20 ms·

I'd love to know the story of this "human error" (that led to tank man being censored on Bing). Like... what were they trying to do? Why do they this capability

by cletus 5y ago

I'd love to know the story of this "human error" (that led to tank man being censored on Bing). Like... what were they trying to do? Why do they this capability at all? Was it unauthorized removal from Bing search results? If so, by whom? Why? Try and get the auto-caption on Tiktok to recognize "Tiananmen Square". It sets a really bad precedent to allow or accept Western companies (yes I know Tiktok is Chinese) kowtowing to China in the hopes that those companies will gain access to the Chinese market. It's widely suspect that not having the American flag on the moon landing in the movie "First Man" was to cater to the Chinese market. Let me clue in all the investors and the Western big-tech CEOs on a little secret about China: you, as a Western company, will never "win" in the Chinese market. The CCP will make sure that happens. You are literally wasting your time and debasing yourself for something that will never happen. Take any Western company like Google, Uber or Amazon and the dominant player in China will be some homegrown clone of that. This is not an accident and it will never change. It's time the developed world woke up to this as it is openly mocking WTO rules about equal access to markets.

colinmhayes 5y ago
Tank man is banned in China. Someone at bing probably was told to censor it in China but did it for the entire world instead. I really don't understand this argument that western companies shouldn't operate in China. How is not censoring and being banned any more productive than the status quo? China is too politically powerful for anything to be done, especially by activist fortune 500 companies.
- slumdev 5y ago
  > How is not censoring and being banned any more productive than the status quo? It lets the Chinese Communist Party pretend their citizens don't live in a curated bubble designed to reinforce feelings of nationalism and loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party. Some Chinese are allowed to travel abroad. If they discovered a totally different Internet abroad, they might start asking uncomfortable questions back home. Instead, CCP bosses hope that they simply won't notice that the domestic Bing isn't the same as Bing everywhere else.
  - rossjudson 5y ago
    Your use of the word "hope" there is pretty funny. ;) I am quite sure that Chinese people travelling abroad are 100% familiar with what they should not talk or write about once they get home.
    - slumdev 5y ago
      Yeah, I think very few are under any logical or intellectual delusion, but constant reinforcement and signaling affects everyone subconsciously.
    - ralph84 5y ago
      You don't need to qualify that with "once they get home". Chinese who talk or write about the wrong things will be hunted down wherever they are in the world. China managed to get the UAE to detain a US permanent resident for almost two months when he was traveling from Istanbul to New York with a connection in Dubai. https://apnews.com/article/europe-china-dubai-middle-east-health-970442d55373971b724e35828b5b61a4 https://apnews.com/article/europe-china-dubai-middle-east-he...
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    Chinese people understand that their internet is censored.
  - monksy 5y ago
    Don't worry they won't let people stray that much: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucius_Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucius_Institute Also, they tend to have family back home that can be pressured.
- dylan604 5y ago
  >How is not censoring and being banned any more productive than the status quo? Any company that does this for content in China, but "only" in China raises serious doubts when they say they are not doing it anywhere else. If you add this ability, it will be misused/abused either by "rogue" employees, being hacked, or being forced to by gov't because of "terrorism" or "the kids".
  - Barrin92 5y ago
    Companies have to comply with differing laws and regulations based on the jurisdictions they operate in. I honestly don't have serious doubt that Microsoft does this in the US other than because of a technical error because they simply have no incentive to. They can add this ability at any point anyway because putting a phrase into a word filter takes about 10 minutes I guess. What is the logical alternative here, every American company leaves every other market because they have differing censorship laws? How is that helping anyone else?
    - dylan604 5y ago
      You are way too scoped in on this specific issue. View the topic of bending to CCP will in other areas of tech, not just search. Cloud providers operating in China is a big area of concern. If these providers have built in the ability for the CCP to access user data, then there's no way they could ever stand up to US gov't asking for the same access. That's just a single example.
      - vimacs2 5y ago
