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YouTube deleting Palmer Luckey’s comments about CCP’s Wumao division
- dTal 6y agoReposting my comment from my own submission: This is a reported issue[0] since last year, but is now apparently going viral [1]. 五毛 translates as "50 cent party", the somewhat well-known CCP astroturfing division. According to the comments in [1], another apparently banned phrase is "gongfei" ( 共匪 ) , which supposedly translates as "communist bandit". [0] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/17821466?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/17821466?hl=en [1]https://imgur.com/gallery/KQPcEkB https://imgur.com/gallery/KQPcEkB
- dpbriggs 6y agoDon't they realize that people will just generate euphemisms? Idiotic.
- Freak_NL 6y agoDoesn't that just mean Winnie-the-Pooh gets banned as well?
- SuoDuanDao 6y agoAn arms race like that favours the trolls though. I do believe the answer to an overly snoopy surveillance state is to drown it in data.
- bitL 6y agoIn that case everybody ends up as a false positive in some subsystem with real consequences.
- SuoDuanDao 6y agoIf everyone is a false positive, the system is clearly poorly designed.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago> Don't they realize that people will just generate euphemisms? This still chills discourse. The cognitive load of staying on top of an accelerating treadmill of euphemisms shouldn’t be discounted.
- droopyEyelids 6y agoI believe that associating the euphemisms with their original context is the type of problem machine learning is well equipped to solve- anyone have the expertise to share their conjecture?
- speechisaright9 6y agoThe scary part is that there is a significant contingent of people in tech who believe Youtube is morally justified in doing this because it's a private platform, and therefore and not subject to human rights standards like freedom of speech. Want to criticize an abusive regime? Build your own Youtube clone!
- catsdanxe 6y agoIsn't that exactly what bitchute and other platforms are doing?
- henriquez 6y agoYes, but it will be tough for them to compete with YouTube, which has lost money consistently since Google acquired them in the early 2000’s. Google is effectively offering YouTube below cost which creates an anticompetitive effect.
- ageitgey 6y agoYouTube no longer loses money - far from it. It generated 15 billion dollars in revenue in 2019, ~10% of Google's revenue. https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2019Q4_alphabet_earnings_release.pdf https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2019Q4_alphabet_earnings...
- Jommi 6y agoThat does not mean it doesn't lose money. You're talking about revenue.
- judge2020 6y agoI don't think you can say they're morally justified in doing this, just legally. We can/should use outrage and bad PR to get them to change how their platform works.
- marcinzm 6y agoThe problem as we've seen is that giving unlimited freedom of speech on these social platforms results in very bad things as state actors use it to incite social unrest. Of course, in protecting Europe and America's ability to remain safe democracies you also end up protecting China's ability to be a dictatorship. Keep in mind that western governments generally support China so you'd have a private company go against the government policies of the nation it is based in.
- manuelabeledo 6y agoIt looks to me like another example of failed automatic comment moderation. But again, it will be interpreted as big tech kneeling to the CCP.
- wendyshu 6y agoHow could we do a test to determine which is the true cause?
- Natsu 6y agoWell, there's this thing called the 50 mao party, due to them being paid 50 mao cents for each propaganda comment they post on behalf of the CCP. We should see if we can discuss that party on youtube, or if wu3 mao2 dang3 gets censored. According to the article, every mention of wu3 mao2 dang3 is being suppressed. https://www.chinasmack.com/glossary#%E4%BA%94%E6%AF%9B%E5%85%9A https://www.chinasmack.com/glossary#%E4%BA%94%E6%AF%9B%E5%85...
- judge2020 6y agoYoutube certainly doesn't have enough moderators to look at every comment, best they can do is have watch words/phrases that flag a comment either for automatic deletion/shadow deletion/human moderation.
- text70 6y agoHave a poorly constructed comment referencing a made up society. "The CCP must be eliminated. I will not stand by idly while the Clown Collective of Pittsburgh goes on strike."
