22 ms·

It's scary how many of the systems we were worried about in China (e.g. social credit system, censorship, etc.) are basically being created now in the west thro

by dayvid 5y ago

It's scary how many of the systems we were worried about in China (e.g. social credit system, censorship, etc.) are basically being created now in the west through the proxy of critical companies blocking access and/or working together.

another_story 5y ago
A bit different considering the west has alternatives which are not blocked, whereas China doesn't. You can even spin up your own sources and serve whatever you want,a right not afforded the average Chinese citizen.
- Karunamon 5y ago
  Given the centralization and collusion of payment providers, I don't think that holds.
  - octoberfranklin 5y ago
    Why downvotes?
    - vengefulduck 5y ago
      Ever heard of bitcoin?
      - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
        I have! But my landlord and the store where I buy most of my food have not.
- YaBomm 5y ago
  Only a bit different when you compare monopolies to governments which are ultimate monopolies...
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  A bit different considering the west has alternatives which are not blocked, Yeah, right up until we don't. Wishful thinking doesn't scale.
- bko 5y ago
  > You can even spin up your own sources and serve whatever you want,a right not afforded the average Chinese citizen. It's difficult when the backbone of the internet isn't available to you. For instance, AWS can be denied cutting off vital internet infrastructure we take for granted. Further payment processors like Visa can cut off access. Even banks could cut you off and even seize your funds if they got the directive. You can spin your own service is a nice fiction we tell ourselves but with financing getting cut off it becomes impossible to build a service that reaches a lot of people without a lot of money and a disregard for profit. In China maybe someone would come knocking on the door to take you away to jail. But in the US, we don't need to go that far. All it would take is the press secretary telling big tech they need to help fight "misinformation" and pointing them in the right direction.
  - vikingerik 5y ago
    And spinning your own service also fails once the upstream ISPs and DNS registrars also start banning you for wrongthink. That's coming too.
    - bko 5y ago
      That's a good point. It just keeps moving upstream. I'm especially worried about the tie between big tech and the government. There's open communication between the two and the current administration is helping tech companies craft their "misinformation policy". On a certain level its inevitable. If you want to make sure people have reliable resources, someone needs to identify whats reliable and what's not (usually a three letter agency). But when you have the white house openly call on a Swedish company to censor a popular podcaster, that's where I draw the line. Artists can pull their music, people can boycott, but the government shouldn't have their finger on the scale. That's exactly what the 1st amendment is about. If the state can declare something should be censored and it is (voluntarily though!) then it's no different than force. And when you exert that same pressure on upstream providers, you've essentially rebuilt the great firewall of China without any casualties.
    - roenxi 5y ago
      I'm sceptical that is technically possible. If it was, it would have been deployed against the torrent websites by now. Despite countless attempts to shut them down, trackers are still easy to access with only basic technical knowledge and no specialist software. Communication is even harder to block than torrent traffic. At least torrents have an unusual characteristic traffic pattern that could be checked for. Watching wrongthink videos over an encrypted connection doesn't even have that.
- nemothekid 5y ago
  You can do this in China too - just get a VPN. If you think a VPN is too high of a hurdle for the average Chinese citizen, I'd argue it's just as high for American netizens as well.
  - dgellow 5y ago
    That’s illegal in China. You’re only allowed to use VPN approved by the government and only for some use-cases.
- ehsankia 5y ago
  Every single day on HN, people mix up giving someone a platform to censoring someone. Social platforms are megaphones. Up until a decade ago, it was impossible for nearly everyone to reach out a large audience, especially worldwide. Nowadays, anyone can make a video accessible by billions of people with a single click. If people banned from that is "censorship", then by that definition the whole world was censored 2 decades ago.
  - ekianjo 5y ago
    > then by that definition the whole world was censored 2 decades ago. Nope, you are misunderstanding something here. Removing what was considered "given" is what becomes perceived as censorship.
    - ehsankia 5y ago
      > perceived as censorship keyword here being _perceived_
      - ekianjo 5y ago
        Everything is a matter of perception at the end of the day.
  - d0gsg0w00f 5y ago
    But is taking away the megaphone the same as silencing them? When everyone has a megaphone, those who don't are not heard.
    - dgellow 5y ago
