11 ms·

I built ByteDance's censorship machine

153 points by jbegley 6y ago

orange_joe 6y ago
While most of the post is what I would expect, the minority language censorship was unexpected. It’s another sign of China’s ethnocentrism/Han Supremacist culture play out. It’s a real shame to see this sort of enforced death of linguistic diversity.
- exhaze 6y ago
  How come you found it unexpected?
- jbob2000 6y ago
  We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people in power WANT society to look like. My company recently moved away from animated characters back to using humans in their ads. Most of the people in our ads are mixed race, you can't really tell if they're asian, white, arab, or "tanned". So it's the same promotion of a genetic look, just with a different group of people.
  - CharlesW 6y ago
    > We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people in power WANT society to look like. The actual explanation is simpler and more crass: It's about what sells to the target audience. At least for large campaigns, these things are thoroughly vetted. If you're uncomfortable with some aspect of an ad, you aren't the target audience.
    - jbob2000 6y ago
      And you don't think the CCP's promotion of Han is the same thing?
      - duxup 6y ago
        Promotion? They described simply cutting off a stream because of the language spoken.
        jbob2000 6y ago
        Ok, and if my company's marketing team proposed an ad with a bunch of white people in it, they would also be cut off. Same shit, different process.
        duxup 6y ago
        I can't comment on what your marketing team is up to but I don't know of any state level limitation on the demographics of ads. I see plenty of ads with white only folks in it...
      - slowmovintarget 6y ago
        It is definitively not. CCP has zero interest in sales. It is interested in preserving the party by controlling the populace, with special emphasis on ideology. The activist Left in the West is grass-roots censorship, which is a completely different problem from a top-down, military-backed authoritarian regime. Granted, the former seems hard at work trying to produce the latter.
      - dillondoyle 6y ago
        Absolute not. Even disregarding your false promotion comparison, what about the other side? CCP 'promotes' (actually carries out) the brutal persecution of non-Han and specifically Uighurs in part facilitated propaganda ('ads') US corporations are not forced by the government to include for instance only one community or exclude another in their communications. Us corporations are not de facto owned by the government and do not have the same goal of consolidating power to maintain the CCP's (and increasingly just one man at the top's) grip over its own citizens. In the US many spend lots of money lobbying to keep the government out of their business!
  - gumby 6y ago
    > We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people in power WANT society to look like. What? It’s all about the money. Ads, and tv (which is simply a honeypot to draw ad viewers) want to connect with as many viewers as possible in order to sell as much product (cars, cereal, or whatever) as possible. In the 1950s US the only people with appreciable spending power were white parents, thus those were the ads. Magazines, which could be more finely targeted, were more diverse overall, though demographically siloed. Society does not look like that (it never did, but the $$$ distribution did). Ads and TV are on the trailing edge, not the leading edge. And TV looks demographically more like the people I see, and more like my family, than it ever has before. I have no idea what the phrase “people in power WANT society to look like” really means.
    - thisiszilff 6y ago
      It's true, in a way, society looks like what the people in power want society to look like because the people in power are those with money and people who figure out how to make more money get power. It's like you say, that TV and ads are on the trailing edge as people figure out how to keep up with the distribution of money in society.
    - rchaud 6y ago
      > I have no idea what the phrase “people in power WANT society to look like” really means. OP wasn't exactly ambiguous. Only thing that was missing from "people in power" was maybe three sets of parantheses enclosing it.
      - sudosysgen 6y ago
        This seems like a ridiculously uncharitable explanation to the point of bad faith. A better interpretation that is also accurate would be that the people in power are people with money and influence.
  - nemothekid 6y ago
    I think it's strange that you equate "using racially ambiguous people" to promotion of said group. The fictional marketing company and the CCP have very different goals and I think you are projecting your own personal biases onto modern television marketing.
- nomay 6y ago
  Live streaming platforms literally detect and warn against "unauthorized foreigners" from appearing on the screen. TV channels like BBC (for high-end hotels) are being monitored real-time to black-out sensitive parts, books mailed or imported from overseas get pages ripped out, even entries in dictionaries get painted black. Don't underestimate the seriousness of the censorship, it's among the few things communists are actually good at.
  - jaflo 6y ago
    Could you elaborate on the first point? Do they run live race detection on streams and cut off access?
    - nomay 6y ago
      I counldn't find that tweet from a female streaming on Doyu that got a warning for featuring her white boyfriend, but found another news. https://en.pingwest.com/a/6595 https://en.pingwest.com/a/6595
    - hkmaxpro 6y ago
      The stream was cutoff after a white guy appeared for a minute. If it’s not race detection, I don’t know what it is. https://twitter.com/JoshuaDummer/status/1280877750245453828 https://twitter.com/JoshuaDummer/status/1280877750245453828 https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3963271 https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3963271
- noobface1337 6y ago
  Where is this idea of Han supremacy coming from? I've known many Han who, when they had the option, they chose to be classified as a minority on their ID cards, since you know, minorities in China get far better treatment. And if we were to talk about death of languages, maybe you need to realise that it's actually a much worse problem in Anglo-Saxon countries than anywhere else https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_time_of_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_time_of_e...
