While most of the post is what I would expect, the minority language censorship was unexpected. It’s another sign of China’s ethnocentrism/Han Supremacist culture play out. It’s a real shame to see this sort of enforced death of linguistic diversity.
We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people in power WANT society to look like.
My company recently moved away from animated characters back to using humans in their ads. Most of the people in our ads are mixed race, you can't really tell if they're asian, white, arab, or "tanned".
So it's the same promotion of a genetic look, just with a different group of people.
> We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people in power WANT society to look like.
The actual explanation is simpler and more crass: It's about what sells to the target audience. At least for large campaigns, these things are thoroughly vetted.
If you're uncomfortable with some aspect of an ad, you aren't the target audience.
I can't comment on what your marketing team is up to but I don't know of any state level limitation on the demographics of ads. I see plenty of ads with white only folks in it...
It is definitively not. CCP has zero interest in sales. It is interested in preserving the party by controlling the populace, with special emphasis on ideology.
The activist Left in the West is grass-roots censorship, which is a completely different problem from a top-down, military-backed authoritarian regime. Granted, the former seems hard at work trying to produce the latter.
Even disregarding your false promotion comparison, what about the other side?
CCP 'promotes' (actually carries out) the brutal persecution of non-Han and specifically Uighurs in part facilitated propaganda ('ads')
US corporations are not forced by the government to include for instance only one community or exclude another in their communications.
Us corporations are not de facto owned by the government and do not have the same goal of consolidating power to maintain the CCP's (and increasingly just one man at the top's) grip over its own citizens.
In the US many spend lots of money lobbying to keep the government out of their business!
> We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people in power WANT society to look like.
What? It’s all about the money.
Ads, and tv (which is simply a honeypot to draw ad viewers) want to connect with as many viewers as possible in order to sell as much product (cars, cereal, or whatever) as possible.
In the 1950s US the only people with appreciable spending power were white parents, thus those were the ads. Magazines, which could be more finely targeted, were more diverse overall, though demographically siloed.
Society does not look like that (it never did, but the $$$ distribution did). Ads and TV are on the trailing edge, not the leading edge. And TV looks demographically more like the people I see, and more like my family, than it ever has before.
I have no idea what the phrase “people in power WANT society to look like” really means.
It's true, in a way, society looks like what the people in power want society to look like because the people in power are those with money and people who figure out how to make more money get power. It's like you say, that TV and ads are on the trailing edge as people figure out how to keep up with the distribution of money in society.
This seems like a ridiculously uncharitable explanation to the point of bad faith. A better interpretation that is also accurate would be that the people in power are people with money and influence.
I think it's strange that you equate "using racially ambiguous people" to promotion of said group. The fictional marketing company and the CCP have very different goals and I think you are projecting your own personal biases onto modern television marketing.
Live streaming platforms literally detect and warn against "unauthorized foreigners" from appearing on the screen.
TV channels like BBC (for high-end hotels) are being monitored real-time to black-out sensitive parts, books mailed or imported from overseas get pages ripped out, even entries in dictionaries get painted black.
Don't underestimate the seriousness of the censorship, it's among the few things communists are actually good at.
Where is this idea of Han supremacy coming from? I've known many Han who, when they had the option, they chose to be classified as a minority on their ID cards, since you know, minorities in China get far better treatment.
Most speakers of minority languages in China are Han Chinese. The censors who interrupted live streams when a non-Mandarin language was spoken were most likely speakers of a minority language, just a different one, which is why they didn't understand anything. So I don't think describing it as "Han Supremacism" is accurate. Presumably they didn't interrupt the streams because they felt ethnically superior to the speaker, but because they're liable if something illegal gets said and they don't censor it.
And note their reason for not automatically blocking Uyghur content: "We eventually decided not to do it: We didn't have enough Uyghur language data points in our system, and the most popular livestream rooms were already closely monitored." Which I guess means they have a dedicated group of Uyghur speakers on staff to censor those streams.
Douyin even banned speakers of Cantonese [0][1], a language spoken by 80M+ speakers and a top-20 language in the world [2].
Cantonese was widely spoken in Guangdong until the CCP actively wiped it out [3]. Among the 204 members of the CCP Central Committee, only 2 are from Guangdong [4]. Guangdong generated the highest GDP among all 31 administrative divisions [5], and doesn’t get its fair share of high ranking officials.
It’s not Han supremacy. It’s Mandarin-Han supremacy.
The article doesn't name the engineer but is still heavy on personal details. If China wanted to persecute said engineer they could easily find out who is responsible.
dont worry he is probably getting paid by the ccp to spread this message. keep on lockin down. the wuhan videos were real, but we manged to censor everything else.
