YouTube actively deletes anti CCP comments(twitter.com) |
YouTube actively deletes anti CCP comments(twitter.com) |
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.
Chinese characters aren't magic. Putting two characters next to each other isn't fundamentally different from putting "Russian" and "propaganda" next to each other. You could write a sentence with just a single-character word, but that's not going to be more expressive than a single word in any other language.
Excuse my bluntness here, but that is a very lazy excuse. A lot of comments are repeated, utter trash that span multiple channels and videos from known bad actors. Sure no spam filtering is perfect but in this case it's obvious YT has gone out of their way to handle that data differently.
It’s the other way around: an expressed hateful opinion may be considered hate speech by the law or someone. And an opinion may be considered hateful. But the other way doesn’t make any sense.
"All <n-word>s need to go back to Africa." (clearly and overly hateful)
"All black people need to go back to Africa." (still hateful)
"All African-Americans need to go back to Africa." (All words are accepted, but the notion is still rather hateful)
No matter what words one uses it could be considered hate speech by today's definition. Disclaimer: I do not nor do I advocate using racial slurs, the stub in here was just to prove a point.
In the case of communist bandits, it's a criticism of a political ideology, and in particular here one party. Criticism of political parties and ideologies is completely fine, even when expressing insults to them. Expressing threats of violence or other crimes isn't permitted or moral, but expressing dislike or disrespect is perfectly valid. Can anyone say they've never expressed disrespect to any ideology or political party in their life?
Does that offend you?
Would you be as happy to see fascism protected from negative commentary online, as you clearly would communism?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23317570
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.
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.
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...
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/...
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.
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.
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?
To say all conspiracy theories are bad is to say the government never conspires, or at least nobody ever correctly theorizes about it. Seems unlikely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory
and check out the citations.
One challenge is that Google's actually got some pretty solid signal to find and kill bots. But it's not impossible to botnet their services; just harder than doing it to the average online service that doesn't have an army of engineers who've trained on the adversarial space of people trying to automate ad clicks for real-money revenue.
I received a notice that the comment was removed for violating community standards against “hate speech” and was told that’s my one warning for the next 12 months and any subsequent infringements would lead to a 24 hour ban. I used their process to disagree with the finding and they replied in a few minutes that they rejected my appeal.
Obviously they can make mistakes, but I’d also be curious about your specific usage.
Someone must have reported you.
If someone insults them in the comments and they report it, are they even abusing the system or are they using the reporting mechanism as intended?
That's not an objective fact-oriented mission, and a moderation system that allows users to flag and kill comments that make them feel bad is still satisfying the constraints of the design.
"""
> Although laws vary by state, in the United States a defamation action typically requires that a plaintiff claiming defamation prove that the defendant:
> 1. made a false and defamatory statement concerning the plaintiff;
> 2. shared the statement with a third party (that is, somebody other than the person defamed by the statement);
> 3. if the defamatory matter is of public concern, acted in a manner which amounted at least to negligence on the part of the defendant; and
> 4. caused damages to the plaintiff.
"""
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation#Civil_defamation
Arguably all of these points are met by a "too big to jail" billboard facing the public. Though given the nature of a political candidate and free speech, I think this would be protected. Particularly because "Defenses to defamation that may defeat a lawsuit, including possible dismissal before trial, include the statement being one of opinion rather than fact or being 'fair comment and criticism'."
That said, even if it doesn't meet the technical level to convict I think it's a reasonable thing to refer to as defamation colloquially and I suspect you know that too.
For clarity on the specifics of a 'defamatory statement':
> A defamatory statement is a false statement of fact that exposes a person to hatred, ridicule, or contempt, causes him to be shunned, or injures him in his business or trade.
I do appreciate the work y'all do to keep this place nice, but I also hope you keep this in mind. I feel HN is 'influential' enough that being too ruthless about optimizing for 'new and interesting and curiosity-focused' might possibly diminish the values of HN as a spotlight/platform for important issues. I would pick the curiosity side though if I had to choose.
There's a related issue, which is that the better HN gets at its core thing (curiosity), the more the audience grows in quantity and/or quality, and then the more people then want to use that audience for something else. Sometimes that's to promote their company or event, sometimes it's to bring attention to some other matter—maybe more important than what's actually on the front page here. The more those things become the focus, though, the worse HN becomes at the core thing, so there's a sort of paradox where the better it gets, the worse it gets.
What seems to work is to focus on the core but not too rigidly. This is a good because rigidity turns into predictability which is bad for curiosity anyhow.
Third, this site has a serious problem with nationalistic flamewar, in which people vent their anger against another country in cartoonish ways. That is wrong and stupid, but worst of all it is tedious. On a site dedicated to curiosity, anything tedious is off topic.
Nobody calls berkeley student marxists 'bandits'.
'Communist' and 'ba'athist' are ideological affiliations, as are affiliations with the Chinese Communist Party or the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party specifically.
'Syrian' and 'Chinese' are not ideological affiliations.
I find most of their reports to be pretty balanced and factual, even if they have an obviously mainland Chinese perspective.
Before concluding that their content is propaganda that should be dismissed out of hand, why not verify for yourself whether it's that bad? Their video content speak for themselves. You don't even have to agree with them.
The content produced by Liu Xin in particular are pretty high quality. She regularly invites guests -- even western ones -- on her show, who provide non-Chinese perspectives. Sometimes their guests even disagree with her.
If you disagree, I would love to hear why.
For example, it's easy to be factual and accurate when you can pick subjects that don't touch anything in a list of sensitive spots.
Another thing to keep in mind is the intended audience. If they don't expect more than, say, 0.1% of the Chinese population to watch that content, they might relax the censors. There are half a dozen cases of Brazilian rock records sung in English where the international version wasn't censored, but he Brazilian version was very tamed down.
I will admit that I haven't watched their content, though, so feel free to give a rebuttal.
This is the most bizarre take on libertarian free speech absolutism that I've heard all week.
It also adds noise to the discussion which detracts from the very real bad behavior that’s happening here.
You know that comment moderation on a privately owned website is both legal and protected by law, and in no way affects your free speech protections?
OK cool, that resolves the parent's objection. I did not know that.
> You know that comment moderation on a privately owned website is both legal and protected by law, and in no way affects your free speech protections?
Read up on the CDA and the special privileges granted by Section 230. I'm not at all suggesting that online moderation should be made illegal.
> I’m not at all suggesting that online moderation should be made illegal.
Maybe I misunderstood. What are you suggesting then? What is the problem, and how is tearing down section 230 going to solve that problem? You said you wanted porn and beheadings to be allowed, and made a claim above that moderation is censorship. That did sound to me like you’re against moderation, so help me understand what you meant.
BTW, what is making you think that section 230 has anything to do with YouTube's comment deletion here? It sounds like they claimed it was a mistake. Whether true or not, it doesn't sound like section 230 is being used as a defense. So is this discussion about section 230 a red herring?
The people making that comment are talking about the government and the nation, not an ideology (which is barely even followed in practice, anyways).
Whether these political organizations adhere to their own professed principles is completely irrelevant; neither do. Whether these political organizations tolerate opposition is completely irrelevant; neither do.