- yorwba 6y ago
  Most speakers of minority languages in China are Han Chinese. The censors who interrupted live streams when a non-Mandarin language was spoken were most likely speakers of a minority language, just a different one, which is why they didn't understand anything. So I don't think describing it as "Han Supremacism" is accurate. Presumably they didn't interrupt the streams because they felt ethnically superior to the speaker, but because they're liable if something illegal gets said and they don't censor it. And note their reason for not automatically blocking Uyghur content: "We eventually decided not to do it: We didn't have enough Uyghur language data points in our system, and the most popular livestream rooms were already closely monitored." Which I guess means they have a dedicated group of Uyghur speakers on staff to censor those streams.
- hkmaxpro 6y ago
  Douyin even banned speakers of Cantonese [0][1], a language spoken by 80M+ speakers and a top-20 language in the world [2]. Cantonese was widely spoken in Guangdong until the CCP actively wiped it out [3]. Among the 204 members of the CCP Central Committee, only 2 are from Guangdong [4]. Guangdong generated the highest GDP among all 31 administrative divisions [5], and doesn’t get its fair share of high ranking officials. It’s not Han supremacy. It’s Mandarin-Han supremacy. [0] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200402/03110144220/tiktok-users-china-temporarily-banned-speaking-their-own-cantonese-language-instead-using-official-mandarin.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200402/03110144220/tikto... [1] https://www.scmp.com/abacus/culture/article/3078365/chinas-version-tiktok-suspends-users-speaking-cantonese https://www.scmp.com/abacus/culture/article/3078365/chinas-v... (paywalled) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num... [3] https://www.businessinsider.com/china-is-forcing-its-biggest-cantonese-speaking-region-to-speak-mandarin-2014-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/china-is-forcing-its-biggest... [4] https://www.sohu.com/a/429814378_469134 https://www.sohu.com/a/429814378_469134 (in Chinese) [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_administrative_divisions_by_GDP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_administrative...
IceWreck 6y ago
The article doesn't name the engineer but is still heavy on personal details. If China wanted to persecute said engineer they could easily find out who is responsible.
- AntiImperialist 6y ago
  Except if it's a fictional propaganda piece. Most of these "anonymous sources" reports are.
- chinathrowaway 6y ago
  dont worry he is probably getting paid by the ccp to spread this message. keep on lockin down. the wuhan videos were real, but we manged to censor everything else.
burlesona 6y ago
Reading this, it was hard not to think of the direction US Academia, and to a lesser degree the government in general, is headed. We’re having deeply uncomfortable dilemmas with free speech - and whether speech at scale is fundamentally different. Ten years ago I could never have imagined an apparatus such as described in this article existing in the US, but today it seems possible. Perhaps still unlikely, but possible.
- faitswulff 6y ago
  I was recently blocked for 24 hours from Facebook for testing the phrase “fucking British” in the context of colonial history. Note that I was testing it after another poster asked if their own comment saying the same thing had been censored. After having my test comment removed, I confirmed that “okay, it seems automated” which was itself flagged as being hate speech somehow, and my ban instated immediately. My contacts proceeded to discuss ways to get around the filter (use idioms, odd characters, Unicode) and I was immediately reminded of how people get around Chinese censorship.
- duxup 6y ago
  That seems like an entirely different topic from what is described in the article.
nomay 6y ago
Censorship is imo Bytedance's lesser evil. The way this company destroys journalism is its biggest crime. Algorithm-driven "self-media" that ByteDance popularised (with Toutiao) has essentially wiped out news in China, anyone can write sensationalized and fabricated news-style stories on its platforms and compete with "mundane and boring" serious news，AND GET PAID, these self-media are so prevalent and low-brow that fact-checking has been rendered futile. It now has democratized censorship，indoctrination and misinformation, as the self-media care only about their ads income. My advice? Vehemently reject any info/news platforms, as they care only about clicks. >The “Post-Truth” Publication Where Chinese Students in America Get Their News" https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-post-truth-publication-where-chinese-students-in-america-get-their-news https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-post-trut...
- duxup 6y ago
  We have similar situations elsewhere. Folks rage about 'the media' (a term now so amorphous I can't tell what it means anymore, or if the person even reads / watches what they think of as the media), so we get lots of self research / internet sleuth type discovery on platforms like reddit. We had one on HN recently too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26186645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26186645. I applaud the person for putting in the effort, but I'm highly skeptical of internet sleuths and their ability to string a few searches and documents together into an accurate narrative / provide context to complex systems simply because they found what they thought of as similar things to recent events.
  - nomay 6y ago
    The difference is incentive, you probably have heard that ByteDance already makes big money, it pays these self-media to concoct what-ever eye-grabbing "content", and lend credibility to these "writers" by putting them in the same arena with traditional news and reporters: their news aggregation app and say this is today's "news" for you. The only metric that matters is click numbers, you can now out-do reporters with your perfect news stories that check every eye-grabbing boxes, coz you can type however you like and face no consequences, so why not to make it as juicy as possible.
svieira 6y ago