Reading this, it was hard not to think of the direction US Academia, and to a lesser degree the government in general, is headed. We’re having deeply uncomfortable dilemmas with free speech - and whether speech at scale is fundamentally different. Ten years ago I could never have imagined an apparatus such as described in this article existing in the US, but today it seems possible. Perhaps still unlikely, but possible.
I was recently blocked for 24 hours from Facebook for testing the phrase “fucking British” in the context of colonial history. Note that I was testing it after another poster asked if their own comment saying the same thing had been censored. After having my test comment removed, I confirmed that “okay, it seems automated” which was itself flagged as being hate speech somehow, and my ban instated immediately.
My contacts proceeded to discuss ways to get around the filter (use idioms, odd characters, Unicode) and I was immediately reminded of how people get around Chinese censorship.
The way this company destroys journalism is its biggest crime. Algorithm-driven "self-media" that ByteDance popularised (with Toutiao) has essentially wiped out news in China, anyone can write sensationalized and fabricated news-style stories on its platforms and compete with "mundane and boring" serious news，AND GET PAID, these self-media are so prevalent and low-brow that fact-checking has been rendered futile.
It now has democratized censorship，indoctrination and misinformation, as the self-media care only about their ads income.
My advice? Vehemently reject any info/news platforms, as they care only about clicks.
>The “Post-Truth” Publication Where Chinese Students in America Get Their News"
Folks rage about 'the media' (a term now so amorphous I can't tell what it means anymore, or if the person even reads / watches what they think of as the media), so we get lots of self research / internet sleuth type discovery on platforms like reddit.
We had one on HN recently too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26186645. I applaud the person for putting in the effort, but I'm highly skeptical of internet sleuths and their ability to string a few searches and documents together into an accurate narrative / provide context to complex systems simply because they found what they thought of as similar things to recent events.
The difference is incentive, you probably have heard that ByteDance already makes big money, it pays these self-media to concoct what-ever eye-grabbing "content", and lend credibility to these "writers" by putting them in the same arena with traditional news and reporters: their news aggregation app and say this is today's "news" for you.
The only metric that matters is click numbers, you can now out-do reporters with your perfect news stories that check every eye-grabbing boxes, coz you can type however you like and face no consequences, so why not to make it as juicy as possible.
"Internet sleuthing" can mean "reporting the glitch" without meaning "giving a causal account of the glitch".
The "official narrative" on major political events has definitely been glitching out. Weird stuff like Qanon is really symptomatic of how institutions who should be calling this out (this huge intellectual buffer society has: Cory Doctorow, sociology deparments, church leaders...) are pretending not to see the glitches.
But they're there. I could start five flame wars in a short comment citing a few, but the point is not to side with the "deplorable" side in each of these, but to note that there's some deep truth at the root of each of these five deplorable things that goes haywire because the intellectual element of society hasn't been paying mind to it.
Maybe intellectuals just want to watch the world burn?
> but I'm highly skeptical of internet sleuths and their ability to string a few searches and documents together into an accurate narrative / provide context to complex systems
Me too, but i'm just as sceptical when it comes to "real" journalists. Journalists aren't domain experts in everything. Read some random news about tech stuff, it's often times filled with clear indications of them not really understanding the topic. Which isn't meant to bash journalists, they have limited time for research, need to write an article, and again are usually not domain experts.
Follow journalists who have domain expertise in technology?
You can use a shitty news article about a particular relevant topic that contains some questionable issues, and then search around for people that actually know what they are talking about.
Exert some of your own effort to find good sources. Don't trust the first thing you read. This is ultimately the problem imo.
Yep, thats one solution. But then do you really need journalists? Ultimately this ends in you having a some people you trust in certain areas. Quite how it works in real life. E.g. real life friends asked me what i think of covid tracking apps because they trust me on topics like this.
It's also not without failure modes. Lets say you just follow certain journalists/sleuths on certain topics that's basically filter bubbling by design.
Doing your own research to finding sources is imo the best thing, but it just doesn't scale. If i personally checked every single thing i've read today, that would be a full time job (aaand we've just invented journalists again to solve THAT problem)
That seems fair, at least in the context you describe (not sure i'm there but that's not important).
I think the 'pay attention to the media source and journalist and decide if you think they're good' is a viable route in the meantime even in the context you provided.
The look stuff up yourself kinda thing always reminds me of the conspiracy theories that people develop after they 'research'.... it's so easy to find what you want to find...
> I think the 'pay attention to the media source and journalist and decide if you think they're good' is a viable route in the meantime even in the context you provided.
I don't like this, again because of filter bubbles. It's very easy to fall into a 'i don't agree with this person, they must be wrong' trap.
> The look stuff up yourself kinda thing always reminds me of the conspiracy theories that people develop after they 'research'.... it's so easy to find what you want to find...
I would argue that this is what we're doing on HN though. HN has a policy of preferring the primary source.
