the description of this post. I made a new comment, and there is zero way it could have been seen as harassment.
- newyankee 6y agoAll of the social media platforms have become hotbeds for information warfare. From country based subreddits (or any subreddit with some political content) to Youtube banning videos that are mass reported, it is crazy. Right now in India a popular youtuber had his video deleted. It was apparently on track to becoming the most liked non music video on the platform.
- alfiedotwtf 6y agoSure, but that's why I chose my video, which was posted a year ago with only 800 views. I knew there was no way somebody could have been watching my video within a minute and saw that comment then flagged it - this was automated.
- aboringusername 6y agoI think that's a key part of the perception that comments are being "censored". I mean, as I write this comment, I am typing in a textarea (<textarea name="text" rows="6" cols="60"></textarea>), it has a few hidden fields, and that's about it. This could be a complete spam message (go visit my penis enlarger at http://someurl.com http://someurl.com), or something that adds value to the discussion. The server could pre-emptively try to work that out and automoderate, or a human could get to it later, maybe community flagging provides a signal or can be abused. Imagine state actors doing this on a ginormous scale. Troll farms with people submitting content all day every day, to try and "confuse" an AI or make it "re-learn", that would be in their bests interests if they have a particular agenda. That's what we're dealing with here.
- jtdev 6y agoI wonder if YT deletes comments or content critical of the U.S.? Based on some of the comments here, only China is being shielded from criticism...
- jacknews 6y agoI don't know about China in particular, but I find youtube censorship to be particularly deceitful. If you make a comment, and it is censored for some reason, perhaps the video owner blocked you or whatever, the comment still shows; TO YOU. When you are logged in, you can see your comment. But no-one else can see it. Log out, or logon as someone else, and your comment is simply not there. I found a similar thing with facebook. If you join a group, and are then banned for some reason (I'm not sure the exact mechanism), you can no longer see the group - it's as though it doesn't exist; it doesn't show in searches, etc. But log out, or logon as someone else, and there it is. This 'customized view of reality' seems to me much more dangerous than simple censorship.
- comprev 6y agoI think this method is called a "shadow ban" on Reddit. You can see your comment on the sub only when logged in.
- jacknews 6y agoYes that's it exactly, thanks for naming the practice. It should be banned, lol.
- bitwize 6y agoIt's used here on Hackernews too. It contains troll harassment. By not letting a troll know they've been banned, you remove the incentive they might have to create a new account to continue their harassment.
- zozbot234 6y agoHN has the "showdead" option to reveal those comments, though. And the ban gets reversed altogether once enough users have "vouched" for them.
- crankylinuxuser 6y ago> It contains troll harassment. By not letting a troll know they've been banned, you remove the incentive they might have to create a new account to continue their harassment. Completely false. It only adds another step, which is "check account with a private session". I'm sure eventually shadowbanning will also look at what IP address and also lie as well. But right now I don't know any sites that do that. But shadowbanning is a disgusting practice, and is completely anti-transparency. It can be used to further political agendas (like the article is about). And if an account is spewing troll garbage, just delete, add to a mod log, and close. But very few sites are open like this. (The only site I'm aware of was the old site kuro5hin.org). edit: And not only shadowbanning, but flags/dead also are abused here on HN. Its all too easy for a legit post with a differing (non-trollish) viewpoint that differs from the status quo, get -1'ed into oblivion, and then summarily flaggedkilled. Again, I've seen this happen when it appeared that there was some sort of concerted campaign to silence certain opinions. Requests to require a comment for flags/-1's, or even a 'who modded this' have gone unanswered.
- zorked 6y agoTry to post some grammatically incoherent comment and include the words "penis", "enlargement", and "pills". Let us know how it went. This is probably just an anti-spam measure. There are many anti-china bots out there, so posting off-topic bot-like comments will get you removed. What happened to Occam's razor?
- alfiedotwtf 6y agoIt was a comment on my own video, and this is after I saw a clip from a friend doing the same thing to one of his videos - random words that would be picked up be a naive regex.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dessant 6y agoIt would help if you'd share the exact comments that got removed.
- alfiedotwtf 6y agoI mentioned then in another comment here. It was: Chinese trash wuhan tiananmen square The comment below was that "Chinese trash" could have been blocked for "anti-harassment", but for a year old, low-viewed volume video giving a synthesizer demo, I'm not sure how Google could have interpreted it as harassment vs a comment on sanitation and recycling.
- p49k 6y agoDid you try posting an actual comment which referenced those terms in a meaningful way? Maybe it’s being blocked for being spammy incoherent word salad.
- alfiedotwtf 6y agoNo. I was in shock and then made this Ask HN post in disbelief, wanting to see if others had experienced the same thing.