> As a young unicorn, ByteDance does not have strong government relationships like other tech giants do, so it's walking a tightrope every second. For those in free countries: when you build moderation tools and use them to silence political dissent "because you have to / to play the game" the game plays you. There is no one "too big" to be crushed by those with the material source of political power [1] and everyone tells themselves that they "have to" build the tools because they don't have the "power" to push back or because "it really is that bad this time". But some things don't have to be built (or built in the centralized, controllable way that they are). And when centralization is required or "it really is that bad this time", censorship should be widely publicized and discussed both in real time and with regular retrospectives on decisions to censor that are _public_. For those in dictatorships: All is not lost, regardless. [2][3] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_power_grows_out_of_the_barrel_of_a_gun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_power_grows_out_of_t... [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20120107141633/http://www.vaclavhavel.cz/showtrans.php?cat=clanky&val=72_aj_clanky.html&typ=HTML https://web.archive.org/web/20120107141633/http://www.vaclav... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless
- ah69 6y ago
  Excellent comment. Thank you.
- andreilys 6y ago
  If the ruling government controls all elements of public discourse, how exactly do you “widely publicize and discuss censorship in real time”?
- xwolfi 6y ago
  Having been raised in a democracy and raising my kids in a dictatorship, I think there's a lot of misunderstanding from both side. People in democracies cannot comprehend how anyone in a dictatorship could live anything else than miserable, and people in dictatorship mostly see people in democracies as hypocrite imperialists who lie to themselves about who truly rules. The funny thing is that, well, it mostly all depend on how much you care and how corrupt the people in charge are, totally independent of the system. A dictatorship in Singapore works better than a democracy in Mexico for most metrics except anything that will make the power feel it's not in perfect control. The only difference in a dictatorship is the complete insecurity of the leaders who can't fathom that... we'd frigging vote for them would they ask nicely :D And you can completely ignore the party(ies), and live an entirely fulfilling and useful life, in both systems. I wouldn't argue for doing this but I see it all the time from both side and I envy it sometimes. So this whole debate about censorship, it's really just a debate about insecurity. They don't censor the truth here, they don't censor debate or discussion, they only censor what nobody cares about: critics of the party. So it's a lot less "terrible" or "inhuman" than I thought it would be coming from a democracy. And I think the way to make it change isn't to whine and yell at it as much as you can, but to embrace the competent leaders when they come and give confidence to them we'll give them 10x more power by voting directly for them. And lay the final trap. At least my origin democracy became a democracy when it started doing just that after 2 centuries of massacres and revolts followed by authoritarian counter reactions in a seemingly endless cycle of aggressive "activism". It simply ended when we went to war in mass without being forced and convinced the rulers we'd vote for them anyway as a result, sheeples we are, which we did the first election. Trapped.
sneak 6y ago
> I was on a central technology team that supports the Trust and Safety team, which sits within ByteDance's core data department. Funny how censorship which makes these platforms entirely untrustworthy as a view into the world is filed under "Trust" in the org chart. It's sort of like how Facebook's faux grassroots "community standards" are just the rules Facebook dictates to its community.
AntiImperialist 6y ago
Countries have to protect themselves. Influential media companies of every country do the same thing. NEXT!
chinathrowaway 6y ago
so, somehow we are supposed to believe china has all the censorship capabilities in the world, but was not able to stem the flood of shaky smartphone videos flowing out of wuhan? this seems like a big ccp psyop. (this article and its source included)
throw373782 6y ago
Anonymous source? Check. Unverifiable anecdotal evidence? Check. Somehow I’m not surprised that HN users don’t express the faintest bit of skepticism on topics that confirm their pre-existing biases. “Alarmingly, only 14 percent of American students were able to reliably distinguish fact from opinion in reading tests.” [0] [0] https://bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/pisa-test-china https://bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/pisa-test-chin...
- Jonanin 6y ago
  Uh huh... don’t kid yourself that this is exclusively a problem with Americans. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-post-truth-publication-where-chinese-students-in-america-get-their-news https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-post-trut...
- zepto 6y ago
  > Somehow I’m not surprised that HN users don’t express the faintest bit of skepticism on topics that confirm their pre-existing biases. Could it be that you are drawing conclusions without evidence here? How do you know anything about the skepticism or biases of those who don’t express them?
  - AntiImperialist 6y ago
    He's obviously talking about those who express them.
- fernandotakai 6y ago
  >Unverifiable anecdotal evidence? Check. i didn't see any evidence in comment post that contradicts the post. the only link i see right now is for an article praising chinese kids, which is highly interesting given the contents of the original post.
- jryle70 6y ago
  > Anonymous source? Check. > Unverifiable anecdotal evidence? Check. Have you ever wondered why there is no Edward Snowden of China, despite the fact the Chinese equivalence of NSA is undoubtedly as much aggressive, if not more? Such a person would have been suicidal, not to mention no news organizations would be willing to publish their information. In such an environment anonymous source is the norm. It has to be. Unfortunately that also provides plausible deniability, as your post illustrates.
quantummkv 6y ago
The more that I read about what the social media giants are doing everywhere, including the recent drama around wsb discord ban and the Facebook-Australia thing, I feel that what's happening in China is chillingly close to happening to the rest of the world. Or maybe it is already happening slowly and we don't realise it yet.
Firebrand 6y ago