It was a sudden and dramatic shift. I spent years being critical of news establishments, due to things such as the "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect," poor science reporting, conflicts of interest or a distaste with the progressively shorter articles and lower quality writing. However, as of the last few years, I don't feel comfortable talking about that with most people anymore. Terms like "mainstream media" or vocal distrust of news establishments have become conservative political dogwhistles, and imply that the speaker has a tenuous grasp on the concept of "reality."
Essentially, the Overton Window has shifted from questioning journalistic ethics and quality to a binary "do you support actual news of events that really happened...or delusional fancies of YouTube personalities and stuff like QAnon?"
The delusional fantasies aren't just YouTube though. It's in Fox News, it's in the op-ed section of the WSJ, it's propagated by political leaders. The entire conservative movement in the US right now is steeped in delusional fantasies. I don't see how this gets better.
I think people should be skeptical of any news platform which can easily be centrally controlled and manipulated. However, there is likely journalistic value to be found in some portion of those user-created news stories.
"Vehemently reject"ing user-created news seems to overly discount the flaws of mass media journalism: filter bubbles and misinformation are not new problems, and large organizations tend to have greater bias towards state interests. For example, I don't believe the national outrage over George Floyd would have occurred if everyone still got their news from mass media.
I have yet to witness MSNBC pour their efforts into deliberate misinformation. They clearly have a bias, but they are at least peddling correct information.
I think "deliberate" is a hard thing to determine with available information, and Politifact has certainly has selection bias is what they check and some ratings are questionable, but I think this demonstrates that they don't always 'peddle correct information':
I do think MSNBC's MO tends towards bending truth to make emotional appeals against ideological opponents rather than reporting outright fabrications, such as:
Also, a lot of their Russiagate reporting was questionably and thinly sourced. I suspect it will be a couple more years before the public gets enough substantive facts to outright call their reporting and analysis on this topic "false" or "intentionally misleading" but they certainly had a number of questionable segments.
The latest "False" fact check on that page is from 2015. Meaning that she went through the 2016 primary, 2016 election, the entire Trump presidency, and the 2020 election since the last time Polifact rated one of her claims false. And the claim was sourced from Pew Research but mistakenly interpreted.
I have a novel idea on that front: What if to combat ad-driven fake news we will deprive people spreading them from money, so that it would not be profitable to show them ads. That money can instead be directed to subsidizing education for those same people in formal logic and critical thinking.
> As a young unicorn, ByteDance does not have strong government relationships like other tech giants do, so it's walking a tightrope every second.
For those in free countries: when you build moderation tools and use them to silence political dissent "because you have to / to play the game" the game plays you. There is no one "too big" to be crushed by those with the material source of political power [1] and everyone tells themselves that they "have to" build the tools because they don't have the "power" to push back or because "it really is that bad this time". But some things don't have to be built (or built in the centralized, controllable way that they are). And when centralization is required or "it really is that bad this time", censorship should be widely publicized and discussed both in real time and with regular retrospectives on decisions to censor that are _public_.
For those in dictatorships: All is not lost, regardless. [2][3]
Having been raised in a democracy and raising my kids in a dictatorship, I think there's a lot of misunderstanding from both side. People in democracies cannot comprehend how anyone in a dictatorship could live anything else than miserable, and people in dictatorship mostly see people in democracies as hypocrite imperialists who lie to themselves about who truly rules.
The funny thing is that, well, it mostly all depend on how much you care and how corrupt the people in charge are, totally independent of the system. A dictatorship in Singapore works better than a democracy in Mexico for most metrics except anything that will make the power feel it's not in perfect control. The only difference in a dictatorship is the complete insecurity of the leaders who can't fathom that... we'd frigging vote for them would they ask nicely :D And you can completely ignore the party(ies), and live an entirely fulfilling and useful life, in both systems. I wouldn't argue for doing this but I see it all the time from both side and I envy it sometimes.
So this whole debate about censorship, it's really just a debate about insecurity. They don't censor the truth here, they don't censor debate or discussion, they only censor what nobody cares about: critics of the party. So it's a lot less "terrible" or "inhuman" than I thought it would be coming from a democracy. And I think the way to make it change isn't to whine and yell at it as much as you can, but to embrace the competent leaders when they come and give confidence to them we'll give them 10x more power by voting directly for them. And lay the final trap. At least my origin democracy became a democracy when it started doing just that after 2 centuries of massacres and revolts followed by authoritarian counter reactions in a seemingly endless cycle of aggressive "activism". It simply ended when we went to war in mass without being forced and convinced the rulers we'd vote for them anyway as a result, sheeples we are, which we did the first election. Trapped.
Its best case, average case and worst case, just like with algorithms on different data sets.