      And that’s fine. Not everybody can or has to be heard by everybody else. There no such as a thing as an expectation to be heard by others. That becomes more problematic and debatable once infrastructure companies such as a DNS provider or a hosting company refuses to deal with some content given that you remove the ability to create your own soapbox.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  How much does it matter in practice ? If you personally decide to host your own blog from your house, nobody will probably come after you. If you get enough traction, you’ll need to host a whole operation that can be managed by a full staff and serve millions of views every day. There’s now in the picture one or more platform providers, and payment processing that you depend on for your income. A bunch of entities are now allowing you to have your soapbox, that can be swept away at any turn if you’re too much of a problem for any of them. No need to arrest you or kidnap you, “violate your rights”, they just cut your supplies.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    This just shows that many of the policies in China are wanted by many, probably the majority, in society there. The policies are not always used for good, but they are indeed used to stop the spread of harmful misinformation or harmful practices (eg. detox via drinking bleach). In the US, you have the right to say something, but that doesn’t mean anyone has to listen to you or have to help spread your message; if you try, you might find a (possibly large) niche that people are interested in such as “the 2020 election was rigged” or “COVID doesn’t exist” or “the moon landing was filmed on a sound stage”, and you won’t be robbed of your autonomy of movement and speech by being sent to jail or a “re-education camp”.
    - makeitdouble 5y ago
      More and more I have the feeling that we focus a lot on the freedom to say some political things (“the 2020 election was rigged”), and accept stuff like jail for breaking DRM or life breaking monetary amounts in penalty for copyright infringement as some benign issue we should strive to solve, but if we can’t that’s just too bad, gotta live with it. I’m not saying I’d live in China, but I feel we’re putting too much credit in our own system. Even comparing ourselves to China doesn’t feel productive, we all have our local issues and should probably focus on solving them.
      - undersuit 5y ago
        Streamers on twitch were getting banned for saying the word cracker, temporarily losing their livelihood because of joke outrage from some loosely organized people on Reddit/Twitch. Meanwhile Covid variant Omicron was just about to peak and the amount of misinformation about Covid peaked too. Sacrifice another ~350k Americans and countless others around the globe from our refusal to stop misinformation, I sleep. Save some gamers' mock wounded pride; real stuff. Never saw much misinformation on Twitch to be honest, but they are taking a more active role as of a few days ago: https://safety.twitch.tv/s/safety-news/detail?language=en_US&post=Preventing-Misinformation-Actors-from-Using-Twitch https://safety.twitch.tv/s/safety-news/detail?language=en_US...
jmull 5y ago
I don’t get why people think youtube should be forced to host stuff they don’t want to host. Youtube should be socialized and forced to become a content-neutral storage? But why?!? We have the internet, where you can rent or run your own server and storage and post your conspiracy theory videos.
- pokstad 5y ago
  No one is arguing about YouTube being forced to do things. People are discussing how sad it is that YouTube has gone down that road.
  - jmull 5y ago
    It’s sad that youtube can choose what content to host? It’s sad that not everyone agrees with all the choices they make? Doesn’t seem sad to me. The alternative, where youtube cannot choose what content to host, seems sad to me.
    - BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
      Google is a nearly two trillion dollar company. I shed no tears for “forcing” them to host speech they don’t like. My desire to give companies rights diminishes with scale.
      - jmull 5y ago
        Fortunately, in the US, we have the first amendment as a shield against authoritarians who would dictate the content we see.
        car_analogy 5y ago
        Against government authoritarians. You have no shield against private oligopolies.
        5y ago
Buttons840 5y ago
Some political websites have been blocked on the hosting level and even the ISP level. I can't defend these website's political views, but I can defend their right to at least host their website somewhere.
dgellow 5y ago
In China you would risk being arrested for such a thing. Not just see your channel or video taken down by a platform.
- daenz 5y ago
  Whether it's Huxley or Orwell, they're both dystopias. EDIT>> My mistake, censorship falls clearly under Orwell
  - hyperbovine 5y ago
    That’s a dangerous false equivalence.
  - _yoqn 5y ago
    Nah, Huxley. Netflix is our Soma.
  - dgellow 5y ago
    Honestly, we are so far into what was considered dystopian in the past century, I don’t know if that even make sense to still use that type of categorization. But to actually answer your comment: 1. A company removing proven disinformation is quite far from what censorship is. Also not really something that would be considered dystopian. 2. I would disagree that Orwell work is about “censorship is bad”. His work is IMHO more about exploring risks caused by attempt to do population surveillance and control. Spreading lies and falsehood consistently to destroy any understanding of an actual situation, the way Trump does by lying about election fraud, is way closer to the Orwellian nightmare than YouTube removing that content.
    - daenz 5y ago
      2. It's more extreme than that though. YouTube banned a reputable news source for reporting on a story in which Trump tangentially mentioned election fraud. That's pretty Orwellian imo.
      - 5y ago

by dayvid 5y ago

another_story 5y ago

A bit different considering the west has alternatives which are not blocked, whereas China doesn't. You can even spin up your own sources and serve whatever you want,a right not afforded the average Chinese citizen.