I never really paid attention to just how massive Bytedance actually is until the article mentioned some of their products. Makes sense how they had the resources to brute force TikTok into the American consciousness so quickly.
3gg 6y ago
> At the time, I was a tech worker at ByteDance, where I helped develop tools and platforms for content moderation. In other words, I had helped build the system that censored accounts like mine. What do you mean "in other words"? Are there other words? How does one get into this situation without realizing what they are really doing? It looks obvious in retrospect, but what is not obvious back then?
- avianlyric 6y ago
  I don’t think the original source was in anyway unaware of what they were doing. They’re not making any attempt to excuse their behaviour, just describe and explain what it’s like to work at a Chinese tech company. We shouldn’t admonish those failing to stand-up for our ideals, when they live in a world where those ideals get you at best censored, and at worst disappeared.
  - 3gg 6y ago
    You are right, but I was legitimately curious. At the very least, they have the choice of not working in that particular role/company. Further down the article they mention their colleagues had studied journalism and raised some eyebrows, and that he/she wanted to change things from the inside, if only by a little, then realized they were just a powerless cog. I'm going to guess they must be in their late 20s / early 30s now.
    - nomay 6y ago
      Tech jobs are the most well-paid in China, sometimes better than gov jobs that require connections, since tech companies have access to the global excess money flow； if you want to buy a condo and get married in big cities, tech jobs are one of the few chances that plebs can get to have a shot, even then, the typical condo prices is like 20 to 40 times their annual income. People are paying tens of thousands to get employee referral to get into these big tech companies, and I'd say that the majority of their employee are deeply patriotic and believe what they are doing is necessary and right since they are the winners of the social system.
DevKoala 6y ago
> When I was at ByteDance, we received multiple requests from the bases to develop an algorithm that could automatically detect when a Douyin user spoke Uyghur, and then cut off the livestream session. Disgusting.
- DevKoala 6y ago
  This comment is getting downvoted. How? At least make an argument for why this is not a disgusting practice.
halfjoking 6y ago
This is what corporate media wants in America. The same people behind the Iraq war are now outrage machines trying to drum up support for censorship in the name of stopping a new threat... "homegrown Al Qaeda" wearing a MAGA hat. I know this will be divisive, but the NYT needs to formally retract their reporting of the attacks on the capitol: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-false-and-exaggerated-claims https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-false-and-exaggerated-c...
- reducesuffering 6y ago
  What happened to Glen? He's clearly angry at media like NYT for narrative spinning and reporting mistakes. This entire article is about how they hastily reported Officer Sisnick was killed by the mob, but as of now we don't definitively know how he died yet. That's basically it. Almost all of his reporting is taking a microscope to US left media and policies, while blatantly failing to report on any egregious errors with US right media and policies. It's like siding with Putin because RT will find some sort of dirt on the opposition.
  - halfjoking 6y ago
    I agree Glenn should hate both sides equally. It's also hurting his credibility being used as a mouthpiece by right-wing media. He's just given time on Fox so they could say "See - the swamp is real, even this leftist says so! That's why you should never trust those liberals." But please give Glenn some slack. If it wasn't for him Edward Snowden may be in Guantanamo, instead of regularly giving interviews over livestreams. Calling the last 6 weeks "reporting mistakes" is way too generous. These are planted stories to shape public opinion. Glenn recognizes this and clearly explains using these events as a basis to censor the entire internet is unbelievably dangerous. Not since the Patriot Act has there been a danger to democracy so egregious. I hope people see realize it before it's too late.
  - cwkoss 6y ago
    > Almost all of his reporting is taking a microscope to US left media and policies, while blatantly failing to report on any egregious errors with US right media and policies. There is significant liberal discourse around errors in right media already: its a crowded beat already (and it often devolves into fruitless filter bubble circle jerks). Non-partisan criticism of liberal discourse is a fairly empty beat in modern discourse, which is why I value his reporting. Personally, I think the idea that journalists should try to balance both sides of every issue is without basis unless you're specifically trying to make an institution like NYT that tries to cover essentially everything.
ctocoder 6y ago
Computing and Ethics was a very important class in my CS program. Just because you can should you?
KDJohnBrown 6y ago
Don’t feel bad. It is nearly impossible to become wealthy in software without increasing the suffering of others.
- malloreon 6y ago
  I’m at a loss to understand why your statement means this person, or anyone who increases the suffering of others in the pursuit of their own personal wealth, shouldn’t feel bad about doing so.
  - thewarrior 6y ago
    What do you do afterwards ? All good jobs eventually end up in a handful of mega corporations. The startups will either be acquired by one or become one.
  - KDJohnBrown 6y ago
    Because that is how capitalism works in practice, and that’s where the true wealth comes from on the internet: sociopathic detachment.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  Do you think that as a whole, something like Youtube has overall increased suffering?
  - KDJohnBrown 6y ago
    A television which spies on you and can be with you 24/7/365? Every parent I know gives up by age 10 and YouTube becomes their childrens’ babysitters. No more childhood, just consumption until the day we die.
    - ehsankia 6y ago
      I've learned hundreds of skills on Youtube. I fixed my toilet last week for 15$, instead of the usual 150$ it would cost to get a plumber. Millions of people around the world can learn and solve things by themselves and get help with the tap of a button. That's not valuable?

