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Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube

• dionian 6y ago
  This phrase is a pejorative for Communists; it is more or less equivalent to the term 'commies' in English. EDIT: Please don't downvote me for contributing relevant facts to the discussion. I do not support censorship.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • slantyyz 6y ago
    If that's the case, shouldn't Youtube ban words like 'cuck', 'libtard' and 'snowflake'?
    • dionian 6y ago
      Yes. I wonder why the Thought Police are going so easy on "Hate".
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  • vorpalhex 6y ago
    Youtube doesn't censor most pejoratives in comments, as you can tell by reading any of the comments.
    • addHocker 6y ago
      Goto have money, goto have power, to be sensitive or gentil glass hearted.
    • chki 6y ago
      I think you are reading things into the comment your replying to that aren't there.
      • vorpalhex 6y ago
        It is either the case that the parent likes to add random facts into conversations such as "the word communist contains 9 letters" which has nothing to do with the conversation, or the parent clearly felt that the phrase being perjorative was tied to it being censored. Let us assume the parent was being on topic and relevant. Therefore they seem to indicate the censoring was due to it being perjorative. As most other perjoratives are not typically censored (per my comment), that would imply that the "Communist Bandit" perjorative is somehow special. Is it special because it's somehow especially worse than other perjoratives, or is it special because it offends a foreign state's political party?
        • chki 6y ago
          I guess we're on a tangent now but maybe it's an interesting exercise. >the parent clearly felt that the phrase being perjorative was tied to it being censored. How do you come to this conclusion? In my view the comment is not implying anything at all, it is merely translating (not only using a direct translation but also conveying the implications of the phrase "communist bandit"). The word "pejorative" adds to the translation. There is nothing in the original comment that says anything about censorship at all.
          • vorpalhex 6y ago
            So then the parent was adding in random fun facts for our benefit?
  • SirHound 6y ago
    Break my fucking heart
  • 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 6y ago
    They definitely don’t ban the word “commie” in English, so why ban the Chinese one?
    • jldugger 6y ago
      You know why.
  • sova 6y ago
    A banded together band of bandits bandying about their propaganda. Communists are not US citizens, and even if they were, the US does not have laws to protect softies from "pejorative speech." Clearly, someone claimed it was "hate speech" -- which it is not -- and now it's banned globally on YouTube because US laws stipulate they must not entertain Hate Speech, but until a US judge says "Communist Bandito" is hate speech, zero relevance.
    • sova 6y ago
      Sure, vote me down but it's true - extranational powers do not have citizens' rights in the US, and even if they did, pejorative language is not something citizens are insulated from as a right. Google is siding with a fascist prison-state over Americans' right to free speech, it is deplorable. And furthermore, the only real justification for a global ban for a US-based company could be "hate speech," which clearly enough communist operatives claimed it was, but just because somebody's feelings are hurt doesn't make something hate speech, it doesn't come down to cancellation politics. In other words, Google is siding with the Party Room of Control because Google is not an American company. If they were, they would not let this stand.
  • Lio 6y ago
    Commie is itself not a pejorative anymore than “communist” is. It’s like calling a member of the National Socialist party a Nazi. Calling someone that’s not a communist or a nazi either would be a pejorative. “Commie bandit” might not be a pejorative either depending on who it’s applied to. At times there have been communist guerrilla groups that have used banditry to fund their political struggle. There are people that believe that an enforced one party state is a form of banditry (although a one party state is not requirement of communism).
• zaggynl 6y ago
  Try commenting 共匪 on any youtube video, the comment will be deleted after ~15 seconds
  • WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
    Holy shit, it's true.
    • fermienrico 6y ago
      Same, I went on some video that has very few views and it is a blanket, Youtube-wide censor. This is gonna backfire so hard, Streisand effect is coming. I tried 共匪 and 共.匪, both got deleted.
  • torrance 6y ago
    Deleted for me too. Wow.
  • johnchristopher 6y ago
    So, are the people commenting 共匪 flagged at Google, now ?
  • elliekelly 6y ago
    It looks like Google translate doesn’t offer suggested synonyms/related words for that term either. It translate the word to “gangster”.
    • oefrha 6y ago
      Google Translate to/from Chinese is often terrible, especially with short phrases. Try 剿匪 which means busting gangs/bandits (剿 = bust, so this phrase is an action against bandits). However, Google translates it to “bandit”.
  • snapetom 6y ago
    Just tried it on a video about WHO and Bruce Alyward. It's still up after 6 minutes. Either we're inundating their censor bot, it's been shadowbanned, or Google has stopped under the flak. I'll keep checking later.
• longtermd 6y ago
  RIP free, American speech.
  • smolder 6y ago
    Just stop using Google, they aren't America. Hmmm, maybe we should have enforced antitrust rules and not legalized unlimited political bribery.
• nunodonato 6y ago
  wow, three "google bans/deletes" on the frontpage today. Its never too early to start ditching everything google.
  • freshhawk 6y ago
    I like how there are a bunch of comments in those other threads insisting Google doesn't do anything moderation that's "political".
    • uoaei 6y ago
      One fascinating thing about being Very Online in the past 10-20 years is watching the messages of astroturfing campaigns slowly leak into public sentiment. I'm sure the same thing happens with other forms of media, primarily cable television. But as an example, with the whole 50 Cent Army, a few people have heard convincing arguments from them and turned into unwitting (or otherwise) propagators of the same rhetoric.
      • jungletime 6y ago
        Carl Jung: “People don't have ideas. Ideas have people.”
        • uoaei 6y ago
          That dude was right on. The concept that's helped me the most in my personal growth has been that of the Jungian shadow.
      • Aunche 6y ago
        > But as an example, with the whole 50 Cent Army, a few people have heard convincing arguments from them and turned into unwitting (or otherwise) propagators of the same rhetoric. The 50 Cent Army posts pro-Chinese propaganda on Chinese websites. Do we have any evidence that the 50 Cent Army posts on English websites? I can't imagine it being that difficult to produce given that we traced Russian propaganda. Forgive my snark, but it sounds like you are unwitting propagating rhetoric that designed to dismiss anything that defends China. If you're interested in what the 50 cent army actually does, Harvard published a paper about it. It turns out that China rarely actually engages in argument, but rather tries to distract people, so they think about other things. https://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/50c.pdf https://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/50c.pdf
• dkdk8283 6y ago
  Very unfortunate - should be able to critique anything and not be censored.
  • ThrowawayBandit 6y ago
    To critique is not to insult. They don't prevent you from criticising anything. They are only trying to remove insults.
    • jpxw 6y ago
      I’m assuming this is bait/trolling, given this is being posted by an anonymous throwaway. If not, you are utterly ridiculous.
    • alibaba_x 6y ago
      Found the CCP shill.
• self_awareness 6y ago
  Just tried it, and after 30 seconds it was deleted
  • RodgerTheGreat 6y ago
    I hope your youtube account isn't linked to a gmail account you consider important.
    • stri8ed 6y ago
      This is the first time I am seriously considering leaving Gmail. Seems like a royal pain in the ass to switch though, since you don't "own" your email handle like you would a domain.
      • bgdam 6y ago
        With a bit of planning you can have a near seamless switch. The biggest pain point would be places where you have to reregister/change your email address, and you can avoid even that if you're fine with Google still getting to read all email that comes to that address.
      • RodgerTheGreat 6y ago
        It is a huge pain in the ass to switch, but the sooner you start transitioning to an email solution you control the sooner you'll be out of the tenuous position of depending on a free service that can be revoked at any time.