        "If these providers have built in the ability for the CCP to access user data, then there's no way they could ever stand up to US gov't asking for the same access" There are plenty of good reasons to refuse to cede to CCP demands but this makes no sense. The only tech company that were able to mount serious resistance against a serious data access request by the US government were Apple and a couple of things: 1. They are a trillion dollar company. 2. They are primarily a hardware company, not a cloud services company 3. There is no guarantee (and I would argue rather unlikely) that if the FBI were unable to break the encryption of that phone independently that they would not have kept mounting pressure on Apple till they cracked. It's a complete fantasy to believe that any individual or company has guaranteed data protection in the US or indeed most nation states. Once the government really want your data, they will get it with enough time.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Saying it's censoring China to not operate there is both a matter of semantic spin and also misses the point: 1) Operating there helps support a repressive regime that often uses the tools and services of foreign companies to facilitate that repression. I don't think a refusal to operate there is censorship, and if you do, that is a broad enough definition of censorship that the Montgomery Bus Boycott would also fall into that category. 2) It is also a bad long-term business decision. Between forced IP transfer, IP theft, piracy, and enormous subsidies for home-grown competitors, most companies are not truly growing in an emerging market, they are filling a short term gap until China can replace them with their own alternatives, bootstrapped by those short term interactions with foreign companies. At that point, it is happy to expand those homegrown options out to the rest of the world, bootstrapped by not having to make the same R&D investments, complete with its repressive values embedded in the products & services. China is not truly interested being a partner country on the world stage. It's implicit and explicit goals are self sufficiency in service of not needing to even pretend it respects anything but its own power. This is revealed every time there's a Bing "accident" or another actor is made to embarrass themselves in kowtowing to China, or a movie changes a Tibetan character to anything but Tibetan, or a Hotel corporation like Marriot is forced offline in China until it similarly embarrasses itself. China's goal is to have enough power to forced anyone that interacts with it to adopt its own repressive values. Now at this point in the conversation someone will say "What about the things the US does"? To which I respond: 1) That's irrelevant to the issue of China. Whatever the US does isn't an excuse to allow China to get away with things, and other countries and corporations are free to avoid dealing with the US in the same way I advocate they avoid China. 2) That's a false equivalence. The US may do objectionable things. But when it comes to repression of it's population, at it's worst levels of privacy intrusion it still gives it's citizens more freedom by an order if magnitude than does China.
lsiebert 5y ago
I think China is happy to let in physical products like Apple, but it wants the internet stuff under it's control.
hintymad 5y ago
Before we even get to the political side of "you will never win in the Chinese market", how do we explain that Amazon lost to jd.com, and Walmart (and a slew of other retailers) lost to local retailers? The Chinese government didn't favor the local retailers in anyway. Another case is Uber vs DiDi. The Chinese government didn't favor Didi either, yet DiDi managed to beat Uber hands down. Specifically, Didi managed to be profitable in short trips while losing money on long trips, and Uber's biz team found it out months later. Kinda shameful, if you ask me.
- xenihn 5y ago
  >The Chinese government didn't favor the local retailers in anyway. Do you have proof of this?
  - hintymad 5y ago
    Should it be the other way around, namely do we have proof that the Chinese government interfered? I do acknowledge that it's hard to know for sure that something does not exist. It's just that there's plenty of news on how Chinese government play favors for its auto industry, for Baidu, and for media companies. But somehow I didn't see any report or even anecdote on retailing, and certainly not for Did (some cities tried to regulate both Uber and Didi).
    - xenihn 5y ago
      I'm not the one who made a statement as if it were a fact.
- sennight 5y ago
  > how do we explain that Amazon lost to jt.com... JTI? Of Japan? The one where the Japanese government is legally required to own at least a third?
  - hintymad 5y ago
    My bad. JD.com. Updated.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
agency 5y ago
Is there any evidence regarding that “First Man” anecdote? I remember this being a big thing in the conservative culture sphere in at the time but it seems like a manufactured controversy. Are there not American flags in all manner of big blockbusters that do huge numbers in China? The character “Captain America” doesn’t seem to have stopped the MCU movies from succeeding there. The whole thing feels like people just looking to get angry about something.
- alias_neo 5y ago
  We nom-Americans are well aware of the "flag tax". We know Hollywood gets tax cuts for bigger, more numerous and slower-mo shots of American flags in their films. Clearly "First Man" was making a statement about this special treatment.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    Interesting, so you have any citation links for this? I'd like to read more about this but a quick search brings up nothing.