153 points by jbegley 6y ago

While most of the post is what I would expect, the minority language censorship was unexpected. It’s another sign of China’s ethnocentrism/Han Supremacist culture play out. It’s a real shame to see this sort of enforced death of linguistic diversity.

exhaze 6y ago
How come you found it unexpected?
jbob2000 6y ago
We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people in power WANT society to look like. My company recently moved away from animated characters back to using humans in their ads. Most of the people in our ads are mixed race, you can't really tell if they're asian, white, arab, or "tanned". So it's the same promotion of a genetic look, just with a different group of people.
- CharlesW 6y ago
  > We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people in power WANT society to look like. The actual explanation is simpler and more crass: It's about what sells to the target audience. At least for large campaigns, these things are thoroughly vetted. If you're uncomfortable with some aspect of an ad, you aren't the target audience.
  - jbob2000 6y ago
    And you don't think the CCP's promotion of Han is the same thing?
    - duxup 6y ago
      Promotion? They described simply cutting off a stream because of the language spoken.
      - jbob2000 6y ago
        Ok, and if my company's marketing team proposed an ad with a bunch of white people in it, they would also be cut off. Same shit, different process.
        duxup 6y ago
        I can't comment on what your marketing team is up to but I don't know of any state level limitation on the demographics of ads. I see plenty of ads with white only folks in it...
    - slowmovintarget 6y ago
      It is definitively not. CCP has zero interest in sales. It is interested in preserving the party by controlling the populace, with special emphasis on ideology. The activist Left in the West is grass-roots censorship, which is a completely different problem from a top-down, military-backed authoritarian regime. Granted, the former seems hard at work trying to produce the latter.
    - dillondoyle 6y ago
      Absolute not. Even disregarding your false promotion comparison, what about the other side? CCP 'promotes' (actually carries out) the brutal persecution of non-Han and specifically Uighurs in part facilitated propaganda ('ads') US corporations are not forced by the government to include for instance only one community or exclude another in their communications. Us corporations are not de facto owned by the government and do not have the same goal of consolidating power to maintain the CCP's (and increasingly just one man at the top's) grip over its own citizens. In the US many spend lots of money lobbying to keep the government out of their business!
- gumby 6y ago
  > We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people in power WANT society to look like. What? It’s all about the money. Ads, and tv (which is simply a honeypot to draw ad viewers) want to connect with as many viewers as possible in order to sell as much product (cars, cereal, or whatever) as possible. In the 1950s US the only people with appreciable spending power were white parents, thus those were the ads. Magazines, which could be more finely targeted, were more diverse overall, though demographically siloed. Society does not look like that (it never did, but the $$$ distribution did). Ads and TV are on the trailing edge, not the leading edge. And TV looks demographically more like the people I see, and more like my family, than it ever has before. I have no idea what the phrase “people in power WANT society to look like” really means.
  - thisiszilff 6y ago
    It's true, in a way, society looks like what the people in power want society to look like because the people in power are those with money and people who figure out how to make more money get power. It's like you say, that TV and ads are on the trailing edge as people figure out how to keep up with the distribution of money in society.
  - rchaud 6y ago
    > I have no idea what the phrase “people in power WANT society to look like” really means. OP wasn't exactly ambiguous. Only thing that was missing from "people in power" was maybe three sets of parantheses enclosing it.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      This seems like a ridiculously uncharitable explanation to the point of bad faith. A better interpretation that is also accurate would be that the people in power are people with money and influence.
- nemothekid 6y ago
  I think it's strange that you equate "using racially ambiguous people" to promotion of said group. The fictional marketing company and the CCP have very different goals and I think you are projecting your own personal biases onto modern television marketing.
nomay 6y ago
Live streaming platforms literally detect and warn against "unauthorized foreigners" from appearing on the screen. TV channels like BBC (for high-end hotels) are being monitored real-time to black-out sensitive parts, books mailed or imported from overseas get pages ripped out, even entries in dictionaries get painted black. Don't underestimate the seriousness of the censorship, it's among the few things communists are actually good at.
- jaflo 6y ago
  Could you elaborate on the first point? Do they run live race detection on streams and cut off access?
  - nomay 6y ago
    I counldn't find that tweet from a female streaming on Doyu that got a warning for featuring her white boyfriend, but found another news. https://en.pingwest.com/a/6595 https://en.pingwest.com/a/6595
  - hkmaxpro 6y ago
    The stream was cutoff after a white guy appeared for a minute. If it’s not race detection, I don’t know what it is. https://twitter.com/JoshuaDummer/status/1280877750245453828 https://twitter.com/JoshuaDummer/status/1280877750245453828 https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3963271 https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3963271
noobface1337 6y ago
Where is this idea of Han supremacy coming from? I've known many Han who, when they had the option, they chose to be classified as a minority on their ID cards, since you know, minorities in China get far better treatment. And if we were to talk about death of languages, maybe you need to realise that it's actually a much worse problem in Anglo-Saxon countries than anywhere else https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_time_of_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_time_of_e...
yorwba 6y ago
Most speakers of minority languages in China are Han Chinese. The censors who interrupted live streams when a non-Mandarin language was spoken were most likely speakers of a minority language, just a different one, which is why they didn't understand anything. So I don't think describing it as "Han Supremacism" is accurate. Presumably they didn't interrupt the streams because they felt ethnically superior to the speaker, but because they're liable if something illegal gets said and they don't censor it. And note their reason for not automatically blocking Uyghur content: "We eventually decided not to do it: We didn't have enough Uyghur language data points in our system, and the most popular livestream rooms were already closely monitored." Which I guess means they have a dedicated group of Uyghur speakers on staff to censor those streams.
hkmaxpro 6y ago
Douyin even banned speakers of Cantonese [0][1], a language spoken by 80M+ speakers and a top-20 language in the world [2]. Cantonese was widely spoken in Guangdong until the CCP actively wiped it out [3]. Among the 204 members of the CCP Central Committee, only 2 are from Guangdong [4]. Guangdong generated the highest GDP among all 31 administrative divisions [5], and doesn’t get its fair share of high ranking officials. It’s not Han supremacy. It’s Mandarin-Han supremacy. [0] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200402/03110144220/tiktok-users-china-temporarily-banned-speaking-their-own-cantonese-language-instead-using-official-mandarin.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200402/03110144220/tikto... [1] https://www.scmp.com/abacus/culture/article/3078365/chinas-version-tiktok-suspends-users-speaking-cantonese https://www.scmp.com/abacus/culture/article/3078365/chinas-v... (paywalled) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num... [3] https://www.businessinsider.com/china-is-forcing-its-biggest-cantonese-speaking-region-to-speak-mandarin-2014-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/china-is-forcing-its-biggest... [4] https://www.sohu.com/a/429814378_469134 https://www.sohu.com/a/429814378_469134 (in Chinese) [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_administrative_divisions_by_GDP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_administrative...