      • ricardo81 6y ago
        It's not so bad if you have a domain tied to the gmail account. I use myname@mydomain.com but point my MX records to use gmail for it. So switching for me basically means re-pointing to another mail service. The only reason I use them is their spam filters are excellent. Otherwise I wouldn't. Switching would be laborious if you're using @gmail, probably a case of looking at each unique domain name you've received an email from, logging in and switching addresses. Could be relatively methodical about it by taking a backup and then working down your inbox and deleting the emails from those recipients until you have nothing left. Could be a day job. There is an option in gmail to forward your emails to another address if you wanted to do it over time.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• cscurmudgeon 6y ago
  "Don't be evil"
  • paulintrognon 6y ago
    It's been dropped since 2018. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-dont-be-evil/254019/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-dont-be-evil/2540...
    • SquareWheel 6y ago
      Did you read the article you linked? It's no longer prefacing the code of conduct, but it's still included in it. They moved it from the opening statement to the closing statement. Despite four comments now incorrectly posting otherwise, it has never once been removed from the code of conduct.
      • goda90 6y ago
        "And remember… don’t be evil" the way its written at the end of the code really feels like a sarcastic wink, like "don't be evil" is a joke that they know they don't actually follow.
  • wolfgke 6y ago
    Google Removes 'Don't Be Evil' Clause From Its Code of Conduct https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393 https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...
  • sova 6y ago
    "Do the right thing." (...based on political context and who is paying you)
  • paul7986 6y ago
    They've dropped it and added it back then dropped it and so on I realized first hand they did evil in 2013 (stomping on and or blantantly stealing tech from those dreamers they inspired to dream/do/innovate) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929
• joobus 6y ago
  Google is now openly pro-communist. Fantastic.
  • uoaei 6y ago
    No, they're pro-people-who-call-themselves-Communist-and-also-have-a-lot-of-geopolitical-power-and-market-share. China is most certainly a capitalist state through and through, and Google is a money-grubbing company whose sole motive is profit. It really isn't hard to talk about these things in frank terms without resorting to silly culture-war-style name-calling.
    • joobus 6y ago
      China is communist. You can invent long, hyphenated euphemisms all you want.
      • uoaei 6y ago
        Hey, I can also make unsubstantiated claims on public fora. China is not communist.
      • packet_nerd 6y ago
        China has a stock market [1] and 389 billionaires [2], second only to the US. A decidedly un-communist state of affairs... In reality they are an authoritarian capitalist surveillance state. [1] http://english.sse.com.cn/ http://english.sse.com.cn/ [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanponciano/2020/04/08/the-countries-with-the-most-billionaires-in-2020/#478db8e84429 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanponciano/2020/04/08/the...
      • WilliamEdward 6y ago
        Not even the most anti-china, anti-communist person in the world operating on half a brain cell would call china communist. How are you buying things from china with capital if they're communist?
    • antepodius 6y ago
      Eh. Eventually monopolist/oligarchical capitalism and top-down socialism become isomorphic to each other.
• xhruso00 6y ago
  Tried and was deleted after 30 seconds (3rd refresh)
• myartsev 6y ago
  Interesting - the support ticket at Google is from 11/10/2019, and doesn't look like anything has changed since?
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• buckminstrix 6y ago
  In other news, Youtube will soon be coming to China. Pick your adventure, which do you want? Youtube in CN or write whatever you like? You'll also get videos deleted if you include in them info against WHO advice.
  • grimjack00 6y ago
    Which gets interesting when advice changes.
  • cbilson 6y ago
    Actually, this is more like: “In other news, you are in China now.” I don’t care that much about how Chinese citizens let their 共肥 party censor them, but it’s not ok when I am being censored for speech that could be considered offensive to the communist party of China.
    • buckminstrix 6y ago
      Nope. Well, sort of, but not really. It's more like. You are on Earth now. All the big govs work together at the highest levels. The whole nationalistic shtick is for us proles down here in the bleachers, working the boilers, eating scraps. You know, like entertainment? Something to get all excited about, like. And all govs control info. Democracies just pretend they don't (they do it covertly, through narrative control, disinfo, etc). Social media now presents them with a problem. They have to censor platforms, which makes it overt. This is against the historical trend of democracies modus operandi for information control. Brave new world out there! Edit (this thread now has restrictions, can't reply you, below, so here): I mean more "nationalistic shtick" as in the trope of "US vs China" or "US vs Russia" etc. They have to be able to start a profitable war, for something, right? All the same...expanding the argument (as you have) to the "truths we hold to be self-evident", well, they are unfortunately not implemented in as iron-clad a way as us proles would think. It should be obvious. I love the US, living there, the people, the environment, everything about it...aaaannndd....structurally, you can't really say that the debt trap, opioid epidemic, Wall St bailout, social division deliberately inflamed by the media, covert info control and surveillance, democratic "theatrics" that stymie results, really equates with "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" can you, chum? I mean, I sort of agree with you a little bit, even, in a way. It is sad. And I do think it is an impressive argument. Yes. Very much! ツ Edit (to your edit ツ): Yes, the Muslims in camps, that is a hard thing for Westerners to get their head around. It's funny, tho. I wonder about it, for a few reasons: - Western tech supports the security in XJ - China has protected Russian, and US interests along its Western (Central Asian) borders with regard to the countries there, the Tajik, Afghan and Pakistan areas. It could have caused plenty of troubles for US/Russia there, but on the face of it their security interests align. And honestly, who do you think is coming across the Afghan-Chinese border (or via Tajik) and doing some of the interrogations in the detention centers, working right alongside Chinese? You guessed it, the [C_A] ツ. - I would have thought an American would be more supportive of counter-terrorism/deradicalization/counter-narrative. Being soft on sepratist terrorists almost seems like being an apologist for terrorism. Something I know no American would ever do...I'm sure. :P Especially considering how tough the English speaking world has been on terrorists in the Middle East. I can't imagine them standing up to support Islamic terrorism in XJ, or is that just because it's against CN and it's like "enemy of my enemy is my friend"? But truth is CN no your enemy. Really no! - The XJ narrative is actually cooperative propaganda between US/China. 90%+ of "whistleblowers/defectors" are Chinese disinfo agents working this psyop. Preparing for the "great discrediting" that will come. The remaining ones are fakes/unaffiliated individuals trying to get attention. The real story is: There is strong CT presence in XJ, but the "camps" is fake news, as you say. People apply to go. Like college. And yes, some people wish they were not there, just like college! But they can leave. Only people who are "detained" are terrorists, exactly like in the US. - This XJ propos is a complex info strategy but boils down to: 1) an overly critical narrative works to support China (just like the overly critical MSM actually supported President Trump into election because it fired up his base); 2) regular Chinese, seeing how crazy and fake is Western coverage of XJ, begin to distrust more and more Western media, helping the Party; 3) eventually, when the time is right, XJ will be revealed as to have been wildly-mis-assessed by Western media, in a "mea culpa" moment that boosts Chinese world image, and plays to the idea of it having been unfairly "maligned and mistrusted". 4) For the US side, anything that supports criticism of China plays well domestically for racist/nationalist reasons, and can be used to fire up a base, 5) Also for US, anything extremely emotive and triggering, can be used to make proles act irrationally and distract them, and also thereby to grease the wheels for other moves such as law passage, etc. It's also a distraction to how they're working together. It's all just calculations designed to take the global proletariat to a destination, through the best path. Path has to be right for each country's circumstances. So each country needs their own story. That's all it is. Don't worry about it. As long as you obey the law, you'll be fine. I hope this "red pill" doesn't taste too bitter. I'm not trying to rock your worldview. Nor offend you. Actually I hope you feel a little more a peace about everything. The world doesn't have to be perfect, nor make perfect sense...but it's all still OK. Focus on the stuff that matters to you. Ignore the noise because it's a lie, and it's gonna happen anyway. You still have a lot of power to make your own life good.
• JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  How far does this go? How far could it go? Can one take out an ad with "共匪" in the text? Adwords against it? Is this censored on Orkut? Would Google consider censoring Gmail? Or Google Voice? Would they consider bleeping Google Meets? Google will need to be very public about who signed off on this and under what framework.
  • mmhsieh 6y ago
    What if "共匪" is presented graphically? Do the sniffers have the image recognition to flag those too?
    • ocdtrekkie 6y ago
      Generic corporate spam filters can OCR for spam text in pictures and have been able to do that for many years, I would assume Google can too.
      • mmhsieh 6y ago
        Very interesting. I wonder what would happen if you put in some special noise from adversarial AI methods today. Would be a real arms race of detection vs evasion.
• zozin 6y ago
  Section 230 of the CDA either needs to be re-interpreted by the judiciary or Congress needs to get its act in order and pass a new law that is more reflective of society in 2020 and beyond. It's not 1996 anymore...
• BitwiseFool 6y ago
  I find it so ironic that the reason for censoring a slur against communism is because a capitalist company stands to lose revenue from angering the government of China.
  • Aaronstotle 6y ago
    What could be more American than selling out your values in the name of making more money?
• AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
  From the actual Google Support question, this was posted on 11/10/19. Why are we only now just noticing? Was it previously confined to China and has now just rolled out globally?
  • Yeri 6y ago
    Youtube is blocked in China though, so using VPNs technically Google shouldn't know they are based in CN.
  • jshevek 6y ago
    Viral noticing is fed by widespread predispositions, which change over time like fashion. There is a critical mass of people paying attention to censorship in general, and recently a critical mass of people attentive to the evils of the CCP. Also, seems to have been at least since 2012 https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2012/jun/all-blocked-keywords-according-google https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2012/jun/all-blocked-keywords-...
    • elefanten 6y ago
      How far Google has fallen. From proactively fighting political censorship to silently facilitating it.
    • yorwba 6y ago
      > Also, seems to have been at least since 2012 https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2012/jun/all-blocked-keywords-according-google https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2012/jun/all-blocked-keywords-... You're misrepresenting that link. It's not a list of things that Google censors, but a list of things that Google wanted people to know are blocked by the Great Firewall (i.e. Google calling attention to censorship, not censoring themselves).
• torrance 6y ago
  It appears that the comment is only deleted when it’s made on videos. I made a comment on a YouTube “post” and it’s still there.
• ddevault 6y ago
  Google & YouTube employees on HN: how do you justify still working at this company? Enough of the cognitive dissonance. Face your choices and tell me how you square yourself with them. For shame.
  • strictnein 6y ago
    They look at their bank accounts.
    • ddevault 6y ago
      That doesn't justify their behavior - it condemns it.
      • nialv7 6y ago
        Yeah, but it's a good reason for a lot of them to keep working at the company and turn a deaf ear towards what it's been doing.
        • reaperducer 6y ago
          it's a good reason for a lot of them to keep working at the company and turn a deaf ear towards what it's been doing. It's a reason. It's not a good reason.
          • nialv7 6y ago
            "good" not in a moral sense. Or you could say a strong reason.
      • Frost1x 6y ago
        In our society it does. They're being incentivized (highly) to do said work. I'm not saying I agree with the incentive structure but money is one of the core incentives in the US since it translates to other necessities and wants in life. Those working at dubious businesses are being highly incentivized to do so and at the same time, normalizing said behaviors. Here's the kicker as well, as the clench on labor grows tighter with the middle class being squeezed more and more, people seem oblivious that even if you're getting paid relatively well (6 figures) and have options to jump ship, that may not always be the case when labor keeps caving (sometimes without option) into business incentive structures for compensation. If there are plenty of people on the labor market capable of competing with you yet willing to do work you won't for money, you too will be displaced. Ultimately, the people dangling carrots in front of us win and we (those who rely on labor for income) lose.
• sb057 6y ago
  Will the people who previously defended YouTube/Google's other censorship come out of the woodwork again? It's not as if it is no longer a private website able to moderate its content however it desires. Will they respond to this controversy with that then-popular xkcd strip[1] about how, "if you're yelled at, boycotted, have your show canceled, or get banned from an internet community, your free speech riots aren't being violated. It's just that the people listening think you're an asshole, and they're showing you the door."? [1] https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/
• missosoup 6y ago
  There was a previous unrelated discussion about this just a few hours ago which was climbing to the top of the front page when I saw it. And then just vanished: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221264 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221264 It's not flagged, it just went from #13 on the front page to invisible. In a single refresh. How does that work? Looking at the votes and age, it should be in the top 5 of both Ask and the front page. What's the metric or decision that made it disappear? @dang might be worth commenting on this? Moderation is fine, opaque removal of content with no explanation, not so much. I fully believe @dang has the best interests of the community in mind, so please give us a clear explanation of what's going on here.
  • barbapapa22 6y ago
    HN is extremely corrupt in that way, but don't worry, my reply to you will be flagged and people will continue to ignore HN's extreme biases, and ideological agenda.
    • dang 6y ago
      Just out of curiosity: what ideological agenda?
  • gerbal 6y ago
    If this is true, follow the money. HN is run by a Venture Capital firm. What are their incentives? Who does the business have to keep happy?
    • JumpCrisscross 6y ago
      > If this is true, follow the money Isn't it more likely it was flagged off the front page by overly-enthusiastic users? I'll also admit that this link, to a support thread, is more compelling than the Ask HN, where half the comments were questioning whether the phenomenon was actually happening.
      • jshevek 6y ago
• mmhsieh 6y ago
  The netizens of China have come up with very clever code talk to get around censors. For instance, Hu Jintao's surname can be broken up into the Chinese radicals for "Old Moon." So instead of Hu, they refer to him as Old Moon, etc. I wonder if non-Chinese Google users will be doing the same thing soon.
• lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  Some interesting background on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_bandit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_bandit
  • BlackCherry 6y ago
    I was just about to post this: Communist bandit (Chinese: 共匪; pinyin: gòngfěi) is an anti-communist insult directed to the Chinese Communist Party. The term originated from the Nationalist Government in 1927. This is direct censorship on behalf of the Chinese Government.
    • est 6y ago
      It's an insult but also a historical fact. KMT was listed a observer party in COMINTERN and Chiang Kai Shek himself was nominated as president of COMINTERN China branch. So in a sense KMT was the real Communist deal and CCP was a copycat version. COMINTERN even ordered CCP to join force with KMT to form "united front", Mao himself was forced to join KMT. And it turned out to be a bloodshed purge by the KMT. Afterwards The CCP failed to hold its insurgent territories, CCP vows to kickout the Soviet consultants and cut links with COMINTERN and became independent, thus began the famous "Long March". THe term "bandit" was invented at that time.
      • ardy42 6y ago
        Wasn't it was an enemy-of-my-enemy alliance that occurred in the context of the Japanese invasion, and both sides were planning on picking up their civil war where they left off, after the Japanese had been removed?
        • yorwba 6y ago
          No, the First United Front was formed in 1924, the purge of Communists by the Nationalists started with the Shanghai massacre 1927 and the Long March began in 1934, before the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937.