    - alias_neo 5y ago
      Sorry friend. It was a joke. It's a long-running light-hearted poke at just how often Americans put flags in every piece of visual media they create.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  The American flag planting on the moon is one of the single most iconic and culturally significant events in American history, ever. The movie is based off of a book written by an American. The movie was directed by an American. The movie was produced by an American. For the movie to exclude this without it being a deliberate decision would be an oversight or coincidence beyond reasonable belief. Yes, American flags appear in other movies. Captain America is a fictional character in a fictional universe. Use of the American flag in that context is not in the least bit comparable to the first time humans stepped foot on solid ground that wasn't named Earth. The moon landing was also an iconic benchmark for world civilization as whole. Given that we have concrete knowledge of China forcing studios and actors to parrot China's values, it is certainly plausible that China did not want the crowning moment of this iconic human achievement to prominently feature America at that moment. It's also plausible that foreign sentiment against the US at that time--not just from China-- was also a factor. It is also possible the film creators wanted to present the moment as an achievement for all of civilization, without a focus on the US in particular. But given the history, book, director, and importance for the US, I absolutely believe it was deliberate, and as such people upset about it do not represent a manufactured controversy. If you grew up during the height of the Cold War and the arms race with Russia and watched the moon landing, or have heard--as I have-- stories from my parents and grand parents how much that gave them hope during a very dark time, you also might be a little upset that your country's role had been erased in the crowning moment.
mywittyname 5y ago
You're absolutely right. But from a Chinese perspective, they see open access to American companies for what it is: neocolonialism. They don't want American companies coming in, buying up all of the local brands, and siphoning off the profits back to America. The Chinese also don't want these large American companies using their business power to direct local politics. Just look at the attitude that Google, Palantir, and similar have for Europeans. I bet there are times that Germany wished they had their own Baidu. China is doing what it can to stop from becoming an American vassal.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  > China is doing what it can to stop from becoming an American vassal If our countries weren't so tightly intertwined with complicated trade partnerships and mutually beneficial enterprises, I'd be inclined to agree with you.
- gentleman11 5y ago
  Is it neocolonialism when American companies move into Canadian or German markets, or when ikea sets up in town, or when South Korean films displace Japanese films?
  - asddubs 5y ago
    I think it's a question of scale (and the term has historical connotations as well obviously). I probably wouldn't call it neocolonialism but as a german citizen I do think that the less dependent on american companies we are, the better.
  - strken 5y ago
    It's certainly seen as neo-colonialism, or at least exploitation, by some people. Here are a couple of examples of Australian protest songs about American economic and military expansion into our country: https://youtube.com/watch?v=tl1IvmJvel0 https://youtube.com/watch?v=tl1IvmJvel0 https://youtube.com/watch?v=anx_o43Y27Y https://youtube.com/watch?v=anx_o43Y27Y
  - mywittyname 5y ago
ashtonkem 5y ago
It’s very frustrating when companies come up with these blatant lies. Just say you’re censoring it on behalf of China. We don’t believe your “human error” lie, and it’s insulting to our intelligence to even try.
- batiudrami 5y ago
  If it was deliberate it’s much more likely that this was an employee behaving outside their remit than it being a company policy. “Human error” can be used euphemistically like this when you aren’t prepared to throw a junior employee to the wolves.
xwolfi 5y ago
I m in China and while I understand where you're coming from, from my point of view, you insisting on showing an american flag on the moon is a bit what we're saying about shadow colonialism. You only ever like or accept vassal and submissive partners. It's still hard for us, but maybe we'll give up our pride for the american money, like so many others :) This ofc doesnt excuse the communist crimes and lack of trust in us, the population, a problem totally independent from our conflict with the US, whatever excuse the US found at the spur of the moment.
Nerwesta 5y ago
> It's widely suspect that not having the American flag on the moon landing in the movie "First Man" was to cater to the Chinese market. I didn't watch that movie, I guess it surprised you as an (allegedly ?) American the same way it surprised many Europeans watching the numerous WW2 movies about the US saving the old-world. It's all about catering the most profitable market in the end. ( I'm not here to throw oil on fire by the way, I guess that the same... process ? )
tqi 5y ago
Excuse me, "kowtowing"? Where did you pick that up from, a yellow peril poster?