IceWreck 6y ago

The article doesn't name the engineer but is still heavy on personal details. If China wanted to persecute said engineer they could easily find out who is responsible.

AntiImperialist 6y ago
Except if it's a fictional propaganda piece. Most of these "anonymous sources" reports are.
chinathrowaway 6y ago
dont worry he is probably getting paid by the ccp to spread this message. keep on lockin down. the wuhan videos were real, but we manged to censor everything else.

burlesona 6y ago

Reading this, it was hard not to think of the direction US Academia, and to a lesser degree the government in general, is headed. We’re having deeply uncomfortable dilemmas with free speech - and whether speech at scale is fundamentally different. Ten years ago I could never have imagined an apparatus such as described in this article existing in the US, but today it seems possible. Perhaps still unlikely, but possible.

faitswulff 6y ago
I was recently blocked for 24 hours from Facebook for testing the phrase “fucking British” in the context of colonial history. Note that I was testing it after another poster asked if their own comment saying the same thing had been censored. After having my test comment removed, I confirmed that “okay, it seems automated” which was itself flagged as being hate speech somehow, and my ban instated immediately. My contacts proceeded to discuss ways to get around the filter (use idioms, odd characters, Unicode) and I was immediately reminded of how people get around Chinese censorship.
duxup 6y ago
That seems like an entirely different topic from what is described in the article.

nomay 6y ago

Censorship is imo Bytedance's lesser evil. The way this company destroys journalism is its biggest crime. Algorithm-driven "self-media" that ByteDance popularised (with Toutiao) has essentially wiped out news in China, anyone can write sensationalized and fabricated news-style stories on its platforms and compete with "mundane and boring" serious news，AND GET PAID, these self-media are so prevalent and low-brow that fact-checking has been rendered futile. It now has democratized censorship，indoctrination and misinformation, as the self-media care only about their ads income. My advice? Vehemently reject any info/news platforms, as they care only about clicks. >The “Post-Truth” Publication Where Chinese Students in America Get Their News" https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-post-truth-publication-where-chinese-students-in-america-get-their-news https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-post-trut...

duxup 6y ago
We have similar situations elsewhere. Folks rage about 'the media' (a term now so amorphous I can't tell what it means anymore, or if the person even reads / watches what they think of as the media), so we get lots of self research / internet sleuth type discovery on platforms like reddit. We had one on HN recently too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26186645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26186645. I applaud the person for putting in the effort, but I'm highly skeptical of internet sleuths and their ability to string a few searches and documents together into an accurate narrative / provide context to complex systems simply because they found what they thought of as similar things to recent events.
- nomay 6y ago
  The difference is incentive, you probably have heard that ByteDance already makes big money, it pays these self-media to concoct what-ever eye-grabbing "content", and lend credibility to these "writers" by putting them in the same arena with traditional news and reporters: their news aggregation app and say this is today's "news" for you. The only metric that matters is click numbers, you can now out-do reporters with your perfect news stories that check every eye-grabbing boxes, coz you can type however you like and face no consequences, so why not to make it as juicy as possible.

