The current submission is a nice test case actually. The comments here are no different than the ones in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223219, which had over a thousand comments and was only a week and half ago.
Btw, since someone always wonders: no we're not doing this because we're communists. It's a question of curiosity and repetition not going together (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). HN is for curiosity (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
Censoring messages about an arm of a government where YouTube is banned has me wondering what is going on behind closed doors.
How hard would be for Chinese intelligence to recruit YouTube moderators, and offer them a briefcase filled with unmarked bitcoin in exchange for deleting the comments that they flagged?
I think it's much simpler than that. There are also just millions upon millions of very nationalistic Chinese citizens (living globally) that would happily abuse the mod button.
There are Google employees... in China... that know exactly how the company works and how to game the system. Maybe they need to be "pressured" by the Chinese gov't - but I wonder if that's even necessary.
Social media is rife with people who will advocate for their country for free and without being asked to.
Isn't that also a 'conspiracy theory'? What does this term mean to you?
More topically, this was automated so it's not like a few bad actors who manually delete comments were to blame.
Youtube is not supporting CCP. They regularly delete videos that are even mildly supportive of CCP, for example https://twitter.com/rachw82451432/status/1265308476034519040
Another example is the 'Fighting terrorism' documentary by CGTN, which has been deleted and reuploaded many times now.
Heck, I don't even call the above examples 'pro-CCP'. They just show a different point of view that isn't anti-CCP.
I see people here claiming something along the lines of: all anti-CCP comments are valuable examples of freedom of speech. But let's be honest here. Were it any nearly any other topic, people's usual opinion of Youtube comments is that it's a cesspool. While there is indeed valuable anti-CCP commentary out there, some really is not worth reading and just degrade the quality of the website.
As opposed to what comments? I've never seen a non-low-quality comment on YouTube.
It's almost an art form in itself, like when World of Warcraft trials didn't allow chat and spammers would just sign in to a hundred accounts and die in the shape of the domain name with all the corpses.
Their comments still aren't Hacker News quality, but they are far above the Youtube average.
For example, check the comments at https://youtu.be/ufxfSJgQuSI
I wonder, how many times did they go through their 3 strikes? With the amount of videos google banned on all of their channels should now go into hundreds.
An ordinary content makers may well be banned after 1. An evident velvet glove treatment.
But if I read in between the lines of your comments, you appear to be saying that all of CGTN's videos are propaganda that should be dismissed out of hand. I don't agree with that notion. Whether you agree with their views is another story, but I do think it is valuable for their story to be at least heard.
Probably no individual. There are enough Chinese pro-nationalists using YouTube to generate noticeable signal if they all, independently based on their political creed or as an organized brigade, decide to start flagging posts. Once the flagging begins, the relative rarity of the characters in question combined against the flagging signal would generate a Bayesian prior that the word in question would tend to get flagged, and would preemptively start killing those comments.
This is one of the ways to train an automatic moderation system that is capable of discovering novel words the community decides are swears, and brigading is a known pathology that those systems are susceptible to.
The big question is: was this a recent effort to flag these phrases or was it a gradual thing? If it is the former, I think it is easy to forgive Google as things move fast. If it is the latter I think it brings questions about fundamental methodologies.
I am being intentionally ambiguous about what is being classified because there are similar complaints about other subjects so I want to generalize.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-ch...
And they aren’t any more nationalistic than Americans. Reporting this slogan is the equivalent of, say, an American reporting “Drumpf is Hitler” or “Hussein Obama”. These are all dumb slogans which are spammed just to get a political reaction. Different people get offended about different things, that’s just something you have to deal with in a big community.
Intersections such as "The word is rarely used, but when it is used it happens in a political setting where someone is more likely to decide to hit the flag button" would train an ML algorithm that the word is unwelcome in general.
I don't understand what worldview leads to the conclusion that any moderation of a private platform by a private entity is equivalent to government censorship.
> I don't understand what worldview leads to the conclusion that any moderation of a private platform by a private entity is equivalent to government censorship.
I didn’t say “government censorship”.
Nonsense. The Internet in general, and YouTube in particular did quite well for themselves for most of their existence, without any significant moderation.
You would have to pretty new to the internet to think that it would all collapse without heavy handed censorship.
I remember very clearly that up until about 2015 there was almost no moderation outside of spam, copyright infringement, or blatantly illegal stuff.
It would probably benefit these online communities to stop moderating and censoring stuff so much.
YouTube clearly is trying to gentrify their platform, and turn it into a sanitized short-form Netflix.
They pay media companies like MSNBC and Fox News to post clips of their shows, and heavily promote them.
They've driven many of the best content creators off of their platform. I used to really enjoy YouTube, but my favorite channels are constantly having to worry about their videos being deleted. They've been removing their old videos for fear of getting too many strikes, and moving to other, less good platforms.
> I don't understand what worldview leads to the conclusion that any moderation of a private platform by a private entity is equivalent to government censorship.
Well, when a platform becomes ubiquitous and powerful enough that only government can restrain it, then the question of people's general welfare comes up.
America has had these discussions before. We used to let oil companies, coal companies, rail roads, and phone companies become aggressive and destructive monopolies.
I think that at this point, calling YouTube "private" is not really correct. Not just do they heavily benefit from many government protections, but they are so big that they are not bound to market forces, and are essentially unaccountable to the public.
Corporations have no right to exist. And corporations that do not follow the rules certainly should not enjoy Section 230 protections. I don't think it is too much to ask that we be allowed to sue them if they don't follow the law.
And if you're suggesting every instance of moderation on Youtube's platform should be a civil or criminal matter, and that a court or some other agent of the state should decide on each matter rather than Google, how would that not still be censorship?