We already know that a benevolent dictatorship is the most efficient form of government, the best case in stewarding resources, it just lacks a secession path to maintain its efficiency, as dictatorships most frequently create worst case scenarios: worst stewarding of resources and no ability to dissent to correct it. No respect from the rest of the people on how the correction takes place, one coup just leads to another coup.
Inclusive democracies most frequently create average case scenarios of efficiency. They aren’t inherently better just because they’re inclusive. They can create best case and worst case scenarios too.
That’s discounting the forced sterilization, imprisonment, and extermination of the target du jour,
> One is an authoritative report documenting the systematic sterilization of Uighur women. The other was the seizure by U.S. Customs and Border Protection of 13 tons of products made from human hair suspected of being forcibly removed from Uighurs imprisoned in concentration camps.
> they only censor what nobody cares about: critics of the party
Saying that they only censor their critics and adding that they are only censoring “what no one cares about, critics of the party” is disturbing.
When one person can impose their will on you, it’s all rainbows and kitties until you disagree or step out of line. As I am guessing that the people who oppose forced sterilization and the other Nazi concentration camp policies (forced shaving of hair at camps for use as a product is a fairly distinct one) will end up censored and at those camps too?
These problems and issues might be out of sound and out of mind for now, but sooner or later, as the previous enemy starts to thin out, they will find new ones. And eventually, they’ll come for you too.
Often people who live in autocracies by choice do not believe such warnings. They are the intellectual equivalent of exercise and vitamins.
To make it clearer, here's what happens at the end of such regimes. Even for their supporters,
Towards the end of the war, the Nazis who were occupying the Netherlands blew up a town hall after inviting 134 people and their children to take shelter there. These people were of the right race. Most of them had done nothing against them. Some of them might have supported them.
They were the in-group until they weren't. They died because they weren't members of the party.
Being ambitiously evil, the Nazis also killed erstwhile embraced citizens at scale with the Dutch famine by blocking the transport of food from farms to citizens in their occupied territories. They did it because they could.
Perhaps this is still distant. Here's a shorter example. Almost all of the people Stalin directly ordered to be killed were his supporters.
> They were the in-group until they weren't. They died because they weren't members of the party.
So were they the in-group or not? Most people in occupied Europe did not approve at all of nazi germany. Sure, there were some collaborationist but most europeans did totally disapprove nazi germany.
It's not the same as people who voted for communism then got was they asked for: in my opinion, when you vote for a totalitarian society, it's just fair game that in return you get what you asked for (I know, I know, the ultra-left leaning are going to say that "this wasn't true communism and next time, believe us, we're going to make it work").
You cannot compare occupied Europe who didn't ask to live under a totalitarian society to those who supported communism.
Moving between democracy and dictatorship several times in my life I can say this: it mainly boils down to how well your interests align with the interests of the one(s) in power. The main difference is that if your interests don't align you'll have a much harder life in a dictatorship than in a democracy, special cases (like Singapore) notwithstanding. For every Singapore there's more than one Myanmar.
" dictatorship mostly see people in democracies as hypocrite imperialists who lie to themselves about who truly rules."
Han China is the most Imperial place on earth, and possibly has been since antiquity. 100x more ethnocentric and classically Imperial that America ever remotely was for example.
Isn't it interesting that someone could contemplate even writing such a thing?
Go ahead and compare 'Manifest Destiny' to Han Chinese Imperialism of the last 2000 years, that exercise will enlighten us all.
As part of 'Manifest Destiny', make sure sure to include the dozens of major states like Korea, Japan, Germany, France, Italy that the US liberated from other conquerors at great cost, and others it provides support for at some cost. Like Taiwan.
If the US were an Imperial Power, all the Oil in Iraq and in Saudi Arabia would belong to it.
Ironically, as the US 5th Fleet today provides protection for all merchant craft in the Gulf at this very moment, so that that everyone is free to move, buy and sell from/with whom they please - considerably more of that Oil goes to China than the US.
You don't have to contribute, but if you don't, they'll find someone who will. We like to put the moral responsibility of such things on people who were trying to make a living. I think the power of the powerful is more relevant.
To be honest, I think focusing away from that is an ideological operation. It sounds very inspiring: "you don't have to do this!" Yeah, well, tell that to the people requiring the censorship.
The question is what should we, western nations, do about this?
Should we keep hiring, sponsoring and giving away residency to engineers who made the decision to help building these platforms? Or collectively decide not to reward these behaviors?
Build distributed systems that can't be taken down. Social media could be built on IPFS and file coin and lib P2P. Protocols that have no ownership or entity to attack via political means. Email already works this way in a sense.
That's how I see it. moderation should be a service on top of the protocol that users can choose themselves. Perhaps even unique for each person built out by input from the user.
Sure, but email didn't have to compete with anything before it. And even then today email has turned into a surveillance nightmare, not the ideal of the comment above.