svieira 6y ago

> As a young unicorn, ByteDance does not have strong government relationships like other tech giants do, so it's walking a tightrope every second. For those in free countries: when you build moderation tools and use them to silence political dissent "because you have to / to play the game" the game plays you. There is no one "too big" to be crushed by those with the material source of political power [1] and everyone tells themselves that they "have to" build the tools because they don't have the "power" to push back or because "it really is that bad this time". But some things don't have to be built (or built in the centralized, controllable way that they are). And when centralization is required or "it really is that bad this time", censorship should be widely publicized and discussed both in real time and with regular retrospectives on decisions to censor that are _public_. For those in dictatorships: All is not lost, regardless. [2][3] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_power_grows_out_of_the_barrel_of_a_gun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_power_grows_out_of_t... [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20120107141633/http://www.vaclavhavel.cz/showtrans.php?cat=clanky&val=72_aj_clanky.html&typ=HTML https://web.archive.org/web/20120107141633/http://www.vaclav... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless

ah69 6y ago
Excellent comment. Thank you.
andreilys 6y ago
If the ruling government controls all elements of public discourse, how exactly do you “widely publicize and discuss censorship in real time”?
xwolfi 6y ago
Having been raised in a democracy and raising my kids in a dictatorship, I think there's a lot of misunderstanding from both side. People in democracies cannot comprehend how anyone in a dictatorship could live anything else than miserable, and people in dictatorship mostly see people in democracies as hypocrite imperialists who lie to themselves about who truly rules. The funny thing is that, well, it mostly all depend on how much you care and how corrupt the people in charge are, totally independent of the system. A dictatorship in Singapore works better than a democracy in Mexico for most metrics except anything that will make the power feel it's not in perfect control. The only difference in a dictatorship is the complete insecurity of the leaders who can't fathom that... we'd frigging vote for them would they ask nicely :D And you can completely ignore the party(ies), and live an entirely fulfilling and useful life, in both systems. I wouldn't argue for doing this but I see it all the time from both side and I envy it sometimes. So this whole debate about censorship, it's really just a debate about insecurity. They don't censor the truth here, they don't censor debate or discussion, they only censor what nobody cares about: critics of the party. So it's a lot less "terrible" or "inhuman" than I thought it would be coming from a democracy. And I think the way to make it change isn't to whine and yell at it as much as you can, but to embrace the competent leaders when they come and give confidence to them we'll give them 10x more power by voting directly for them. And lay the final trap. At least my origin democracy became a democracy when it started doing just that after 2 centuries of massacres and revolts followed by authoritarian counter reactions in a seemingly endless cycle of aggressive "activism". It simply ended when we went to war in mass without being forced and convinced the rulers we'd vote for them anyway as a result, sheeples we are, which we did the first election. Trapped.

sneak 6y ago

> I was on a central technology team that supports the Trust and Safety team, which sits within ByteDance's core data department. Funny how censorship which makes these platforms entirely untrustworthy as a view into the world is filed under "Trust" in the org chart. It's sort of like how Facebook's faux grassroots "community standards" are just the rules Facebook dictates to its community.

AntiImperialist 6y ago

Countries have to protect themselves. Influential media companies of every country do the same thing. NEXT!

chinathrowaway 6y ago

so, somehow we are supposed to believe china has all the censorship capabilities in the world, but was not able to stem the flood of shaky smartphone videos flowing out of wuhan? this seems like a big ccp psyop. (this article and its source included)

throw373782 6y ago

Anonymous source? Check. Unverifiable anecdotal evidence? Check. Somehow I’m not surprised that HN users don’t express the faintest bit of skepticism on topics that confirm their pre-existing biases. “Alarmingly, only 14 percent of American students were able to reliably distinguish fact from opinion in reading tests.” [0] [0] https://bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/pisa-test-china https://bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/pisa-test-chin...

Jonanin 6y ago
Uh huh... don’t kid yourself that this is exclusively a problem with Americans. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-post-truth-publication-where-chinese-students-in-america-get-their-news https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-post-trut...
zepto 6y ago
> Somehow I’m not surprised that HN users don’t express the faintest bit of skepticism on topics that confirm their pre-existing biases. Could it be that you are drawing conclusions without evidence here? How do you know anything about the skepticism or biases of those who don’t express them?
- AntiImperialist 6y ago
  He's obviously talking about those who express them.
fernandotakai 6y ago
>Unverifiable anecdotal evidence? Check. i didn't see any evidence in comment post that contradicts the post. the only link i see right now is for an article praising chinese kids, which is highly interesting given the contents of the original post.
jryle70 6y ago
> Anonymous source? Check. > Unverifiable anecdotal evidence? Check. Have you ever wondered why there is no Edward Snowden of China, despite the fact the Chinese equivalence of NSA is undoubtedly as much aggressive, if not more? Such a person would have been suicidal, not to mention no news organizations would be willing to publish their information. In such an environment anonymous source is the norm. It has to be. Unfortunately that also provides plausible deniability, as your post illustrates.

quantummkv 6y ago

The more that I read about what the social media giants are doing everywhere, including the recent drama around wsb discord ban and the Facebook-Australia thing, I feel that what's happening in China is chillingly close to happening to the rest of the world. Or maybe it is already happening slowly and we don't realise it yet.

Firebrand 6y ago

I never really paid attention to just how massive Bytedance actually is until the article mentioned some of their products. Makes sense how they had the resources to brute force TikTok into the American consciousness so quickly.