- thrlllllll 6y agoCan confirm works on my own videos, even if they are unlisted. My own video, 0 views, 0 comments. 共匪, 五毛党, or 五毛 These are all instantly deleted, roughly 10-20s
- mytailorisrich 6y agoThese are insults, trolling terms. It sounds like Youtube now has filters against harassment in order to keep things a minimum civil (rather than being involved in a pro-China conspiracy...) There is plenty of material highly critical of China and its government on Youtube.
- AlchemistCamp 6y agoThat's not true. The 1st term is a historical name for soldiers on the winning side of the civil war that has become a political smear somewhat like "Rethuglicans" or similar. The second and third refers to the well-documented practice of government paid commenters trying to shape public opinion. There's no good justification for YouTube to censor all comments on that topic. If anything the topic has become more important over the years and people are more concerned about it than ever after the 2016 elections.
- mytailorisrich 6y agoSo the first one has indeed become an insult (if it wasn't all along...) The second and third are also insults. Whether the Chinese government pays posters or not, the fact is that the terms are most commonly used in an insulting and harassing manner against anyone that has posted something deemed too "pro-China".
- PeterisP 6y agoThat probably applies to 共匪, but 五毛党 (50 Cent Party) or 五毛 (50 Cent) are reasonable terms that can be used to discuss a particular phenomenon and don't carry anything inherently insulting, the only insulting part is the reference to that group (so if someone considers that group to be immoral, then associating with an immoral group may be considered as an insult) - if everyone decided to call them "fluffykittens" then soon "fluffykittens" would be a trolling term and insult in some sense, but that definitely would not be a reason to delete posts using "fluffykittens". Clear nominative use should always be allowed. I mean, calling someone a troll is an insult pretty much equivalent to 五毛党 but we clearly want to be able to talk about trolls and trolling here, and we want to be able to call someone a troll even if that might insult them. To invoke Godwin's law, calling someone a nazi is usually an insult, that does not justify deleting posts using the word "nazi" even when clearly using to associate someone's actions or behavior with nazis - a reasonable discourse needs the ability to equivocate bad actions with other bad actions, comparing them with appropriate labels, and there are actions where every appropriate label will be insulting simply because the actions themselves are bad, and every non-insulting label will be unappropriate whitewashing.
- atomashpolskiy 6y agoTalk about YouTube. I'm trying to start a conversation on censorship here, on HN, and IMMEDIATELY get flagged. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23220998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23220998 Pissed? Drop a question to hn@ycombinator.com and let the admins know your position on this.
- generalpass 6y agoFirst rule of HN: don't talk about HN.
- stevespang 6y agoYeah, it sux. The moderator for HN is a censor, practices censorship, the First Amendment does not rule at HN.
- atomashpolskiy 6y agoThis comment received +7 and -4 in just 7 minutes since publication. This makes me think that (1) the issue is important and (2) there are clearly people here, who don't want it to be discussed openly.
- flunhat 6y agoFor the past two months, you’ve been frenetically posting about how Bill Gates planned coronavirus to institute some new world order. I think your posts are getting flagged because they’re starting to verge on spam.
- atomashpolskiy 6y agoYou are grossly overexaggerating. I've posted 5 links in total to 3 different pieces of J. Corbett's investigation on BGMF.
- flunhat 6y agoIt’s at least 12 separate articles — I can see your submission history
- quantummkv 6y agoWhat is really sad is that it is neither new or unexpected. People have been warning about exactly this for years. We have seen this happen before. Yet I see a lot of people throwing around Occam's razor and trying to convince themselves that this is not happening in this very thread.
- aboringusername 6y agoPersonally, I feel the YouTube comment section is vastly better than it used to be in the early days of the site. I watched a music video by an artist and the comment section surfaced a comment that the artist had died last year, a piece of information that was actually useful, rather than "FIRST!" or whatever tripe I used to see. It's not perfect, but progress has been made here, more often than not an overly aggressive moderation that yields better more informative comments is better, even at the risk of the legitimate ones being removed.
- Nextgrid 6y ago> rather than "FIRST!" or whatever tripe I used to see It's sad that the lack of "first" is considered as a breakthrough while it was actually the normal situation for decades (every single forum will give you a ban if you start spamming "first" or similar shitposts). The only reason why "first" became a thing is because YouTube has near-zero comment moderation.