>> As a young unicorn, ByteDance does not have strong government relationships like other tech giants do, so it's walking a tightrope every second.
And just to use the same quote. This sentence is just a spin to say the least. Before TikTok, ByteDance's main product was Jinri Toutiao, which translate as Today's Headlines. It was Number one "news" Apps in China.
so, somehow we are supposed to believe china has all the censorship capabilities in the world, but was not able to stem the flood of shaky smartphone videos flowing out of wuhan? this seems like a big ccp psyop. (this article and its source included)
Have you ever wondered why there is no Edward Snowden of China, despite the fact the Chinese equivalence of NSA is undoubtedly as much aggressive, if not more? Such a person would have been suicidal, not to mention no news organizations would be willing to publish their information. In such an environment anonymous source is the norm. It has to be.
Unfortunately that also provides plausible deniability, as your post illustrates.
Isn't Chinese surveillance and censorship completely out in the open? Why would there need to be an Edward Snowden? There is already gobs of evidence of total surveillance, so why would someone risk their skin to expose what is already known and established fact?
Exactly. Confirmation bias at its best. It plays into views of HN readership so no one here questions the validity, even though there's no way to verify validity. And then you get down votes for critical thinking.
The more that I read about what the social media giants are doing everywhere, including the recent drama around wsb discord ban and the Facebook-Australia thing, I feel that what's happening in China is chillingly close to happening to the rest of the world. Or maybe it is already happening slowly and we don't realise it yet.
> At the time, I was a tech worker at ByteDance, where I helped develop tools and platforms for content moderation. In other words, I had helped build the system that censored accounts like mine.
What do you mean "in other words"? Are there other words? How does one get into this situation without realizing what they are really doing? It looks obvious in retrospect, but what is not obvious back then?
I don’t think the original source was in anyway unaware of what they were doing. They’re not making any attempt to excuse their behaviour, just describe and explain what it’s like to work at a Chinese tech company.
We shouldn’t admonish those failing to stand-up for our ideals, when they live in a world where those ideals get you at best censored, and at worst disappeared.
You are right, but I was legitimately curious. At the very least, they have the choice of not working in that particular role/company. Further down the article they mention their colleagues had studied journalism and raised some eyebrows, and that he/she wanted to change things from the inside, if only by a little, then realized they were just a powerless cog. I'm going to guess they must be in their late 20s / early 30s now.
Tech jobs are the most well-paid in China, sometimes better than gov jobs that require connections, since tech companies have access to the global excess money flow； if you want to buy a condo and get married in big cities, tech jobs are one of the few chances that plebs can get to have a shot, even then, the typical condo prices is like 20 to 40 times their annual income.
People are paying tens of thousands to get employee referral to get into these big tech companies, and I'd say that the majority of their employee are deeply patriotic and believe what they are doing is necessary and right since they are the winners of the social system.
> When I was at ByteDance, we received multiple requests from the bases to develop an algorithm that could automatically detect when a Douyin user spoke Uyghur, and then cut off the livestream session.
The same people behind the Iraq war are now outrage machines trying to drum up support for censorship in the name of stopping a new threat... "homegrown Al Qaeda" wearing a MAGA hat. I know this will be divisive, but the NYT needs to formally retract their reporting of the attacks on the capitol:
What happened to Glen? He's clearly angry at media like NYT for narrative spinning and reporting mistakes. This entire article is about how they hastily reported Officer Sisnick was killed by the mob, but as of now we don't definitively know how he died yet. That's basically it. Almost all of his reporting is taking a microscope to US left media and policies, while blatantly failing to report on any egregious errors with US right media and policies.
It's like siding with Putin because RT will find some sort of dirt on the opposition.
I agree Glenn should hate both sides equally. It's also hurting his credibility being used as a mouthpiece by right-wing media.
He's just given time on Fox so they could say "See - the swamp is real, even this leftist says so! That's why you should never trust those liberals."
But please give Glenn some slack. If it wasn't for him Edward Snowden may be in Guantanamo, instead of regularly giving interviews over livestreams.
Calling the last 6 weeks "reporting mistakes" is way too generous. These are planted stories to shape public opinion. Glenn recognizes this and clearly explains using these events as a basis to censor the entire internet is unbelievably dangerous. Not since the Patriot Act has there been a danger to democracy so egregious. I hope people see realize it before it's too late.
> Almost all of his reporting is taking a microscope to US left media and policies, while blatantly failing to report on any egregious errors with US right media and policies.
There is significant liberal discourse around errors in right media already: its a crowded beat already (and it often devolves into fruitless filter bubble circle jerks).
Non-partisan criticism of liberal discourse is a fairly empty beat in modern discourse, which is why I value his reporting.