by cletus 5y ago

colinmhayes 5y ago

Tank man is banned in China. Someone at bing probably was told to censor it in China but did it for the entire world instead. I really don't understand this argument that western companies shouldn't operate in China. How is not censoring and being banned any more productive than the status quo? China is too politically powerful for anything to be done, especially by activist fortune 500 companies.

slumdev 5y ago
> How is not censoring and being banned any more productive than the status quo? It lets the Chinese Communist Party pretend their citizens don't live in a curated bubble designed to reinforce feelings of nationalism and loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party. Some Chinese are allowed to travel abroad. If they discovered a totally different Internet abroad, they might start asking uncomfortable questions back home. Instead, CCP bosses hope that they simply won't notice that the domestic Bing isn't the same as Bing everywhere else.
- rossjudson 5y ago
  Your use of the word "hope" there is pretty funny. ;) I am quite sure that Chinese people travelling abroad are 100% familiar with what they should not talk or write about once they get home.
  - slumdev 5y ago
    Yeah, I think very few are under any logical or intellectual delusion, but constant reinforcement and signaling affects everyone subconsciously.
  - ralph84 5y ago
    You don't need to qualify that with "once they get home". Chinese who talk or write about the wrong things will be hunted down wherever they are in the world. China managed to get the UAE to detain a US permanent resident for almost two months when he was traveling from Istanbul to New York with a connection in Dubai. https://apnews.com/article/europe-china-dubai-middle-east-health-970442d55373971b724e35828b5b61a4 https://apnews.com/article/europe-china-dubai-middle-east-he...
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  Chinese people understand that their internet is censored.
- monksy 5y ago
  Don't worry they won't let people stray that much: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucius_Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucius_Institute Also, they tend to have family back home that can be pressured.
dylan604 5y ago
>How is not censoring and being banned any more productive than the status quo? Any company that does this for content in China, but "only" in China raises serious doubts when they say they are not doing it anywhere else. If you add this ability, it will be misused/abused either by "rogue" employees, being hacked, or being forced to by gov't because of "terrorism" or "the kids".
- Barrin92 5y ago
  Companies have to comply with differing laws and regulations based on the jurisdictions they operate in. I honestly don't have serious doubt that Microsoft does this in the US other than because of a technical error because they simply have no incentive to. They can add this ability at any point anyway because putting a phrase into a word filter takes about 10 minutes I guess. What is the logical alternative here, every American company leaves every other market because they have differing censorship laws? How is that helping anyone else?
  - dylan604 5y ago
    You are way too scoped in on this specific issue. View the topic of bending to CCP will in other areas of tech, not just search. Cloud providers operating in China is a big area of concern. If these providers have built in the ability for the CCP to access user data, then there's no way they could ever stand up to US gov't asking for the same access. That's just a single example.
    - vimacs2 5y ago
      "If these providers have built in the ability for the CCP to access user data, then there's no way they could ever stand up to US gov't asking for the same access" There are plenty of good reasons to refuse to cede to CCP demands but this makes no sense. The only tech company that were able to mount serious resistance against a serious data access request by the US government were Apple and a couple of things: 1. They are a trillion dollar company. 2. They are primarily a hardware company, not a cloud services company 3. There is no guarantee (and I would argue rather unlikely) that if the FBI were unable to break the encryption of that phone independently that they would not have kept mounting pressure on Apple till they cracked. It's a complete fantasy to believe that any individual or company has guaranteed data protection in the US or indeed most nation states. Once the government really want your data, they will get it with enough time.
ineedasername 5y ago
Saying it's censoring China to not operate there is both a matter of semantic spin and also misses the point: 1) Operating there helps support a repressive regime that often uses the tools and services of foreign companies to facilitate that repression. I don't think a refusal to operate there is censorship, and if you do, that is a broad enough definition of censorship that the Montgomery Bus Boycott would also fall into that category. 2) It is also a bad long-term business decision. Between forced IP transfer, IP theft, piracy, and enormous subsidies for home-grown competitors, most companies are not truly growing in an emerging market, they are filling a short term gap until China can replace them with their own alternatives, bootstrapped by those short term interactions with foreign companies. At that point, it is happy to expand those homegrown options out to the rest of the world, bootstrapped by not having to make the same R&D investments, complete with its repressive values embedded in the products & services. China is not truly interested being a partner country on the world stage. It's implicit and explicit goals are self sufficiency in service of not needing to even pretend it respects anything but its own power. This is revealed every time there's a Bing "accident" or another actor is made to embarrass themselves in kowtowing to China, or a movie changes a Tibetan character to anything but Tibetan, or a Hotel corporation like Marriot is forced offline in China until it similarly embarrasses itself. China's goal is to have enough power to forced anyone that interacts with it to adopt its own repressive values. Now at this point in the conversation someone will say "What about the things the US does"? To which I respond: 1) That's irrelevant to the issue of China. Whatever the US does isn't an excuse to allow China to get away with things, and other countries and corporations are free to avoid dealing with the US in the same way I advocate they avoid China. 2) That's a false equivalence. The US may do objectionable things. But when it comes to repression of it's population, at it's worst levels of privacy intrusion it still gives it's citizens more freedom by an order if magnitude than does China.