Also folks, keep in mind that I am absolutely not saying that the government should regulate every video on YouTube, I am only saying that YouTube should lose its special privileges if it wants to play that game itself. It is a critically-important distinction that I feel is being missed here.
The EFF is one of the strongest champions of freedom of speech online, and they disagree with you. https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230
FTFY.
Wait.
9 hours later it is still there... ️
That said, I wouldn't be shocked if every comment Palmer Lucky makes is shadow-banned.
This sounds like yet another anti-China thread that comes the same day as the new security law for Hong Kong (I'm sure it's just a coincidence).
I wonder: does China comment on repressive laws approved in other countries? Isn't Hong Kong a part of China? Why wouldn't they approve any laws they see fit? Why are the people that are concerned about this never concerned about repressive laws approved in US-friendly countries like Turkey or Saudi Arabia or the Emirates?
It's a serious question. We all knew how China works, and even if we thought it's something that goes against some of our values, we never considered it bad enough to be a deal breaker.
So what happened that made us all of a sudden become so fixated about it?
I don't think "conspiracy theory" is correct - it's simply a private business doing what's best for itself financially.
Google isn't some government institution. ...or is it?
intransitive verb - To plan together secretly to commit an illegal or wrongful act or accomplish a legal purpose through illegal action.
intransitive verb - To join or act together; combine.
intransitive verb - To plan or plot secretly.
-----------------
Governments conspire. If they do it well, you can not prove it, only theorize. "Conspiracy theories"
A conspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy by sinister and powerful groups, often political in motivation, when other explanations are more probable.
Possible alternative explanations:
1) The CCP is autoflagging comments from known anti-ccp users
2) The CCP is autoflagging comments only on chinese language videos
etc...
Given that this doesn't reproduce (i.e. there is a comment with this phrase up for over 9 hours) I'm skeptical of the explanation above that it's an automated system inside of YouTube's backends.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufrR98sR7XY&lc=UgyRmEKscwt_U...
I have a hard time imagining the Chinese government finding people who speak fluent English willing to post for 50 cents a comment, and I've never run across an English-language forum where such activity was apparent. The terms "五毛" and "wumao" are usually just spammed at anyone perceived as insufficiently anti-Chinese.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/26/youtube-china-comments-wum...
Is it crazy to think this is CCP state actors? [1] Both in the form of teams of people or bots reporting anything that they dislike to trigger Google's automation, or even just getting people hired by these companies to work on the inside for their interests.
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21270290/youtube-deleting...
Seems more believable than China infiltrating a foreign company to block two words from appearing in Chinese on a website blocked in China.
If I was the CCP I would get people hired to both steal IP and also look out for Chinese interests.
At lest one of the words found first can indeed be seen as denouncing descriptions of communism. I can't judge if it's just that or quite insulting.
If this is true then the interesting question is how they sneaked it in there. From outside by social enginering? From inside by affiliated devs? Through an consultant company hired to create a list of Chinese insults?
The most ironic think is that if my guess is true then it might literally have sneaked in without anyone intention by just using a list of insults from somewhere else without cross validating it.
Great! Let's fix it! Suppose you just throw the words on a whitelist? Well, now there are a couple magic words you can put in unrelated spam comments to ensure that they don't get deleted.
Honestly, all the people knotting their underwear about this don't seem like they've ever seriously thought about abuse on large platforms. It's an inherently adversarial environment, and you have to game out second- and third-order consequences for pretty much everything. And even then there will be unintended consequences. A 'real' fix that doesn't break lots of other things takes time.
Seems roughly equivalent to calling someone "you syrian terrorist" to me? Not sure where to calibrate it.
It's likely at its core a problem with poor employee screening, insufficient training and supervision, and vague/over-reaching policies given to employees that they sometimes interpret as legitimizing them to censor or ban based on their personal political beliefs.
Some employee there likely is a communist sympathizer, or has other connections to China's authoritarian ruling party.
Where did you get your version of the story from?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/23/oculus-pa...
Edit:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/03/31/oculus-rif...
Edit: glad you noticed the discrepancy. The second article you added doesn't show any defamation either.
He was subsequently found out and forced by Zuckerberg to publish a letter pretending he supported Gary Johnson (a lie that Zuckerberg thought was more palatable than Luckey's Trump support). He ended up being sort of fired later because nobody wanted him on their team anymore.
The best information I've read about this is in Steven Levy's new book Facebook: The Inside Story [1].
[0]: https://www.thedailybeast.com/palmer-luckey-the-facebook-nea...
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Facebook-Inside-Story-Steven-Levy/dp/...
Furthermore YouTube comment are full of spam and YouTube doesn't delete them, so why is it that if they contain certain Chinese keywords (in Chinese) they do delete them?
I think this just shows their spam filtering is not perfect. They delete lots of spam, in both English and Chinese, but some slip through.
Your comment seems to imply that the ONLY comments that are being deleted are the ones with the Chinese keywords. That is certainly not true. It tries to delete all spam, but the spam detection has both false negatives and false positives. That doesn't necessarily mean there is a conspiracy (doesn't mean there isn't, but provides no evidence that there is)
It's like censoring someone commenting "It's FBI sponsored" or "Russian propaganda". Sometimes a view words in a context can say as much as a long sentence.
Also in Chinese thinks are a bit more complicated due to how different glyph can be combined and/or used in conjuncture. So I wouldn't be surprised if there is a situation where commenting with a single Chinese glyph is saying as much as a long sentence!
Just insane. Google's new motto should "we do what we want"
> You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.
This is what they do to people that don't follow their agenda. All the while, you can't even respond to comments on your own comment.
