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> 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

> 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.
- vmception 6y ago
  Correct, its not binary. Its best case, average case and worst case, just like with algorithms on different data sets. We already know that a benevolent dictatorship is the most efficient form of government, the best case in stewarding resources, it just lacks a secession path to maintain its efficiency, as dictatorships most frequently create worst case scenarios: worst stewarding of resources and no ability to dissent to correct it. No respect from the rest of the people on how the correction takes place, one coup just leads to another coup. Inclusive democracies most frequently create average case scenarios of efficiency. They aren’t inherently better just because they’re inclusive. They can create best case and worst case scenarios too.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- yters 6y ago
  My main problem with dictatorships is mass concentration camps, mass executions, torture, human experimentation, etc. Granted, democracies have done all the above, but diligent activists corrected the system, and the scale never reached that in dictatorships. But yes, for your average citizen, dictatorship is probably not too bad.
- areoform 6y ago
  That’s discounting the forced sterilization, imprisonment, and extermination of the target du jour, > One is an authoritative report documenting the systematic sterilization of Uighur women. The other was the seizure by U.S. Customs and Border Protection of 13 tons of products made from human hair suspected of being forcibly removed from Uighurs imprisoned in concentration camps. - https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/15/uighur-genocide-xinjiang-china-surveillance-sterilization/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/15/uighur-genocide-xinjian... > they only censor what nobody cares about: critics of the party Saying that they only censor their critics and adding that they are only censoring “what no one cares about, critics of the party” is disturbing. When one person can impose their will on you, it’s all rainbows and kitties until you disagree or step out of line. As I am guessing that the people who oppose forced sterilization and the other Nazi concentration camp policies (forced shaving of hair at camps for use as a product is a fairly distinct one) will end up censored and at those camps too? These problems and issues might be out of sound and out of mind for now, but sooner or later, as the previous enemy starts to thin out, they will find new ones. And eventually, they’ll come for you too. Often people who live in autocracies by choice do not believe such warnings. They are the intellectual equivalent of exercise and vitamins. To make it clearer, here's what happens at the end of such regimes. Even for their supporters, Towards the end of the war, the Nazis who were occupying the Netherlands blew up a town hall after inviting 134 people and their children to take shelter there. These people were of the right race. Most of them had done nothing against them. Some of them might have supported them. They were the in-group until they weren't. They died because they weren't members of the party. https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadhuisramp_Heusden https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadhuisramp_Heusden Being ambitiously evil, the Nazis also killed erstwhile embraced citizens at scale with the Dutch famine by blocking the transport of food from farms to citizens in their occupied territories. They did it because they could. Perhaps this is still distant. Here's a shorter example. Almost all of the people Stalin directly ordered to be killed were his supporters. They were the in-group until they weren't.
draw_down 6y ago
You don't have to contribute, but if you don't, they'll find someone who will. We like to put the moral responsibility of such things on people who were trying to make a living. I think the power of the powerful is more relevant. To be honest, I think focusing away from that is an ideological operation. It sounds very inspiring: "you don't have to do this!" Yeah, well, tell that to the people requiring the censorship.
908B64B197 6y ago
The question is what should we, western nations, do about this? Should we keep hiring, sponsoring and giving away residency to engineers who made the decision to help building these platforms? Or collectively decide not to reward these behaviors?
- gnarbarian 6y ago
  Build distributed systems that can't be taken down. Social media could be built on IPFS and file coin and lib P2P. Protocols that have no ownership or entity to attack via political means. Email already works this way in a sense.
  - viklove 6y ago
    "So how do we do it?" "Just do it." It's easy to say that, but it's obviously not working in the real world. You have to create incentive structures that reward the desired behavior.
    - 908B64B197 6y ago
      Not only that but such a network would be pretty hard to moderate. And by moderate I'm not even talking about the content. I mean completely abused by folks who will turn it into a spam/hosting operation.
      - aabbcc1241 6y ago
        What about shareable and forkable blacklist and whitelist for each user to explicitly opt-in?
        gnarbarian 6y ago
        That's how I see it. moderation should be a service on top of the protocol that users can choose themselves. Perhaps even unique for each person built out by input from the user.
  - 6y ago
ksec 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. And just to use the same quote. This sentence is just a spin to say the least. Before TikTok, ByteDance's main product was Jinri Toutiao, which translate as Today's Headlines. It was Number one "news" Apps in China. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toutiao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toutiao

