It is funny, just yesterday I read Victor Mair's reasoning why "n" might have been banned [1]:
"This is probably out of fear on the part of the government that "N" = "n terms in office", where possibly n > 2; as in "liánrèn n jiè 连任n届" ("n successive terms in office"), which would be forbidden anyway because of the liánrèn 连任 ("continue in office") part."
I don't know any Mandarin or Cantonese, but this seems like a very strange explanation to me. Are there any native speakers with more insight on this?
Native speaker here. My guess is that the censor is not "directly" banning letter "N", but rather, this was a result of some machine learning algorithm that recognizes "N" as part of phrases or sentences that have a high probability of containing other banned words. It is like query expansion in NLP, but in this case it has accidentally banned a word that is widely used in other context.
Edit: This looks like a more reasonable explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16483061, N is the 14th letter in the alphabet, referring to the 14th item in the proposed changes [1] (the change that removes term limit).
To me this feels way too real. People have to speak in 'codes' and 'memes' because they are already being ultra censored and controlled.... and the next level of it being the code or meme being censored.
I'm pretty sure they're banning the letter N because it was the 14th "proclamation" in the recent posting about constitutional changes by Xinhua news. They tried to bury it under a set of 20~ changes and disguise the wording. First, 14 was banned on weibo. Then, N was banned as people quickly jumped to the 14th letter of the English alphabet.
Weibo also has a history of doing stuff like this, Tiananmen Square is sometimes referred to as May 35th, so they like to play with numbers and their meanings.
Government censorship is no fun, but the best part about this article for me was learning that Xi Jinping is sometimes compared to Winnie the Pooh. The comparison picture is dead on.
The really scary part of that article is the screenshot of Weibo with every message censored automatically with "content is illegal".
If you think this sort of thing could never happen in the west, I think you're underestimating how quickly it could happen. The constitutions and bills of rights of any country are not laws of nature that can't be broken- they're words on paper that governments or populist movements can easily ignore.
Consider any politician you disagree with deeply and ask yourself: if they could ban dissent from their views, wouldn't they?
One advantage we have here is that the government is separated enough from the people who have actual executive power to ban content. A sudden ban is quite impossible but we should probably be beware of being a slowly cooked frog.
> they're words on paper that governments or populist movements can easily ignore
For example, China's constitution also contains "Article 35. Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration."
However various words and phrases to even mention Article 35 itself are banned in some chat apps, etc... in China even though the full text of the constitution is available anyways.
You must be mistaken. China's Constitution matches exactly with daily life in China. Of course there's a way to challenge unconstitutional actions, through the Communist Party member dispute process where you can escalate to each level of political officers in the township you live in.
If you go high enough, you might get personal attention from the regional or even provincial governors, who also have to make sure they have enough food, water, shelter, jobs, and prisons to fit the population of their jurisdiction.
I do not understand this comment. Is it sarcasm? Or do you use some unusually restrictive definitions of "freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration"?
China has literally just banned the word 'disagree'.
They can do it without any cognitive dissonance by either classifying certain persons as non-citizens (hence not granted those rights) or by raising some unclear limit to these rights (so those who break national unity, "harmony" or some such aren't covered).
An example outside of China: Venezuela's Maduro, paying attention to international sensibilities, now classifies opposition to him and his government as "hate speech".
like censorship doesn't happen in the usa. remember all that media coverage sanders got when he was packing stadiums while Clinton could barely fill a highschool auditorium? me neither.
how many mass shootings china had last year? oh wait
how about all those bombs dropped daily in the middle east? ah ooos sorry, america again.
That’s not censorship. Censorship is when the government restricts speech. The government doesn’t control American news media.
With that said I have no disagreement about the hypocrisy of USA bombing foreign countries.
As for shooting, how would we know if this happened in China since the government does control the media there. They could suppress anything they reflected negatively.
I see Trump fans frequently utter that they like to shut up mainstream media. In their view anybody who is lying or criticizing their great leader doesn't deserve free speech.
The reason constitutions are relatively stable in the west is that people take them seriously and expect violations to be punished. You're more likely to violate the constitution if you think the people won't demand recourse. The constitutional tradition is really the more significant factor. Sadly, ours seems to be weakening.