• haram_masala 6y ago
  Why would Google do this, though? They seem to have mostly ceded the Chinese market.
  • qubex 6y ago
    Because the Chinese market is huge. Because freedom of speech in the Western world is an individual liberty which platforms such as YouTube do not need to guarantee, whereas censorship in China is an absolute requirement they must abide by. The payoffs are asymmetric. If we had legislation in the EU or in the US that demanded that YouTube not tamper with users’ comments, then they’d have to choose between one side and the other. As it is, they’re not legislated as a utility, so they have editorial oversight.
    • duxup 6y ago
      That doesn't really answer the question of that other user. Google largely has largely taken being excluded from China in stride, the other user is wondering why they would do this now.
      • qubex 6y ago
        As another user posted, there’s a long list of terms dating back to 2012, so this isn’t recent. Even the post referred to dates from the end of 2019, so it isn’t exactly novel. Google might well accept being excluded from China, but I’m assuming that the prospect of being allowed to re-enter that market is periodically dangled in front of them by the ruling party in China, and that consequentially Google has an ongoing motive to somewhat abide by the PRC’s rules. Also, Google may be excluded from China, but Google also has a lot to lose if relations with China deteriorate, for example, if China somehow interferes with the primacy of Android there and therefore causes a massive dent in platform numbers.
        • duxup 6y ago
          I get that but that's just conjecture right? As far as China disconnecting from Android or forking it... that seems inevitable. Deleting some comment's wont change that.
• jshevek 6y ago
  I'm not sure how reliable the following site is, but it looks like this has been banned at least since 2012, along with a long list of words that I find shockingly restrictive. https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2012/jun/all-blocked-keywords-according-google https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2012/jun/all-blocked-keywords-...
  • zaggynl 6y ago
    Learned something new today, thanks.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
• alewi481 6y ago
  I wonder if Google Play Books pulls down works with that phrase included within.
• MangoCoffee 6y ago
  its really sad to see Google kowtow to China. i guess money trump everything. a free, open and democratic China is Taiwan. you can see it by Taiwan's handling of covid 19. they are open about their cases, allowed press to ask unlimited questions and show everything to Taiwanese and not conceal any info. its sad that Western companies love money more than the Western values that they always talk about. "Don't be evil"
  • pm90 6y ago
    Western companies don’t talk about values, Western governments do. The past few decades have seen an aggressive destruction in the power of Western governments to subdue them to Corporate power. The US is a prime example where the Republican party’s only policy platform (not even exaggerating) is “tax cuts are the solution to every problem”. The US government specifically has been declawed and dismembered by the current administration to the point of uselessness. The only time it’s willing to assert power is to enable the corrupt dealings of political appointees and lobbyists.
    • MangoCoffee 6y ago
      so what's this "Don't be evil" thingy that Google always talk about
      • pm90 6y ago
        Nice rebuttal, giving a single example to disprove a hypothesis about a complex system with a spectrum of participants. Try to be better at debating hypotheses.
    • smooth_remmy 6y ago
      You naively think that western governments are immune from being influenced by China. You're wrong. Governmental institutions like the WHO have been influenced by China. The German government has been influenced: they have been reluctant to criticize China. There is no magical governmental institution that is immune from this. If the president was a Democrat we'd be in this same situation.
• mikaeluman 6y ago
  Imagine you posting “nazi bandits” on a WW2 video and seeing it vanish after 15s. We in the IT community need to disassociate with google as much as we possibly can. Free speech is more important than ever.
  • buboard 6y ago
    There s no “we” in the IT community, theres the “well funded groupthink” and “the sea of the unknowns”. When did the IT band together to achieve something?
    • PostOnce 6y ago
      Plenty of times, see the entire open source movement or the cypherpunks, or the browser wars in which Firefox was a major competitor, there must be tons of examples.
      • chillacy 6y ago
        I'm not quite sure the "we" encompasses a majority in all of these examples... especially the "browser wars" where firefox users are a definite minority (compared to IE users). But maybe you mean "we" as in "we the resistance" or something. After all the engineers Microsoft hired to build up IE were also part of the IT world.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • _4ziu 6y ago
    The CCP is not the same as nazis. This is silly.
    • mellow2020 6y ago
      "communist bandits" doesn't refer to communists in general. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_bandit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_bandit
• humaid 6y ago
  Similar happens with the name "Eric Ciaramella", which YouTube instantly deletes. This is a name of a CIA whistle blower. It would be interesting to know what other words are in the YouTube censor list.
  • jshevek 6y ago
    I have posted a link to a list elsewhere in the thread. (Not sure if it would be spam to repost it in this reply, sorry for the inconvenience.)
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • Swenrekcah 6y ago
    Interesting, but there is a pretty clear difference between censorship to protect an individual and censorship of critisising a government.
    • che_shirecat 6y ago
      Are we playing "what censorship is OK censorship" now? Who determines that "pretty clear difference?" Isn't the point of being against censorship is that nothing is above the interests of public scrutiny? Partial censorship seems fundamentally contradictory in terms of the underlying moral justification.
      • reaperducer 6y ago
        Are we playing "what censorship is OK censorship" now? No. It's a game that was played out long ago by responsible organizations. It's just that the tech industry is stumbling upon it these days. For example, responsible media outlets don't publish information about rape victims or suicides unless there is a compelling public interest.
        • pgeorgi 6y ago
          And it even varies by culture. US media reporting on crimes in Germany tend to get confused (to the point that at least once they suspected some public cover up attempt) that they won't get the names of arrested suspects - that's part of our approach to privacy here, while apparently having the names out is considered a mechanism against misconduct by the police in the US (at least that's how it was explained to me when I asked why the names are always public). I can follow both arguments but there's only room for implementing one in any given society. Societies overlapping like they do now (thanks to globalization and, to no small part, the internet) doesn't make that easier.
• runawaybottle 6y ago
  All youtube comments should end with ‘Communists Bandits’. Digital civil disobedience. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthago_delenda_est https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthago_delenda_est
• gabaix 6y ago
  Youtube is in a tough spot. They will be blamed: - if they don't take down speech some consider hateful - if they take down speech some do not consider hateful 共匪 is seen as an insult by a group, but others do not. If Youtube bans nothing, then hate speech thrives and they get bad PR. If Youtube bans anything anyone flags as hate speech, then they become de facto as censorship agents for foreign powers. Anything critical can be seen as offensive and taken down by CCP or Russia. Youtube is more and more siding towards removing content. I wonder, can US regulators do something about it?
  • MangoCoffee 6y ago
    its sad to see a company from "Don't be evil" to kowtow but whatever
  • 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 6y ago
    Compounding this is the veritable explosion of what words which are considered “harmful”, not to mention how vogue it is to be offended (“harmed”) on behalf of another group. If google is hoping to appease these groups, they’re in for a futile challenge.
    • ccsnags 6y ago
      They consider offense to be harm because they seem to want to justify violence against their political rivals.
  • ecmascript 6y ago
    Fuck the CCP and Russia. This just shows Google is fine with censorship as long as they can profit from it.
    • sysashi 6y ago
      please don't mistake political party with a country
  • judge2020 6y ago
    It seems the problem is often scale. When you can't automate something at the same mistake level a human could, scaling it either requires compromises or extreme resource expenditure via something like tens of thousands of human moderators.
• jungletime 6y ago
  In this walled garden, these words will not be spoken. Communists killed like a 100 million people. And for some odd reason, Google decided to side with the communists. Remember, Google is doing this for your "benefit"! You might hurt a commie's feelings. And then they may just have to kill you too.