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.

vmception 6y ago
Correct, its not binary. Its best case, average case and worst case, just like with algorithms on different data sets. We already know that a benevolent dictatorship is the most efficient form of government, the best case in stewarding resources, it just lacks a secession path to maintain its efficiency, as dictatorships most frequently create worst case scenarios: worst stewarding of resources and no ability to dissent to correct it. No respect from the rest of the people on how the correction takes place, one coup just leads to another coup. Inclusive democracies most frequently create average case scenarios of efficiency. They aren’t inherently better just because they’re inclusive. They can create best case and worst case scenarios too.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
yters 6y ago
My main problem with dictatorships is mass concentration camps, mass executions, torture, human experimentation, etc. Granted, democracies have done all the above, but diligent activists corrected the system, and the scale never reached that in dictatorships. But yes, for your average citizen, dictatorship is probably not too bad.
areoform 6y ago
That’s discounting the forced sterilization, imprisonment, and extermination of the target du jour, > One is an authoritative report documenting the systematic sterilization of Uighur women. The other was the seizure by U.S. Customs and Border Protection of 13 tons of products made from human hair suspected of being forcibly removed from Uighurs imprisoned in concentration camps. - https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/15/uighur-genocide-xinjiang-china-surveillance-sterilization/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/15/uighur-genocide-xinjian... > they only censor what nobody cares about: critics of the party Saying that they only censor their critics and adding that they are only censoring “what no one cares about, critics of the party” is disturbing. When one person can impose their will on you, it’s all rainbows and kitties until you disagree or step out of line. As I am guessing that the people who oppose forced sterilization and the other Nazi concentration camp policies (forced shaving of hair at camps for use as a product is a fairly distinct one) will end up censored and at those camps too? These problems and issues might be out of sound and out of mind for now, but sooner or later, as the previous enemy starts to thin out, they will find new ones. And eventually, they’ll come for you too. Often people who live in autocracies by choice do not believe such warnings. They are the intellectual equivalent of exercise and vitamins. To make it clearer, here's what happens at the end of such regimes. Even for their supporters, Towards the end of the war, the Nazis who were occupying the Netherlands blew up a town hall after inviting 134 people and their children to take shelter there. These people were of the right race. Most of them had done nothing against them. Some of them might have supported them. They were the in-group until they weren't. They died because they weren't members of the party. https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadhuisramp_Heusden https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadhuisramp_Heusden Being ambitiously evil, the Nazis also killed erstwhile embraced citizens at scale with the Dutch famine by blocking the transport of food from farms to citizens in their occupied territories. They did it because they could. Perhaps this is still distant. Here's a shorter example. Almost all of the people Stalin directly ordered to be killed were his supporters. They were the in-group until they weren't.

draw_down 6y ago

You don't have to contribute, but if you don't, they'll find someone who will. We like to put the moral responsibility of such things on people who were trying to make a living. I think the power of the powerful is more relevant. To be honest, I think focusing away from that is an ideological operation. It sounds very inspiring: "you don't have to do this!" Yeah, well, tell that to the people requiring the censorship.

908B64B197 6y ago

The question is what should we, western nations, do about this? Should we keep hiring, sponsoring and giving away residency to engineers who made the decision to help building these platforms? Or collectively decide not to reward these behaviors?

gnarbarian 6y ago
Build distributed systems that can't be taken down. Social media could be built on IPFS and file coin and lib P2P. Protocols that have no ownership or entity to attack via political means. Email already works this way in a sense.
- viklove 6y ago
  "So how do we do it?" "Just do it." It's easy to say that, but it's obviously not working in the real world. You have to create incentive structures that reward the desired behavior.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    Not only that but such a network would be pretty hard to moderate. And by moderate I'm not even talking about the content. I mean completely abused by folks who will turn it into a spam/hosting operation.
    - aabbcc1241 6y ago
      What about shareable and forkable blacklist and whitelist for each user to explicitly opt-in?
      - gnarbarian 6y ago
        That's how I see it. moderation should be a service on top of the protocol that users can choose themselves. Perhaps even unique for each person built out by input from the user.
- 6y ago

ksec 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. And just to use the same quote. This sentence is just a spin to say the least. Before TikTok, ByteDance's main product was Jinri Toutiao, which translate as Today's Headlines. It was Number one "news" Apps in China. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toutiao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toutiao