3gg 6y ago

> At the time, I was a tech worker at ByteDance, where I helped develop tools and platforms for content moderation. In other words, I had helped build the system that censored accounts like mine. What do you mean "in other words"? Are there other words? How does one get into this situation without realizing what they are really doing? It looks obvious in retrospect, but what is not obvious back then?

avianlyric 6y ago
I don’t think the original source was in anyway unaware of what they were doing. They’re not making any attempt to excuse their behaviour, just describe and explain what it’s like to work at a Chinese tech company. We shouldn’t admonish those failing to stand-up for our ideals, when they live in a world where those ideals get you at best censored, and at worst disappeared.
- 3gg 6y ago
  You are right, but I was legitimately curious. At the very least, they have the choice of not working in that particular role/company. Further down the article they mention their colleagues had studied journalism and raised some eyebrows, and that he/she wanted to change things from the inside, if only by a little, then realized they were just a powerless cog. I'm going to guess they must be in their late 20s / early 30s now.
  - nomay 6y ago
    Tech jobs are the most well-paid in China, sometimes better than gov jobs that require connections, since tech companies have access to the global excess money flow； if you want to buy a condo and get married in big cities, tech jobs are one of the few chances that plebs can get to have a shot, even then, the typical condo prices is like 20 to 40 times their annual income. People are paying tens of thousands to get employee referral to get into these big tech companies, and I'd say that the majority of their employee are deeply patriotic and believe what they are doing is necessary and right since they are the winners of the social system.

DevKoala 6y ago

> When I was at ByteDance, we received multiple requests from the bases to develop an algorithm that could automatically detect when a Douyin user spoke Uyghur, and then cut off the livestream session. Disgusting.

DevKoala 6y ago
This comment is getting downvoted. How? At least make an argument for why this is not a disgusting practice.

halfjoking 6y ago

This is what corporate media wants in America. The same people behind the Iraq war are now outrage machines trying to drum up support for censorship in the name of stopping a new threat... "homegrown Al Qaeda" wearing a MAGA hat. I know this will be divisive, but the NYT needs to formally retract their reporting of the attacks on the capitol: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-false-and-exaggerated-claims https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-false-and-exaggerated-c...

reducesuffering 6y ago
What happened to Glen? He's clearly angry at media like NYT for narrative spinning and reporting mistakes. This entire article is about how they hastily reported Officer Sisnick was killed by the mob, but as of now we don't definitively know how he died yet. That's basically it. Almost all of his reporting is taking a microscope to US left media and policies, while blatantly failing to report on any egregious errors with US right media and policies. It's like siding with Putin because RT will find some sort of dirt on the opposition.
- halfjoking 6y ago
  I agree Glenn should hate both sides equally. It's also hurting his credibility being used as a mouthpiece by right-wing media. He's just given time on Fox so they could say "See - the swamp is real, even this leftist says so! That's why you should never trust those liberals." But please give Glenn some slack. If it wasn't for him Edward Snowden may be in Guantanamo, instead of regularly giving interviews over livestreams. Calling the last 6 weeks "reporting mistakes" is way too generous. These are planted stories to shape public opinion. Glenn recognizes this and clearly explains using these events as a basis to censor the entire internet is unbelievably dangerous. Not since the Patriot Act has there been a danger to democracy so egregious. I hope people see realize it before it's too late.
- cwkoss 6y ago
  > Almost all of his reporting is taking a microscope to US left media and policies, while blatantly failing to report on any egregious errors with US right media and policies. There is significant liberal discourse around errors in right media already: its a crowded beat already (and it often devolves into fruitless filter bubble circle jerks). Non-partisan criticism of liberal discourse is a fairly empty beat in modern discourse, which is why I value his reporting. Personally, I think the idea that journalists should try to balance both sides of every issue is without basis unless you're specifically trying to make an institution like NYT that tries to cover essentially everything.

ctocoder 6y ago

Computing and Ethics was a very important class in my CS program. Just because you can should you?

KDJohnBrown 6y ago

Don’t feel bad. It is nearly impossible to become wealthy in software without increasing the suffering of others.

malloreon 6y ago
I’m at a loss to understand why your statement means this person, or anyone who increases the suffering of others in the pursuit of their own personal wealth, shouldn’t feel bad about doing so.
- thewarrior 6y ago
  What do you do afterwards ? All good jobs eventually end up in a handful of mega corporations. The startups will either be acquired by one or become one.
- KDJohnBrown 6y ago
  Because that is how capitalism works in practice, and that’s where the true wealth comes from on the internet: sociopathic detachment.
ehsankia 6y ago
Do you think that as a whole, something like Youtube has overall increased suffering?
- KDJohnBrown 6y ago
  A television which spies on you and can be with you 24/7/365? Every parent I know gives up by age 10 and YouTube becomes their childrens’ babysitters. No more childhood, just consumption until the day we die.
  - ehsankia 6y ago
    I've learned hundreds of skills on Youtube. I fixed my toilet last week for 15$, instead of the usual 150$ it would cost to get a plumber. Millions of people around the world can learn and solve things by themselves and get help with the tap of a button. That's not valuable?