• sacks2k 6y ago
  We never had free speech online. Only the illusion of it. I've noticed, especially recently, that most websites that allow commenting will shadow ban comments they disagree with, even if it's not trolling or abusive. The scary part is that most people don't even see this and just assume that all of the comments they see are the only ones on the site. This can create the false sense that a larger number of people have a particular viewpoint. This sort of censorship and controlling behavior absolutely effects the outcome of our elections and is much worse than anything Russia can even dream of. The Chinese government knows this well and in addition to online troll campaigns, they fund our media companies directly and will pull funding if these companies don't toe the line. With Covid ripping through the profits of many of these media companies, now is the time they will buy them up in mass. We all should be prepared for an online future of CCP controlled media and influence.
  • gator005 6y ago
    This site will shadow ban comments they disagree with, even if it's not trolling or abusive.
• asah 6y ago
  The corner cases is why reddit cmostly using armies of humans for censorship aka moderation - there are auto-report and auto-censor bots only for the most egregious cases. (former mod for a top subreddit)
• williesleg 6y ago
  We need a new internet where all information is free.
• ecmascript 6y ago
  The US government should do something about Google, the sooner the better.
  • qubex 6y ago
    This may not be the Federal Government you want to legislate over Google...
    • ecmascript 6y ago
      Dude, I am from Europe. I don't care what government does it just that somebody does something. In fact, I think the Trump administration is probably perfectly suited to do this.
      • qubex 6y ago
        Dude, I’m in Europe too. If you think the Trump administration is “perfectly suited” to do anything... well, that’s your opinion and you’re entitled to it. I certainly don’t agree with you about that.
  • sio8ohPi 6y ago
    Google will just ban "oompa loompa" to appease them.
• lonelappde 6y ago
  And the support page is locked, so Google is also censoring people from trying to understand the rules they are expected to follow.
• really3452 6y ago
  Hopefully something like DTube (https://d.tube/ https://d.tube/) is able to disrupt the Youtube market soon. This google censorship stuff is getting ridiculous.
  • fsflover 6y ago
    Peertube is more promising, since it is distributed.
  • zeeone 6y ago
    Got excited for a moment, then I read the "About" section and closed my browser tab at "crypto decentralized".
  • WilliamEdward 6y ago
    You won't ever see a youtube competitor. Youtube is running with google's proprietary search engine and has a decade and a half of content a competitor simply wont have. It will always be better than its competitors and some nonsense ban on a word won't stop anyone except 10 or 11 people on hackernews.
• haunter 6y ago
  Don't worry someone will come defending Google that it was automated, AI, heuristic problem, no human was involved etc. etc. Keep dreaming
• yingliu4203 6y ago
  Google is becoming another wechat, one or two words a time. The stages are: - ban one or more words - lock your account - control the visibility of your speech - report your actions to Chinese government - ...
• takecarefnd 6y ago
  The simple answer is there are some “communist bandits” in Google. I won't use any product of google anymore.
• koheripbal 6y ago
  I think a more fundamental problem is a single private company having a near-monopoly on various public communication channels, and having financial interests in various global dictatorships. The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this. Google's "We're a private company" get-out-jail-free card cannot continue to apply.
  • shadowgovt 6y ago
    But is it replaced with "I'm an American company?" There's a deep rabbit-hole of hyper-nationalism right next to the deep rabbit-hole of hyper-corporatism. Does a YouTube beholden to the US government get banned from being used in China at all? And if it does, what happens when China creates a competing product that is more successful than YouTube, and YouTube gets displaced globally by a product that is beholden to China's censorship policies in general, not just in isolated cases?
    • dathinab 6y ago
      What if the laws against censoring content would be quite strict, then a censoring Chinese YouTube clone wouldn't even be possible. (In the countries where it's strict. Which could be the EU, US, Kanada, Japan and more. Through it would be more tricky for smaller China dependent countries or autocratic powers. But the other countries could push that through in the way they currently push through commercial interest like copy right).
    • op03 6y ago
      Wikipedia is the way to go. Why have the hypercorporatists and hypernationalists not replaced it??? Because fuckers in both those camps think it has to make money as a condition to exist. It's their weakness. Requires imagination to exploit.
      • deyan 6y ago
        Wikipedia is very easy to game unfortunately.
• est 6y ago
  In my best guess, if large enough people report a repetitive keyword in a comment, the NLP will mark it as backlist corpus and auto-deletes posts next.
• barbegal 6y ago
  As a software engineer I understand these sort of bugs. A product manager in China asks: can we find a way to prevent people commenting on these videos with comments that contain the word 共匪. Engineer goes away and comes up with a plan to train an AI model to detect these comments. He present's this solution to his manager who informs him that the solution needs to be in place next week, there is no time to gather the required training data and annotate it. There is also no budget for this project. So the engineer goes off to find a new plan and finds that Google already has a basic spam comment detector which uses simple heuristics to delete comments. He adds a new rule to the detector. Mark as spam if it contains the "共匪" sub-string. His boss is now happy, it gets sent to a test team in China who confirm that commenting with the word 共匪 on one of the videos results in the comment being deleted. Test passed job done, ticket closed. At no point does this get escalated or reviewed by anyone properly. And if you don't believe this can happen anywhere, see the Scunthorpe problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
  • jpxw 6y ago
    If you’re right, Google will stop removing these comments now that it has gotten publicity (although personally I heard about it ~a week ago) and apologise. I won’t be holding my breath. Edit: I’ve just noticed the Google support claim here was posted in late 2019. It’s somewhat hard to believe that this has just flown under Google’s radar.
  • codegladiator 6y ago
    > He adds a new rule to the detector. Mark as spam if it contains the "共匪" sub-string But they have the best people of the industry who are highly paid for their engineering and problem solving skills. Isn't this the kind of problem they are supposed to solve ? > As a software engineer I understand these sort of bugs. As a software engineer I would have understood this sort of bug if it was some startup.
  • envy2 6y ago
    Except YouTube is blocked in China, so no one really should be trying to solve this to begin with...
• beshrkayali 6y ago
  Reddit has been doing this for a while now.
• silasdavis 6y ago
  I think that just tipped me on to the negative side ambivalence wrt to Google. It's been a journey. Profanity filter gone wrong? Meh.
• hujun 6y ago
  another fact, you know which population uses word "共匪"? people in Taiwan, this is actually very old word dated way back from early 1900s when Kuomintang was still controlling China; they call communist party "共匪", and keep using that term after they got defeated in China civil war, and fled to Taiwan island.
  • elefanten 6y ago
    I'm not sure I understand your point. It makes sense that people in Taiwan would use political rhetoric that aligns with their perspective. The issue is whether societies without political censorship should support their businesses adopting it. Who uses any specific rhetoric (that should be categorically protected) is not salient to the debate.
• takecarefnd 6y ago
  Google is shit
• bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  At the risk of being branded insufficiently anti-chinese, anti-communist, or overly suspicious: I don't believe it. I mean obviously I believe putting the comment in youtube will get it deleted. I just don't necessarily believe it means what it says or the reasoning is because Google is pro-China. First off, 15 seconds all the time means automatic deletion. Is this really a common enough phrase that they have automatic deletion set up for communist bandits, how about communist yak-fuckers? That sounds pretty unlikely to be set to catch that phrase, so maybe it would just be caught by an automatic sentiment/profanity analysis. How about just yak-fuckers, how about bandits? I'm not going to try all these out myself because I don't have the linguistic expertise to know if that ideograph means communist bandits, I do have some co-workers I could ask I guess, maybe tomorrow. Everyone is asking about the phrase in other google services, well in Google translate it translates it as Gangsters when I go to English and Italian. The second one is pretty suspicious because Gangster isn't an Italian word but that's what it gave me a couple minutes ago. I guess I will wait until later to see how this pans out before getting my rage fully on. rage cautiously in prep stage for now. on edit: fixed some grammar.