lsiebert 5y ago

I think China is happy to let in physical products like Apple, but it wants the internet stuff under it's control.

hintymad 5y ago

Before we even get to the political side of "you will never win in the Chinese market", how do we explain that Amazon lost to jd.com, and Walmart (and a slew of other retailers) lost to local retailers? The Chinese government didn't favor the local retailers in anyway. Another case is Uber vs DiDi. The Chinese government didn't favor Didi either, yet DiDi managed to beat Uber hands down. Specifically, Didi managed to be profitable in short trips while losing money on long trips, and Uber's biz team found it out months later. Kinda shameful, if you ask me.

xenihn 5y ago
>The Chinese government didn't favor the local retailers in anyway. Do you have proof of this?
- hintymad 5y ago
  Should it be the other way around, namely do we have proof that the Chinese government interfered? I do acknowledge that it's hard to know for sure that something does not exist. It's just that there's plenty of news on how Chinese government play favors for its auto industry, for Baidu, and for media companies. But somehow I didn't see any report or even anecdote on retailing, and certainly not for Did (some cities tried to regulate both Uber and Didi).
  - xenihn 5y ago
    I'm not the one who made a statement as if it were a fact.
sennight 5y ago
> how do we explain that Amazon lost to jt.com... JTI? Of Japan? The one where the Japanese government is legally required to own at least a third?
- hintymad 5y ago
  My bad. JD.com. Updated.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

agency 5y ago

Is there any evidence regarding that “First Man” anecdote? I remember this being a big thing in the conservative culture sphere in at the time but it seems like a manufactured controversy. Are there not American flags in all manner of big blockbusters that do huge numbers in China? The character “Captain America” doesn’t seem to have stopped the MCU movies from succeeding there. The whole thing feels like people just looking to get angry about something.