Personally, I think the idea that journalists should try to balance both sides of every issue is without basis unless you're specifically trying to make an institution like NYT that tries to cover essentially everything.
> Almost all of his reporting is taking a microscope to US left media and policies
No, it's not.
It's mostly targeting the Democratic Party establishment and centrist media. He’s still playing the role of a leftist critic of the elite centrist establishment.
Of course, it's hard not to notice that though he will still ritually make perfunctory negative comments about the Right in the course of doing so, the content of his criticism is carefully calibrated to match current right-wing narratives about the same outlets as he is criticizing.
I’m at a loss to understand why your statement means this person, or anyone who increases the suffering of others in the pursuit of their own personal wealth, shouldn’t feel bad about doing so.
What do you do afterwards ? All good jobs eventually end up in a handful of mega corporations. The startups will either be acquired by one or become one.
A television which spies
on you and can be with you 24/7/365? Every parent I know gives up by age 10 and YouTube becomes their childrens’ babysitters. No more childhood, just consumption until the day we die.
I've learned hundreds of skills on Youtube. I fixed my toilet last week for 15$, instead of the usual 150$ it would cost to get a plumber. Millions of people around the world can learn and solve things by themselves and get help with the tap of a button. That's not valuable?
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadMy company recently moved away from animated characters back to using humans in their ads. Most of the people in our ads are mixed race, you can't really tell if they're asian, white, arab, or "tanned".
So it's the same promotion of a genetic look, just with a different group of people.
The actual explanation is simpler and more crass: It's about what sells to the target audience. At least for large campaigns, these things are thoroughly vetted.
If you're uncomfortable with some aspect of an ad, you aren't the target audience.
They described simply cutting off a stream because of the language spoken.
Same shit, different process.
The activist Left in the West is grass-roots censorship, which is a completely different problem from a top-down, military-backed authoritarian regime. Granted, the former seems hard at work trying to produce the latter.
Even disregarding your false promotion comparison, what about the other side?
CCP 'promotes' (actually carries out) the brutal persecution of non-Han and specifically Uighurs in part facilitated propaganda ('ads')
US corporations are not forced by the government to include for instance only one community or exclude another in their communications.
Us corporations are not de facto owned by the government and do not have the same goal of consolidating power to maintain the CCP's (and increasingly just one man at the top's) grip over its own citizens.
In the US many spend lots of money lobbying to keep the government out of their business!
What? It’s all about the money.
Ads, and tv (which is simply a honeypot to draw ad viewers) want to connect with as many viewers as possible in order to sell as much product (cars, cereal, or whatever) as possible.
In the 1950s US the only people with appreciable spending power were white parents, thus those were the ads. Magazines, which could be more finely targeted, were more diverse overall, though demographically siloed.
Society does not look like that (it never did, but the $$$ distribution did). Ads and TV are on the trailing edge, not the leading edge. And TV looks demographically more like the people I see, and more like my family, than it ever has before.
I have no idea what the phrase “people in power WANT society to look like” really means.
OP wasn't exactly ambiguous. Only thing that was missing from "people in power" was maybe three sets of parantheses enclosing it.
TV channels like BBC (for high-end hotels) are being monitored real-time to black-out sensitive parts, books mailed or imported from overseas get pages ripped out, even entries in dictionaries get painted black.
Don't underestimate the seriousness of the censorship, it's among the few things communists are actually good at.
https://en.pingwest.com/a/6595
https://twitter.com/JoshuaDummer/status/1280877750245453828
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3963271
And if we were to talk about death of languages, maybe you need to realise that it's actually a much worse problem in Anglo-Saxon countries than anywhere else https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_time_of_e...
And note their reason for not automatically blocking Uyghur content: "We eventually decided not to do it: We didn't have enough Uyghur language data points in our system, and the most popular livestream rooms were already closely monitored." Which I guess means they have a dedicated group of Uyghur speakers on staff to censor those streams.
Cantonese was widely spoken in Guangdong until the CCP actively wiped it out [3]. Among the 204 members of the CCP Central Committee, only 2 are from Guangdong [4]. Guangdong generated the highest GDP among all 31 administrative divisions [5], and doesn’t get its fair share of high ranking officials.
It’s not Han supremacy. It’s Mandarin-Han supremacy.
[0] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200402/03110144220/tikto...
[1] https://www.scmp.com/abacus/culture/article/3078365/chinas-v... (paywalled)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...
[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/china-is-forcing-its-biggest...
[4] https://www.sohu.com/a/429814378_469134 (in Chinese)
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_administrative...
My contacts proceeded to discuss ways to get around the filter (use idioms, odd characters, Unicode) and I was immediately reminded of how people get around Chinese censorship.