• jpxw 6y ago
  https://translate.google.com https://translate.google.com: “共匪” => “Gangster” Interesting
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• tourist2d 6y ago
  Why is this news?
• ixxi 6y ago
  The only way this makes sense is if the intention isn't to ban in order to stop the term being used, but the opposite; to appear to ban in order to cause a sensation. Is any anti-CCP content banned/blocked? epochtimes? falungong? ... it's all still there.
• 1cvmask 6y ago
  All these platforms have always been censorship platforms. It is the nature of the beast. They can explicitly or implicitly censor. They can censor by making sure the algorithm downvotes or content is not discoverable. Many governments, ranging from the US government to other countries have had these platforms like YouTube enforce censorship of content: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/12/us/politics/youtube-terrorism-anwar-al-awlaki.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/12/us/politics/youtube-terro...
• RIMR 6y ago
  What an infantile understanding of the issue. The reason that hate speech creates outrage is because it exists to communicate inhuman hatred of others for their immutable characteristics. The reason that sites like YouTube don't tolerate it isn't that they share in the outrage - it's that they rely entirely on advertisers to keep their bottom line positive, and advertisers aren't going to pay to be associated with hate speech. Hate speech isn't "mostly subjective". It can be easily identified using a few easy qualifiers. Most people who have trouble defining hate speech are people who, at least partially, agree with it.
  • shigawire 6y ago
    I don't agree it can be easily identified by automated moderation tools.
  • manigandham 6y ago
    Where does it say that hate speech is about immutable characteristics? Is that your subjective personal definition? Advertisers really don't care that much (and I'm speaking as a 12 year adtech veteran). They play into popular culture and are being carried along with the increasingly sensitive social environment online. Also we're talking about comments, not video content, and it's futile to try and control how others react. > "It can be easily identified using a few easy qualifiers." Anyone can find anything offensive and hateful. That's the opposite of easily identified. > "Most people who have trouble defining hate speech are people who, at least partially, agree with it." Because it's subjective, according to who's defining it.
    • joshuamorton 6y ago
      Here's the first result from Googling "hate speech": > public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation I might broaden the final bit to "immutable characteristics" instead of the specific list they provide. For the same reason, I probably wouldn't consider the comment under discussion hate speech, but I'm really curious what you find difficult about that definition. Edit: see the followups for why something that is a social construct can be immutable, since multiple people have made the same flawed response.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• mikaeluman 6y ago
  Tested and verified. It was deleted right away. I didn’t even right anything harsh.
• socrates1998 6y ago
  I can't fathom how private companies still think that they can make the CCP happy AND their western customers. The CCP holds values that are completely untenable to western values. As time goes on, companies who don't know this will lose massive brand value in the western world. The NBA has managed to tight rope this so far, but I doubt they can hold it together for very much longer. The CCP is still calling for the Houston Rockets GM to be fired 10 months after he tweeted vague support for the Hong Kong Democracy movement. They still refuse to show NBA games domestically because of it. One vague tweet in support of democracy.
  • gruez 6y ago
    The bigger question is why google/youtube cares. Isn't youtube/google banned in china?
    • yorwba 6y ago
      They still have lots of Chinese users, who probably don't enjoy having insults hurled at them.
      • Qub3d 6y ago
        There are lots of human subcultures that don't enjoy having insults hurled at them, however. Should we really have a corporation drawing these lines in the sand? And should it be doing so with a basic word filter, rather than the "report" function? All context is lost in situations like this, and it is anathema to the design of the internet.
  • shadowgovt 6y ago
    Actually it's super-easy; barely an inconvenience. Most Western customers really do not care. Like, really-really. The default attitude is "Well, China has its rules and the Western nations have theirs. They can get along." Leaks between rulesets are relatively rare in the sea of regular day-to-day operations. And honestly, I don't think the CCP's goals are as far different from the goals of, say, the US government's as some believe. The countries are trading buddies. They're both empires with a number of citizens that is too-big-a-number-to-visualize-in-one's-head. If they ever came into direct conflict, these differences would start to put Western-headquartered countries in difficult positions, but that's not the current state of things.
• kauffj 6y ago
  If you think the idea of trusting giant social media corporations with the levers to control our speech is outrageous, so does everyone working on LBRY. We are working hard to design systems that have the same user experience as the traditional web, but fundamentally redesigned so that this kind of behavior is outright impossible. LBRY allows for local control of the publishing experience, and layers identity, discovery, and payments on top of a distributed data network. P2P desktop client: https://lbry.com/get https://lbry.com/get Web-version: https://lbry.tv https://lbry.tv Tech documentation: https://lbry.tech https://lbry.tech Almost 100 people contributed to LBRY last month, and more than 2 million people used it. Come join us, and escape YouTube :)
• russli1993 6y ago
  I write some comments on Youtube that explains my understanding of the situation happening in China, in a objective as much as possible. And it turns out it could be viewed as Pro-china. Then these comments gets deleted by Youtube. Whether its reported or deleted by the system I don't know.
• kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  I vote for 1989年4月 as a replacement. It's just a harmless date.
  • shalmanese 6y ago
    Yes, posting the date for 2 months before Tiananmen Square is clearly going to rile the Chinese.
• jimbob45 6y ago
  Counterpoint: this is (weirdly effective) reverse psychology. We know China runs slave camps near the NK border and slavery is typically demonized here in America. However, no one talks about it because China deplatforms relatively benign topics instead. Do we really think they wouldn't prefer a Winnie the Pooh image of their leader over slave camps? Even Tiananmen Square is preferable to forced human organ harvesting.
  • mrobot 6y ago
    > We know China runs slave camps near the NK border We don't, actually. > slavery is typically demonized here in America No it's not, it's just hidden so liberals (including republicans) don't have to think about it. It's the prison industrial complex. > Do we really think they wouldn't prefer a Winnie the Pooh image of their leader over slave camps? Even Tiananmen Square is preferable to forced human organ harvesting. Anything you read in the western media about China or North Korea should be second-guessed and double-checked against eastern media, usually chinese language, for facts. The so-called "free press" is really a coordinated operation run by a few media companies in the interests of the capitalist class. People supposedly iced by Kim Jong Un have been magically resurrected many times. Western media tries to put all the blame of the coronavirus deaths in the US on China "not coming forward" when they had months and months to prepare. The US has entire media structures like "Radio Free Asia" to spread anti-China propaganda.
    • pauliunas 6y ago
      so you think it's smart to look for "facts" in Chinese media with all their censorship? What a ridiculous idea, there are no facts there, only things their government wants people to see.
• AmazingTurtle 6y ago
  "This question is locked and replying has been disabled." See, they pulled a sneaky on ya
• exo-pla-net 6y ago
  YouTube filtering slurs and hateful memes is not surprising. They would target anything that gets spammed and reduces the quality of discourse (such as it is on YouTube). I see no evidence that China is getting any special treatment here. It was the subject of hateful spam, so now it gets a filter. Same would apply to any other country or topic. From my perspective, the absolutist "freedom of speech"/anti-censorship belief is naive. There would be no havens for intelligent communication online without censorship. When an intelligent, well-reasoned critique is deliberately suppressed, protest is warranted. Until then, it's shrill and spammy and divisive and ascribes nefarious intent to people simply trying to keep the room clean and is, ironically, best moderated away to preserve the quality of discourse elsewhere.