> Consider any politician you disagree with deeply and ask yourself: if they could ban dissent from their views, wouldn't they?
I'm less concerned about politicians in the US and more about grassroots censorship from the political fringes.
> Consider any politician you disagree with deeply and ask yourself: if they could ban dissent from their views, wouldn't they?
Anyone ambitious and competent enough to gain power would. That is the wisdom of the Constitution: balancing checks on power instead of relying on the “right” leader. Based on that, I would amend your question to: would they use the law against others in power who seek to silence dissidents?
Is there something seriously wrong with that? The whole argument people here are trying to make is how quickly freedom of speech can erode. In that context, it is absolutely apples to apples when you compare freedom of speech in US, France, Germany, China, wherever.
As a French person, the American view of "everything else than absolute free speech is not free speech" annoys me. Our view on that subject is different and I don't feel like living in China.
I am also French and I was not comparing France and China.
I was just presenting fact: In France (and in other European country as well), we also censor content.
Now, obviously France and US have a different idea of what is free-speech and both view have advantages and disadvantages, I am not going to argue about this.
But, at least for speech, we know what is allowed and what is not allowed to be said. But when in come to internet censorship, the minister of interior affair is almost a unregulated black-box.
As far as I remember, their was still the control of a judge , but their was no obligation to publicly have a list of banned website and the reason for their ban.
Plus, all the government have been weakening the frontier between the executive and the juridical system for decades now, so the independence of judges regarding theses issues as been really weakened.
If that doesn't scare you enough, you can read some articles by Yve Sintomaire[0] which explain why France is one of the European country with the least defense against a derive to authoritarianism.
It already happened several times. Twitter admitted to hiding tweets with hash tags like #wikileaks; #podestaemails... So I guess the USA isn't all that different, if you dismiss the propaganda. You just don't have the universal healthcare and you get to spend 10 times more on the military and NSA snooping.
They admitted to banning bots, which is what they did. If someone doesn't like the fact that bots inflated propaganda that they happened to believe in doesn't make it censorship.
Isn’t the more important question, if you disagree with someone and had the power to censor them, would you do it?
Unless people believe in free speech even when it benefits points of view they disagree with, its future in society is in peril. Nobody wants opinions they like to be censored, it’s much more difficult to say that the NRA or religious fundamentalists should have the same protected right of speech as everyone else.
Democracy requires shared values. It's what allows us to disagree in a civil manner. Once values become divergent enough, democracy is no longer really possible because accepting the outcome of losing becomes intolerable.
Absolutely. As a lobbyist I encounter this issue all the time. Unfortunately it's both parties, albeit one more so than the other. Still, issue exists in both parties which is scary.
consider that the internet is the new imperialism of the west. people are so quick to wag the finger at china but no one stops to think that they are looking iut for themselves. Companies like google and facebook promote western values and they do it subversively: whats the old Billy G quote? Integrate, assimilate, dominate, elimate or some such?
this article is just another western propaganda piece trying to paint China as this overbearing big brother entity (which I will admit is a very compelling narrative to western individualists).
This kind of chicanery shows up at every point in monarchical rule...one would have anticipated it to be a bit more delayed in this case given how recent the abolition of the term limit has been
Term limits are a check-and-balance against this sort of silliness. The divine inspiration cited by George W Bush for example to invade the middle east was no guarantee that the US would continue the practice of seeking holy affirmation to invade a country. Abolition of the term limit disrupts international confidence in a parties ability to advance domestic and foreign policy as now, you've pinned yourself to a single dependency in the government.
66 comments
[ 7.6 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] thread"This is probably out of fear on the part of the government that "N" = "n terms in office", where possibly n > 2; as in "liánrèn n jiè 连任n届" ("n successive terms in office"), which would be forbidden anyway because of the liánrèn 连任 ("continue in office") part."
I don't know any Mandarin or Cantonese, but this seems like a very strange explanation to me. Are there any native speakers with more insight on this?
[1] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=36939
Edit: This looks like a more reasonable explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16483061, N is the 14th letter in the alphabet, referring to the 14th item in the proposed changes [1] (the change that removes term limit).