Karunamon 5y ago
Given the centralization and collusion of payment providers, I don't think that holds.
- octoberfranklin 5y ago
  Why downvotes?
  - vengefulduck 5y ago
    Ever heard of bitcoin?
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      I have! But my landlord and the store where I buy most of my food have not.
YaBomm 5y ago
Only a bit different when you compare monopolies to governments which are ultimate monopolies...
CamperBob2 5y ago
A bit different considering the west has alternatives which are not blocked, Yeah, right up until we don't. Wishful thinking doesn't scale.
bko 5y ago
> You can even spin up your own sources and serve whatever you want,a right not afforded the average Chinese citizen. It's difficult when the backbone of the internet isn't available to you. For instance, AWS can be denied cutting off vital internet infrastructure we take for granted. Further payment processors like Visa can cut off access. Even banks could cut you off and even seize your funds if they got the directive. You can spin your own service is a nice fiction we tell ourselves but with financing getting cut off it becomes impossible to build a service that reaches a lot of people without a lot of money and a disregard for profit. In China maybe someone would come knocking on the door to take you away to jail. But in the US, we don't need to go that far. All it would take is the press secretary telling big tech they need to help fight "misinformation" and pointing them in the right direction.
- vikingerik 5y ago
  And spinning your own service also fails once the upstream ISPs and DNS registrars also start banning you for wrongthink. That's coming too.
  - bko 5y ago
    That's a good point. It just keeps moving upstream. I'm especially worried about the tie between big tech and the government. There's open communication between the two and the current administration is helping tech companies craft their "misinformation policy". On a certain level its inevitable. If you want to make sure people have reliable resources, someone needs to identify whats reliable and what's not (usually a three letter agency). But when you have the white house openly call on a Swedish company to censor a popular podcaster, that's where I draw the line. Artists can pull their music, people can boycott, but the government shouldn't have their finger on the scale. That's exactly what the 1st amendment is about. If the state can declare something should be censored and it is (voluntarily though!) then it's no different than force. And when you exert that same pressure on upstream providers, you've essentially rebuilt the great firewall of China without any casualties.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    I'm sceptical that is technically possible. If it was, it would have been deployed against the torrent websites by now. Despite countless attempts to shut them down, trackers are still easy to access with only basic technical knowledge and no specialist software. Communication is even harder to block than torrent traffic. At least torrents have an unusual characteristic traffic pattern that could be checked for. Watching wrongthink videos over an encrypted connection doesn't even have that.
nemothekid 5y ago
You can do this in China too - just get a VPN. If you think a VPN is too high of a hurdle for the average Chinese citizen, I'd argue it's just as high for American netizens as well.
- dgellow 5y ago
  That’s illegal in China. You’re only allowed to use VPN approved by the government and only for some use-cases.
ehsankia 5y ago
Every single day on HN, people mix up giving someone a platform to censoring someone. Social platforms are megaphones. Up until a decade ago, it was impossible for nearly everyone to reach out a large audience, especially worldwide. Nowadays, anyone can make a video accessible by billions of people with a single click. If people banned from that is "censorship", then by that definition the whole world was censored 2 decades ago.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  > then by that definition the whole world was censored 2 decades ago. Nope, you are misunderstanding something here. Removing what was considered "given" is what becomes perceived as censorship.
  - ehsankia 5y ago
    > perceived as censorship keyword here being _perceived_
    - ekianjo 5y ago
      Everything is a matter of perception at the end of the day.
- d0gsg0w00f 5y ago
  But is taking away the megaphone the same as silencing them? When everyone has a megaphone, those who don't are not heard.
  - dgellow 5y ago
    And that’s fine. Not everybody can or has to be heard by everybody else. There no such as a thing as an expectation to be heard by others. That becomes more problematic and debatable once infrastructure companies such as a DNS provider or a hosting company refuses to deal with some content given that you remove the ability to create your own soapbox.
makeitdouble 5y ago
How much does it matter in practice ? If you personally decide to host your own blog from your house, nobody will probably come after you. If you get enough traction, you’ll need to host a whole operation that can be managed by a full staff and serve millions of views every day. There’s now in the picture one or more platform providers, and payment processing that you depend on for your income. A bunch of entities are now allowing you to have your soapbox, that can be swept away at any turn if you’re too much of a problem for any of them. No need to arrest you or kidnap you, “violate your rights”, they just cut your supplies.
- judge2020 5y ago
  This just shows that many of the policies in China are wanted by many, probably the majority, in society there. The policies are not always used for good, but they are indeed used to stop the spread of harmful misinformation or harmful practices (eg. detox via drinking bleach). In the US, you have the right to say something, but that doesn’t mean anyone has to listen to you or have to help spread your message; if you try, you might find a (possibly large) niche that people are interested in such as “the 2020 election was rigged” or “COVID doesn’t exist” or “the moon landing was filmed on a sound stage”, and you won’t be robbed of your autonomy of movement and speech by being sent to jail or a “re-education camp”.
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    More and more I have the feeling that we focus a lot on the freedom to say some political things (“the 2020 election was rigged”), and accept stuff like jail for breaking DRM or life breaking monetary amounts in penalty for copyright infringement as some benign issue we should strive to solve, but if we can’t that’s just too bad, gotta live with it. I’m not saying I’d live in China, but I feel we’re putting too much credit in our own system. Even comparing ourselves to China doesn’t feel productive, we all have our local issues and should probably focus on solving them.
    - undersuit 5y ago
      Streamers on twitch were getting banned for saying the word cracker, temporarily losing their livelihood because of joke outrage from some loosely organized people on Reddit/Twitch. Meanwhile Covid variant Omicron was just about to peak and the amount of misinformation about Covid peaked too. Sacrifice another ~350k Americans and countless others around the globe from our refusal to stop misinformation, I sleep. Save some gamers' mock wounded pride; real stuff. Never saw much misinformation on Twitch to be honest, but they are taking a more active role as of a few days ago: https://safety.twitch.tv/s/safety-news/detail?language=en_US&post=Preventing-Misinformation-Actors-from-Using-Twitch https://safety.twitch.tv/s/safety-news/detail?language=en_US...