The way this company destroys journalism is its biggest crime. Algorithm-driven "self-media" that ByteDance popularised (with Toutiao) has essentially wiped out news in China, anyone can write sensationalized and fabricated news-style stories on its platforms and compete with "mundane and boring" serious news，AND GET PAID, these self-media are so prevalent and low-brow that fact-checking has been rendered futile.
It now has democratized censorship，indoctrination and misinformation, as the self-media care only about their ads income.
My advice? Vehemently reject any info/news platforms, as they care only about clicks.
>The “Post-Truth” Publication Where Chinese Students in America Get Their News"
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-post-trut...
Folks rage about 'the media' (a term now so amorphous I can't tell what it means anymore, or if the person even reads / watches what they think of as the media), so we get lots of self research / internet sleuth type discovery on platforms like reddit.
We had one on HN recently too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26186645. I applaud the person for putting in the effort, but I'm highly skeptical of internet sleuths and their ability to string a few searches and documents together into an accurate narrative / provide context to complex systems simply because they found what they thought of as similar things to recent events.
The only metric that matters is click numbers, you can now out-do reporters with your perfect news stories that check every eye-grabbing boxes, coz you can type however you like and face no consequences, so why not to make it as juicy as possible.
The "official narrative" on major political events has definitely been glitching out. Weird stuff like Qanon is really symptomatic of how institutions who should be calling this out (this huge intellectual buffer society has: Cory Doctorow, sociology deparments, church leaders...) are pretending not to see the glitches.
But they're there. I could start five flame wars in a short comment citing a few, but the point is not to side with the "deplorable" side in each of these, but to note that there's some deep truth at the root of each of these five deplorable things that goes haywire because the intellectual element of society hasn't been paying mind to it.
Maybe intellectuals just want to watch the world burn?
Me too, but i'm just as sceptical when it comes to "real" journalists. Journalists aren't domain experts in everything. Read some random news about tech stuff, it's often times filled with clear indications of them not really understanding the topic. Which isn't meant to bash journalists, they have limited time for research, need to write an article, and again are usually not domain experts.
The question is how do we fix this?
You can use a shitty news article about a particular relevant topic that contains some questionable issues, and then search around for people that actually know what they are talking about.
Exert some of your own effort to find good sources. Don't trust the first thing you read. This is ultimately the problem imo.
It's also not without failure modes. Lets say you just follow certain journalists/sleuths on certain topics that's basically filter bubbling by design.
Doing your own research to finding sources is imo the best thing, but it just doesn't scale. If i personally checked every single thing i've read today, that would be a full time job (aaand we've just invented journalists again to solve THAT problem)
I think the 'pay attention to the media source and journalist and decide if you think they're good' is a viable route in the meantime even in the context you provided.
The look stuff up yourself kinda thing always reminds me of the conspiracy theories that people develop after they 'research'.... it's so easy to find what you want to find...
I don't like this, again because of filter bubbles. It's very easy to fall into a 'i don't agree with this person, they must be wrong' trap.
> The look stuff up yourself kinda thing always reminds me of the conspiracy theories that people develop after they 'research'.... it's so easy to find what you want to find...
I would argue that this is what we're doing on HN though. HN has a policy of preferring the primary source.
Essentially, the Overton Window has shifted from questioning journalistic ethics and quality to a binary "do you support actual news of events that really happened...or delusional fancies of YouTube personalities and stuff like QAnon?"
Honestly, it's disturbing.
I think people should be skeptical of any news platform which can easily be centrally controlled and manipulated. However, there is likely journalistic value to be found in some portion of those user-created news stories.
"Vehemently reject"ing user-created news seems to overly discount the flaws of mass media journalism: filter bubbles and misinformation are not new problems, and large organizations tend to have greater bias towards state interests. For example, I don't believe the national outrage over George Floyd would have occurred if everyone still got their news from mass media.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/list/?speaker=rachel-m...
I do think MSNBC's MO tends towards bending truth to make emotional appeals against ideological opponents rather than reporting outright fabrications, such as:
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/mar/05/zerlina-ma...
Also, a lot of their Russiagate reporting was questionably and thinly sourced. I suspect it will be a couple more years before the public gets enough substantive facts to outright call their reporting and analysis on this topic "false" or "intentionally misleading" but they certainly had a number of questionable segments.
Meanwhile on Fox News, Tucker Carlson had a "pants on fire" just last week. https://www.politifact.com/personalities/tucker-carlson/
For those in free countries: when you build moderation tools and use them to silence political dissent "because you have to / to play the game" the game plays you. There is no one "too big" to be crushed by those with the material source of political power [1] and everyone tells themselves that they "have to" build the tools because they don't have the "power" to push back or because "it really is that bad this time". But some things don't have to be built (or built in the centralized, controllable way that they are). And when centralization is required or "it really is that bad this time", censorship should be widely publicized and discussed both in real time and with regular retrospectives on decisions to censor that are _public_.