[1] (Chinese) http://www.xinhuanet.com/2018-02/25/c_1122451187.htm
A: Have you been to Disney? B: OMG, only like, n times!
(A: 你去过迪斯尼吗？ B: 哎呀我去n次啦)
edit: so i’m confirming Mair’s guess.
Weibo also has a history of doing stuff like this, Tiananmen Square is sometimes referred to as May 35th, so they like to play with numbers and their meanings.
https://twitter.com/vinayak_jain/status/899886641157783553
If you think this sort of thing could never happen in the west, I think you're underestimating how quickly it could happen. The constitutions and bills of rights of any country are not laws of nature that can't be broken- they're words on paper that governments or populist movements can easily ignore.
Consider any politician you disagree with deeply and ask yourself: if they could ban dissent from their views, wouldn't they?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/02/apple-rep...
I jest, I realize it's not "banned".
For example, China's constitution also contains "Article 35. Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration."
However various words and phrases to even mention Article 35 itself are banned in some chat apps, etc... in China even though the full text of the constitution is available anyways.
If you go high enough, you might get personal attention from the regional or even provincial governors, who also have to make sure they have enough food, water, shelter, jobs, and prisons to fit the population of their jurisdiction.
China has literally just banned the word 'disagree'.
https://www.hongkongfp.com/2018/02/27/china-drowns-critics-l...
An example outside of China: Venezuela's Maduro, paying attention to international sensibilities, now classifies opposition to him and his government as "hate speech".
https://hosted.ap.org/article/8b39037f0c71478784778e4dcc8bb4...
how many mass shootings china had last year? oh wait
how about all those bombs dropped daily in the middle east? ah ooos sorry, america again.
USA USA USA
With that said I have no disagreement about the hypocrisy of USA bombing foreign countries.
As for shooting, how would we know if this happened in China since the government does control the media there. They could suppress anything they reflected negatively.
Even this two-term was just a speed bump to be repealed quickly if convenient by a rubber stamp congress.
> Consider any politician you disagree with deeply and ask yourself: if they could ban dissent from their views, wouldn't they?
I'm less concerned about politicians in the US and more about grassroots censorship from the political fringes.
Anyone ambitious and competent enough to gain power would. That is the wisdom of the Constitution: balancing checks on power instead of relying on the “right” leader. Based on that, I would amend your question to: would they use the law against others in power who seek to silence dissidents?
Some are also "shadow-banned" (the default DNS of the ISP return nothing), like the pirate bay (but I think it depends on your ISP).
Now, obviously France and US have a different idea of what is free-speech and both view have advantages and disadvantages, I am not going to argue about this.
But, at least for speech, we know what is allowed and what is not allowed to be said. But when in come to internet censorship, the minister of interior affair is almost a unregulated black-box. As far as I remember, their was still the control of a judge , but their was no obligation to publicly have a list of banned website and the reason for their ban. Plus, all the government have been weakening the frontier between the executive and the juridical system for decades now, so the independence of judges regarding theses issues as been really weakened.
If that doesn't scare you enough, you can read some articles by Yve Sintomaire[0] which explain why France is one of the European country with the least defense against a derive to authoritarianism.
[0] http://civic-forum.eu/espace-public/yves-sintomer-la-france-...
Unless people believe in free speech even when it benefits points of view they disagree with, its future in society is in peril. Nobody wants opinions they like to be censored, it’s much more difficult to say that the NRA or religious fundamentalists should have the same protected right of speech as everyone else.
this article is just another western propaganda piece trying to paint China as this overbearing big brother entity (which I will admit is a very compelling narrative to western individualists).
Term limits are a check-and-balance against this sort of silliness. The divine inspiration cited by George W Bush for example to invade the middle east was no guarantee that the US would continue the practice of seeking holy affirmation to invade a country. Abolition of the term limit disrupts international confidence in a parties ability to advance domestic and foreign policy as now, you've pinned yourself to a single dependency in the government.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Drama/comments/6wocla/assassins_cre...
There's something about censorship that always makes it turn ridiculous in the end.