jmull 5y ago

I don’t get why people think youtube should be forced to host stuff they don’t want to host. Youtube should be socialized and forced to become a content-neutral storage? But why?!? We have the internet, where you can rent or run your own server and storage and post your conspiracy theory videos.

pokstad 5y ago
No one is arguing about YouTube being forced to do things. People are discussing how sad it is that YouTube has gone down that road.
- jmull 5y ago
  It’s sad that youtube can choose what content to host? It’s sad that not everyone agrees with all the choices they make? Doesn’t seem sad to me. The alternative, where youtube cannot choose what content to host, seems sad to me.
  - BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
    Google is a nearly two trillion dollar company. I shed no tears for “forcing” them to host speech they don’t like. My desire to give companies rights diminishes with scale.
    - jmull 5y ago
      Fortunately, in the US, we have the first amendment as a shield against authoritarians who would dictate the content we see.
      - car_analogy 5y ago
        Against government authoritarians. You have no shield against private oligopolies.
        5y ago

Buttons840 5y ago

Some political websites have been blocked on the hosting level and even the ISP level. I can't defend these website's political views, but I can defend their right to at least host their website somewhere.

dgellow 5y ago

In China you would risk being arrested for such a thing. Not just see your channel or video taken down by a platform.

daenz 5y ago
Whether it's Huxley or Orwell, they're both dystopias. EDIT>> My mistake, censorship falls clearly under Orwell
- hyperbovine 5y ago
  That’s a dangerous false equivalence.
- _yoqn 5y ago
  Nah, Huxley. Netflix is our Soma.
- dgellow 5y ago
  Honestly, we are so far into what was considered dystopian in the past century, I don’t know if that even make sense to still use that type of categorization. But to actually answer your comment: 1. A company removing proven disinformation is quite far from what censorship is. Also not really something that would be considered dystopian. 2. I would disagree that Orwell work is about “censorship is bad”. His work is IMHO more about exploring risks caused by attempt to do population surveillance and control. Spreading lies and falsehood consistently to destroy any understanding of an actual situation, the way Trump does by lying about election fraud, is way closer to the Orwellian nightmare than YouTube removing that content.
  - daenz 5y ago
    2. It's more extreme than that though. YouTube banned a reputable news source for reporting on a story in which Trump tangentially mentioned election fraud. That's pretty Orwellian imo.
    - 5y ago