  • jakebasile 6y ago
    Who decides what is intelligent, well-reasoned critique? Those in power have an incentive to categorize anything that threatens them as "hate speech" or "obscene" or "threatening to the social order".
    • exo-pla-net 6y ago
      There are two parties that decide what constitutes an intelligent, well-reasoned critique. The first party is the owner(s) of a platform. For any owner, there is incentive to preserve power, but there is also incentive to not act as an oppressive villain. The owner sometimes has ideals beyond power, such as cultivating free communication to build ideas for a better world. But even the most callous, iron-fisted dictator can sniff the danger in being overly oppressive. They also sometimes recognize that unstifled communication serves as a competitive advantage. As a consequence, free speech is less fragile than it seems. There are even whiffs of it in China itself: https://www.cecc.gov/freedom-of-expression-in-china-a-privilege-not-a-right https://www.cecc.gov/freedom-of-expression-in-china-a-privil... The second party that decides what constitutes an intelligent, well-reasoned critique are the viewers of and contributors to a platform. We have pitchforks, and pitchforks have sharp ends, but they can be dulled by overuse. Furthermore, the citizen's militia grows weary when called upon too often. And thus, when the rallying cry is sounded for the non-event of a crude slur being censored, we're eroding our own power. We're jumping the gun, which should fire only when we think an intelligent, well-reasoned critique has been suppressed. Making a slippery slope argument is betraying a lack of understanding about the above complex dynamic.
• xster 6y ago
  Surprised how everyone just reads the title and no one is discussing whether "Google deletes comment globally" as reported by a single forum post by "Anti-communist hero" who posted one time in 2019 is factually true.
• lern_too_spel 6y ago
  Tried it myself. Can confirm. 15 seconds on the dot.
• rmason 6y ago
  Can someone help me? Who are the communist bandits? Are they people who oppose the Communist government in China?
  • RichardCA 6y ago
    It goes all the way back to Chiang Kai-shek and Nationalist China. It's an old-fashioned way to insult the Maoists and promote the idea that Taiwan was (and still is) in the right.
• nromiun 6y ago
  I am kind of surprised (and worried) that anyone is surprised by this. YouTube has always been known for very heavy moderation. This is only about comments but they also delete tons of videos without any explanation. If the creator is big enough they can cause some outrage in Twitter and get YouTube's "offical" attention and then maybe they will fix it. Otherwise you are out of luck. I wish there was some alternative platform creators could switch to.
• sergiotapia 6y ago
  Stop using youtube, better more decentralized versions exist in the form on lbry.tv or peertube. Why keep planting trees in their walled garden?
• peter_retief 6y ago
  I did a search on youtube for 共匪 and got many results? I added 共匪, 五毛党, or 五毛 as a comment and it quietly disappeared after a few seconds
• yandrypozo 6y ago
  Unbelievable :( it's like deleting all comments that include: "fascist bandits" Communism has killed more people than any other ideology. > The European Parliament has condemned communism as equivalent to Nazism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Declaration_on_European_Conscience_and_Communism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Declaration_on_European...
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• abandonliberty 6y ago
  This is mainly algo-driven through the report functionality, right? Does Google even have any sort of significant oversight?
• zanethomas 6y ago
  They are also deleting comments containing 五毛 which refers to China's army of censors.
• sebastianconcpt 6y ago
  The left invariably requires censorship in order to give the impression of prevailing and being strong. Those who’s interests are in line with their values implement it.
  • qubex 6y ago
    Implying that “the Left” and the Communist Party of China are in any way comparable by referring to them collectively demonstrated a remarkable lack of political insight and a remarkable degree of intellectual dishonesty.
    • sebastianconcpt 6y ago
      On the contrary, but I welcome you to try to make a case instead of an easy claim that an international movement isn’t. BTW: the downvotes without arguments already proved my point.
      • aww_dang 6y ago
        Welcome to ycommienator, a site for entrepreneurs.
• thoughtstheseus 6y ago
  N/A
• gonational 6y ago
  “Then they came for me...” I think we need to band together against censorship in general, not only when it’s related to China.
• tru3_power 6y ago
  In the end, we just have to stop using this stuff. We’re all addicted, complain that google shouldn’t have all this power, yet we can take that power away by choosing not to use these platforms. I’m guilty of this myself.
• aml702 6y ago
  shame on Google
• aml702 6y ago
  SHAME on Google
• whoevercares 6y ago
  Personally I’m not really offended by rare appearance of “共匪”. Politically this word implies the failure to recognize the legal government of mainland China, which goes against international consensus. I’m not surprised this word is blocked at scale
• root_axis 6y ago
  Look at all the flagged comments in this thread and all over the site. HN is the most influential technology forum on the internet, the government should really get involved in preventing the kind of mass censorship that goes on this forum. I am being entirely sarcastic.
  • banads 6y ago
    Maybe if HN got a couple billion more users...
    • root_axis 6y ago
      Why does that matter?
• rbanffy 6y ago
  As someone who's regularly on the receiving end of far-right anti-communist rhetoric that, in places I have lived, includes death threats and a reasonably credible suspicion government may soon want to arrest and disappear some people, I welcome some measure of hate speech suppression. Before I hit submit, let me add a mandatory "burn, karma, burn" because I know what I'm stepping into.
  • elefanten 6y ago
    Yeah, it's stunning that someone who's experienced motivated authoritarian repression is arguing in favor of the CCP's bullshit regime-preservation distortions on speech, thought and discourse. You know who the global leaders of disappearing citizens they disagree with are? Automated filters on a global communication platform instituted for bullshit, regime-appeasing reasons are not going to solve community-driven hate in localities. Anyone motivated to hate you will invent as many slurs as they need. Warping our institutions to play whack-a-mole against bad actors is shooting ourselves in the foot.
• geuis 6y ago
  Just tried this on one of my own youtube videos. Got deleted after only a couple of minutes.
• arduanika 6y ago
  Never forget Dehomag: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehomag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehomag
• dirtydroog 6y ago
  Here's my take on what's probably going on: YouTube is a platform designed around showing video ads to targeted audiences. In order to show those ads they need to allow people to upload user generated content. This content needs to be 'brand safe', i.e. it cannot be content that advertisers don't want to be associated with. 'Content' is more than just the video itself, comments are part of this. If an Easily Offended Entity, in this instance 'China', sees an ad from AdvertiserX appearing on content they deem offensive they can kick up a stink about this, this is especially true in China where nationalism is extremely strong. Western brands have a long history of apologising to China over minor things, they really cannot risk fervent nationalism from damaging their balance sheet either through boycotts or having authorities turning a blind eye to counterfeiting. So YouTube will remove this content, not because they're under the thumb of China, but because advertisers call the shots.
• f0ok 6y ago
  "This question is locked and replying has been disabled." Does anyone know about other censored phrases or expressions? On a completely different note, wouldn't it be possible to create a free (as in freedom), open-source, decentralized search engine?
• leoh 6y ago
  >In 1996, Microsoft halted sales of its Windows 95 operating system in mainland China due to discoveries that it contained the term in Chinese-language input method software bundled with the operating system following police raids on computer stores.
• vxNsr 6y ago
  Same thing happens with JoeBiden.info on facebook. You can't send it in messenger, facebook will tell you it's blocked. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before google manually adds it to the "unsecure websites" list
• anigbrowl 6y ago
  Can any native Chinese speaker offer some additional context, like whether this is likely just a request from the CCP to mute criticism in general, or whether the phrase in Chinese has some specific meaning/implications beyond the separate meaning of the two characters?