- jeroenhd 6y agoI'm more intended to think that YouTube is trying to prevent the leaking shit stain that is the youtube comment section from growing even further. There's some nice channels I see, but anything discussing something even remotely political (which, these days, includes mobile networks, solar panels and other categories that have fallen victim to conspiracy nuts) are full of trolls or shit people in general. Some comment threads incite violence against Jews, others violence against Muslims, and then there's the white supremacists inciting violence against everybody. Putting comments trolling any Chinese viewers below anything that covers China is something that's taken off lately, either because of racism or because of increased activism in Hong Kong. Having everybody be free to say anything had led the YouTube comments to be generally regarded as a place or toxicity and horror for many people. YouTube trying to brush up their image after Elsagate and other such PR disasters only makes sense, and their comment section is the first I'd personally clean up. I don't know how you'd do that without dancing on the dangerous line between (American) expectations of complete freedom of speech and getting out the nutjobs, but someone over at Google seems to be trying to and probably uses this new-fangled machine learning thing to do it because it doesn't involve paying people to keep the stream of verbal manure in check. There's also the danger to your platform that comes with angering Chinese nationalists. When Notepad++ added a message to stand up to the Chinese concentration camps, its Github got completely flooded by angry Chinese people and trolls from both sides. Some of the people calling the author "filthy dog" and other expletives were maintainers of seemingly commonly-used libraries and projects. Criticising the worst of China seems to have the same effect as posting a video of a burning American flag. I doubt many platform owners would like their platform to host these social garbage fires. All of that culminates into topics where trolling often occurs being removed or shadow banned. Posts on HN get shadowbanned as well, usually after manual flagging, but I do have doubts about the absence of troll farms controlling the narrative here. As far as I know, YouTube has always had certain words being blacklisted, usually swears and such. This system can also be used by channel owners to maintain their comment section. I can only imagine when Google decided to add material criticising China, but I'd expect it would have started when the first Hong Kong protests were met with violence.
- zozbot234 6y ago> There's also the danger to your platform that comes with angering Chinese nationalists. When Notepad++ added a message to stand up to the Chinese concentration camps, its Github got completely flooded by angry Chinese people and trolls from both sides. I've definitely seen this kind of thing happen, even on HN, but it's not necessarily organized or paid for like the wumao stereotype implies. Just ordinary "human flesh search engine" dynamics will easily do that - the West has its 4chan trolls, the Chinese have their angry internet nationalism. The most you can say with certainty is that it's definitely tolerated by the authorities, but then there's no reason why it wouldn't be.
- alfiedotwtf 6y ago... and this post has now disappeared from the front page? It was #13 with 77 upvotes.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- keiferski 6y agoThe fact that it may be an automatic filter is sort of missing the point, IMO. An irrational, mechanical Kafkesque dystopia is still a dystopia. Censorship doesn't need to be obvious and straightforward, like 1984.
- alfiedotwtf 6y agoAnd now this post has been removed from the Ask HN front page too...
- effingwewt 6y agoHN slides further downhill every day. I made this account because I forgot my login when I wanted to post because I could not believe dang was letting someone who owned a product be an absolute asshole to everyone critical of it in the comments. I think dang said he would let him slide because 'the product was the guys baby and wouldn't we be mad if someone hated our product/baby'. Point being, moderators are human and have their own biases. When those align with your users, great. When they don't, it's the worst. Shadowbans for dissenters. Removal of proper posts. Instant killing of people's comments. Everyone should turn showdead on. you will see some garbage, but probably 80% are either the other side of the conversation, or have the correct information, but the commenter has been shadowbanned, or one user -1'd them with an alt or 2 and there does the comment anyway.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- _iyig 6y agoModerators, why was this post removed from the front page (and the Ask HN front page)? It is newer and has more upvotes than many other submissions. Are questions like the OP's still allowed on HN?
- zihotki 6y agoIf many people will flag it it will automatically removed from front page. This is likely is not a mod's job but flagging.
- jpxw 6y agohttps://translate.google.com https://translate.google.com: 共匪 => “Gangster” Interesting.
- tossAfterUsing 6y agoIt wouldn't be such a problem to have YouTube colluding with Chinese censors if we didn't depend so much on YouTube to disseminate information.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoThis submission was flagged. I just upvoted it, the flag disappeared instantly. Maybe that's the answer?
- EmilioMartinez 6y agoObviously automated, so this is irrelevant and besides the point (in this case). But it strikes me as odd that that comment sounds so innocent to you. There's an ongoing multi-sided arms race between AI-assisted spam filters, censorship, trolls, socio-political movements, scammers, etc. The result being that many groups find new ways of communicating and circumventing filters. So, if I randomly came across your uncanny and unnatural post in the current context, it would read to me as if you were crypto-advocating for chinese genocide to help resolve world overpopulation, calling the Tiananmen massacre a net positive for mankind. Seriously, read it carefully.