alias_neo 5y ago
We nom-Americans are well aware of the "flag tax". We know Hollywood gets tax cuts for bigger, more numerous and slower-mo shots of American flags in their films. Clearly "First Man" was making a statement about this special treatment.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- shkkmo 5y ago
  Interesting, so you have any citation links for this? I'd like to read more about this but a quick search brings up nothing.
  - alias_neo 5y ago
    Sorry friend. It was a joke. It's a long-running light-hearted poke at just how often Americans put flags in every piece of visual media they create.
ineedasername 5y ago
The American flag planting on the moon is one of the single most iconic and culturally significant events in American history, ever. The movie is based off of a book written by an American. The movie was directed by an American. The movie was produced by an American. For the movie to exclude this without it being a deliberate decision would be an oversight or coincidence beyond reasonable belief. Yes, American flags appear in other movies. Captain America is a fictional character in a fictional universe. Use of the American flag in that context is not in the least bit comparable to the first time humans stepped foot on solid ground that wasn't named Earth. The moon landing was also an iconic benchmark for world civilization as whole. Given that we have concrete knowledge of China forcing studios and actors to parrot China's values, it is certainly plausible that China did not want the crowning moment of this iconic human achievement to prominently feature America at that moment. It's also plausible that foreign sentiment against the US at that time--not just from China-- was also a factor. It is also possible the film creators wanted to present the moment as an achievement for all of civilization, without a focus on the US in particular. But given the history, book, director, and importance for the US, I absolutely believe it was deliberate, and as such people upset about it do not represent a manufactured controversy. If you grew up during the height of the Cold War and the arms race with Russia and watched the moon landing, or have heard--as I have-- stories from my parents and grand parents how much that gave them hope during a very dark time, you also might be a little upset that your country's role had been erased in the crowning moment.

mywittyname 5y ago

You're absolutely right. But from a Chinese perspective, they see open access to American companies for what it is: neocolonialism. They don't want American companies coming in, buying up all of the local brands, and siphoning off the profits back to America. The Chinese also don't want these large American companies using their business power to direct local politics. Just look at the attitude that Google, Palantir, and similar have for Europeans. I bet there are times that Germany wished they had their own Baidu. China is doing what it can to stop from becoming an American vassal.

smoldesu 5y ago
> China is doing what it can to stop from becoming an American vassal If our countries weren't so tightly intertwined with complicated trade partnerships and mutually beneficial enterprises, I'd be inclined to agree with you.
gentleman11 5y ago
Is it neocolonialism when American companies move into Canadian or German markets, or when ikea sets up in town, or when South Korean films displace Japanese films?
- asddubs 5y ago
  I think it's a question of scale (and the term has historical connotations as well obviously). I probably wouldn't call it neocolonialism but as a german citizen I do think that the less dependent on american companies we are, the better.
- strken 5y ago
  It's certainly seen as neo-colonialism, or at least exploitation, by some people. Here are a couple of examples of Australian protest songs about American economic and military expansion into our country: https://youtube.com/watch?v=tl1IvmJvel0 https://youtube.com/watch?v=tl1IvmJvel0 https://youtube.com/watch?v=anx_o43Y27Y https://youtube.com/watch?v=anx_o43Y27Y
- mywittyname 5y ago

ashtonkem 5y ago

It’s very frustrating when companies come up with these blatant lies. Just say you’re censoring it on behalf of China. We don’t believe your “human error” lie, and it’s insulting to our intelligence to even try.

batiudrami 5y ago
If it was deliberate it’s much more likely that this was an employee behaving outside their remit than it being a company policy. “Human error” can be used euphemistically like this when you aren’t prepared to throw a junior employee to the wolves.

xwolfi 5y ago

I m in China and while I understand where you're coming from, from my point of view, you insisting on showing an american flag on the moon is a bit what we're saying about shadow colonialism. You only ever like or accept vassal and submissive partners. It's still hard for us, but maybe we'll give up our pride for the american money, like so many others :) This ofc doesnt excuse the communist crimes and lack of trust in us, the population, a problem totally independent from our conflict with the US, whatever excuse the US found at the spur of the moment.

Nerwesta 5y ago

> It's widely suspect that not having the American flag on the moon landing in the movie "First Man" was to cater to the Chinese market. I didn't watch that movie, I guess it surprised you as an (allegedly ?) American the same way it surprised many Europeans watching the numerous WW2 movies about the US saving the old-world. It's all about catering the most profitable market in the end. ( I'm not here to throw oil on fire by the way, I guess that the same... process ? )

tqi 5y ago

Excuse me, "kowtowing"? Where did you pick that up from, a yellow peril poster?