• Gollapalli 6y ago
  Every damn day, I see more and more reasons why google should be hit with anti-trust.
• cwperkins 6y ago
  There's something I've been thinking about lately and its the fact that I learned about the Black feelings of the Hasidic (Jewish) community moving to Bergen-Lafayette neighborhood of Jersey City only after the mass shooting that occurred their earlier this year. I saw a news report from the neighborhood and a resident mentioned how they have seen a big shift in their neighborhood and longtime residents were getting harassed to sell their homes for the incoming Hasidic residents as they were looking to leave Brooklyn for cheaper real estate. I bring this up in relation to free speech because it seems to me like there was no outlet for the residents to speak up on what was happening. It looks like there was a chilling effect and some discussions may just not have been had. I think its important to provide that forum to air grievances so that a chilling effect does not occur and people feel like they are a frog slowly being boiled alive. I don't think Democracy is the model for all nations today, but I do think that as countries develop and have a certain educated populace that they will trend in that direction. Its better to be enfranchised, then completely trust the decisions made on your behalf elected by a group of technocrats but it requires a populace voting in good faith and of a certain education attainment overall. We must keep an open dialog and forum for people to speak freely. I like to think of confronting prejudice as a first responder running towards danger. I don't cower from having those conversations, I'd much prefer to deconstruct them. I have to say though that the internet makes that hard since it is easy to find echo chambers. I really want to see communities like r/politics on Reddit better try to foster rich, insightful discourse because I really don't see it that way now and if someone feels differently, I would love to hear from you. I personally think Reddit should create a new "Featured Comments" feature like they have in comments on NYT and appoint mods of different biases to choose Featured Comments on highly upvoted content. In the US House of Representatives they give members of the house equal time to address the floor and should we try to virtually recreate that type of forum as well?
  • golergka 6y ago
    To be honest, I think that many, if not most, of israeli and diaspors Jews (and quite a lot of religious, too) would be banned from YouTube for antisemitism if they voiced their opinions on Hasidim there.
    • 6y ago
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• leephillips 6y ago
  “This question is locked and replying has been disabled.”
• throwaway17_17 6y ago
  I don’t understand the shock here, Google doesn’t even allow for Taiwan to be considered a country on its search page. When you search for Taiwan it shows the map picture and says ‘Taiwan’, but Germany for instance shows the map picture and says ‘Germany Country in Europe’. This is the very top of the page on the mobile layout. Doing things to avoid disgruntling the CCP is standard operating procedure for Google at this point.
• qbaqbaqba 6y ago
  What next? Winnie-the-Pooh?
• djdjrjebfbfjd 6y ago
  I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess the phrase was added to their hate speech filter. I would guess that if I wrote racist or anti-semitic phrases those would be automatically deleted as well. Sometimes it gets a bit silly. I remember that in the game Words With Friends you’re not allowed to play “jew”. Which is one of the easiest ways to use a ‘j’.
• ickwabe 6y ago
  There's a gazillion videos all over youtube criticizing, mocking, and calling out the Chinese government for all sorts of repressive activities. I'm confused as to why people would think youtube is bothering to sensor those two characters in oparticular as opposed to something much more likely like spam/bot filtering or channel word filtering. I'd think the Chinese Gov would be much more animated about videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9AvUuEPgvA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9AvUuEPgvA or this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=S3RzKKfNkTk https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=S3RzKKfNkTk or this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4TReo_G74A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4TReo_G74A or any of millions of other videos. i can find plenty of negative comments directed at the chinese communist party in comments all over youtube.
  • banads 6y ago
    Subtle creeping influence is often more effective is the long term than just an all once take over
• janee 6y ago
  Scrolling through all this I still can't find an explanation. Can anyone shed light on the context of this slur? From my ignorant perspective I just don't understand why it would necessitate a takedown. Is it aimed at the whole country, some subset of people, the party, communism in general?? I don't get it.
• octocop 6y ago
  共匪
• beyondkaoru 6y ago
  I was skeptical, so tried it out myself and tried making a comment there with 'communist bandits' / 共匪. My Youtube comment was indeed removed completely and silently, including from my comment history. I am very disappointed with Youtube.
• Dahoon 6y ago
  >Anti-Chinese communist party hero Yeah, most definitely a YouTube user.
• fareesh 6y ago
  I propose the following solution: 1) You must be signed in to view "controversial" comments 2) When you sign up you are given a "Safe search" style set of options for what kind of comment moderation you want (Safe, Moderate, None). 3) For users who want no moderation, apply US law or whichever law applies. For everyone else, apply the existing censorship.
• alfiedotwtf 6y ago
  So I posted this last night [1], it got to the front page (77 points at the time) and after about an hour, it was gone... also missing from the Ask HN page. I could imagine YouTube toeing the Chinese party line, but Hacker News? Really?! Is this about the Y Combinator fund not wanting to upset Chinese money? This really leaves a bad taste in my mouth @pg 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221264 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221264
• dang 6y ago
  All: please don't miss that there are multiple pages of comments. Unfortunately the two top subthreads have become so large that they fill out the first page entirely. You have to click 'More' at the bottom to see the rest (there are almost 1000 at this point).
  • dang 6y ago
    I made this a collapsed stub comment to collect replies, since we don't want to distract the top of the thread too much.
    • jb775 6y ago
      The "more" pagination button appears to only be visible on the first page of comments....you need to update the URL manually to get to comment pages 3+
      • dang 6y ago
        Oh! The second page was crashing. It should be fixed now. Eesh; I'm sorry. There's a bug that we haven't fixed yet, the workaround for which is to restart the server after renaming an account. I must have forgotten to do that.
    • elorant 6y ago
      Collapsing comments doesn't seem to work in subsequent pages
      • dang 6y ago
        It should be working now. Same issue as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23228692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23228692.
        • elorant 6y ago
          Yeap, it does. Thanks man.
• mesozoic 6y ago
  共匪 Does Hacker news?
• wdr1 6y ago
  I just commented on a few of my videos & it's still there?
• donatj 6y ago
  Just leaving this here: https://共匪.com https://xn--b6qv5b.com
• baybal2 6y ago
  I do remember, google had a record of collaborationism in China, especially around 6-4. They were self-blocking gmail, their forums, blogger, etc. Now, the 6-4 hysteria came to Youtube, now in US!
• sebastianconcpt 6y ago
  Welcome to the next stage of censorship: Google anti-anticommunism is not covert but overt now. Take note kids: all forms of anticommunism are going to be pathologized and, when possible, criminalized.
• vuln 6y ago
  Man I love the fact that the upvotes continue to increase.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• broabprobe 6y ago
  the date on this is 11/10/19, why wasn't this posted till now?
• voiddb 6y ago
  To all the people think "共匪" is hate speech, what do you think we should do with such a group that killed millions? Go check the history of CCP. Calling them "共匪" is a gross understatement.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• chenzhekl 6y ago
  Isn't it an offending word to some just like what jap is for Japanese? I don't think it should be allowed just because people don't like communism.
• Zanneth 6y ago
  Just read on Wikipedia[1] that the Chinese Communist Party raided computer stores back in 1996 that sold Windows 95 because the OS contained text input software with the “communist bandit” word in its dictionary. Microsoft had to temporarily halt sales because of the incident. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_bandit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_bandit
• zheli 6y ago
  共匪
• Simulacra 6y ago
  共匪