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- thoughtstheseus 6y agoI’m curious what google would not censor. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding this but it looks like google is supporting a political party here. The dollar value of this must be huge.
- wendyshu 6y agoA glossary for those interested in Chinese internet terminology: https://www.chinasmack.com/glossary#%E4%BA%94%E6%AF%9B%E5%85%9A https://www.chinasmack.com/glossary#%E4%BA%94%E6%AF%9B%E5%85...
- baylearn 6y agoHow come this was on the front page an hour ago, but no longer there? Seems it got taken off quite fast.
- eggy 6y agoThis is why I believe it is important to teach our children from first principles; we can no longer rely on media, left or right, to convey a large percentage of truth. I am old enough that the cliche "believe only half of what you read" is still good advice. Too many people glued to their devices, knee-jerk responses without much thought and propagate misinformation at almost the speed of electrons without consulting their slower-thinking, rational mind. I find relief in going back to first principles for many things now even if it is time consuming. I lived in Macau for 7 years and Indonesia for 1 year. I used a VPN when I first arrived in Macau due to trips to the mainland. Hong Kongers are looking for VPNs like crazy this week, since the CCP announced new efforts to monitor "trouble makers" in HK. HK will never be the same.
- frandroid 6y ago> left or right There are very few false news actors on the left. Most fake news is either corporate or state-sponsored, and /somehow/ that heavily skews very right.
- fossuser 6y agoThere's an interesting story about this. In Steven Levy's new book (which I really liked), Facebook: The Inside Story, he talks about teenagers in Macedonia pushing fake political news stories to drive traffic to their ad-laden websites so they could make money. They didn't care about the political content, the incentive was to figure out what would get shared the most/fastest so they could drive traffic. They tried fake news targeting the left, but it wouldn't get very far because people would call it out in comments and then the posters would delete/remove it. Fake news targeting the right (primarily crazy anti-hillary stories) would spread without any resistance and drive a ton of traffic, so they ended up focusing their attention there. I think this is pretty good evidence that there's a bigger problem on the right since the Macedonian teenagers didn't care about the politics and just wanted to drive traffic for money. There are lots of other interesting details in that book - it's good.
- eggy 6y agoI didn't write false or fake news. I wrote we cannot rely on media, left or right, to convey a large percentage of truth. My comment is more one of bias, and if you think bias is mainly a right thing, and very little bias on the left well,...to paraphrase David Foster Wallace's short parable: "Water? What's water?" - a fish.
- Jommi 6y agoAnyone have actual sources noting that this "wumao" thing actually exists and isn't just a slander phrasing against CCPs supposed censorship efforts?
- jannes 6y agoAnd now this story has been flagged on hacker news... It's already off the front page despite 103 upvotes in 1 hour
- calibas 6y agoI've noticed that if you even try to talk about the manipulation of HN, things like abusing flags to get posts buried, the comments get downvoted. Certain posts disappear very quickly, and there's almost always a clear political reason for why some group wouldn't want people seeing that post.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoIts contrary to policy, to talk about voting in posts not about voting. I shouldn't even be posting this.
- calibas 6y agoWhich makes talking about manipulation of HN on HN very difficult.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoNo, just start a post about it.
- calibas 6y agoI already have. So far it's been ignored entirely. You can talk about manipulation of any other social network here, but suggesting HN is being manipulated is oddly taboo.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoSo, no interest? The answer isn't to spam it other places to forge interest. The rule is here to avoid dilution, folks hijacking a post to talk about a meta-topic. It's been a problem from the start.
- detaro 6y agoPrevious discussions of YT censoring some chinese terms in the last 14 days: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221264 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221264 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23172564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23172564
- resheku 6y agohold on, isn't this against some constitutional freedoms of our american friends? or am I misunderstanding something here?
- 0xdeadb00f 6y agoThis should surprise no one. This is the same company that created an alternate version of their browser + search engine specifically for the CCP in order to censor citizen's online activities.