For those in dictatorships: All is not lost, regardless. [2][3]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_power_grows_out_of_t...
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20120107141633/http://www.vaclav...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless
The funny thing is that, well, it mostly all depend on how much you care and how corrupt the people in charge are, totally independent of the system. A dictatorship in Singapore works better than a democracy in Mexico for most metrics except anything that will make the power feel it's not in perfect control. The only difference in a dictatorship is the complete insecurity of the leaders who can't fathom that... we'd frigging vote for them would they ask nicely :D And you can completely ignore the party(ies), and live an entirely fulfilling and useful life, in both systems. I wouldn't argue for doing this but I see it all the time from both side and I envy it sometimes.
So this whole debate about censorship, it's really just a debate about insecurity. They don't censor the truth here, they don't censor debate or discussion, they only censor what nobody cares about: critics of the party. So it's a lot less "terrible" or "inhuman" than I thought it would be coming from a democracy. And I think the way to make it change isn't to whine and yell at it as much as you can, but to embrace the competent leaders when they come and give confidence to them we'll give them 10x more power by voting directly for them. And lay the final trap. At least my origin democracy became a democracy when it started doing just that after 2 centuries of massacres and revolts followed by authoritarian counter reactions in a seemingly endless cycle of aggressive "activism". It simply ended when we went to war in mass without being forced and convinced the rulers we'd vote for them anyway as a result, sheeples we are, which we did the first election. Trapped.
Its best case, average case and worst case, just like with algorithms on different data sets.
We already know that a benevolent dictatorship is the most efficient form of government, the best case in stewarding resources, it just lacks a secession path to maintain its efficiency, as dictatorships most frequently create worst case scenarios: worst stewarding of resources and no ability to dissent to correct it. No respect from the rest of the people on how the correction takes place, one coup just leads to another coup.
Inclusive democracies most frequently create average case scenarios of efficiency. They aren’t inherently better just because they’re inclusive. They can create best case and worst case scenarios too.
Granted, democracies have done all the above, but diligent activists corrected the system, and the scale never reached that in dictatorships.
But yes, for your average citizen, dictatorship is probably not too bad.
> One is an authoritative report documenting the systematic sterilization of Uighur women. The other was the seizure by U.S. Customs and Border Protection of 13 tons of products made from human hair suspected of being forcibly removed from Uighurs imprisoned in concentration camps.
- https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/15/uighur-genocide-xinjian...
> they only censor what nobody cares about: critics of the party
Saying that they only censor their critics and adding that they are only censoring “what no one cares about, critics of the party” is disturbing.
When one person can impose their will on you, it’s all rainbows and kitties until you disagree or step out of line. As I am guessing that the people who oppose forced sterilization and the other Nazi concentration camp policies (forced shaving of hair at camps for use as a product is a fairly distinct one) will end up censored and at those camps too?
These problems and issues might be out of sound and out of mind for now, but sooner or later, as the previous enemy starts to thin out, they will find new ones. And eventually, they’ll come for you too.
Often people who live in autocracies by choice do not believe such warnings. They are the intellectual equivalent of exercise and vitamins.
To make it clearer, here's what happens at the end of such regimes. Even for their supporters,
Towards the end of the war, the Nazis who were occupying the Netherlands blew up a town hall after inviting 134 people and their children to take shelter there. These people were of the right race. Most of them had done nothing against them. Some of them might have supported them.
They were the in-group until they weren't. They died because they weren't members of the party.
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadhuisramp_Heusden
Being ambitiously evil, the Nazis also killed erstwhile embraced citizens at scale with the Dutch famine by blocking the transport of food from farms to citizens in their occupied territories. They did it because they could.
Perhaps this is still distant. Here's a shorter example. Almost all of the people Stalin directly ordered to be killed were his supporters.
They were the in-group until they weren't.
> They were the in-group until they weren't. They died because they weren't members of the party.
So were they the in-group or not? Most people in occupied Europe did not approve at all of nazi germany. Sure, there were some collaborationist but most europeans did totally disapprove nazi germany.
It's not the same as people who voted for communism then got was they asked for: in my opinion, when you vote for a totalitarian society, it's just fair game that in return you get what you asked for (I know, I know, the ultra-left leaning are going to say that "this wasn't true communism and next time, believe us, we're going to make it work").
You cannot compare occupied Europe who didn't ask to live under a totalitarian society to those who supported communism.
Han China is the most Imperial place on earth, and possibly has been since antiquity. 100x more ethnocentric and classically Imperial that America ever remotely was for example.
Isn't it interesting that someone could contemplate even writing such a thing?
As part of 'Manifest Destiny', make sure sure to include the dozens of major states like Korea, Japan, Germany, France, Italy that the US liberated from other conquerors at great cost, and others it provides support for at some cost. Like Taiwan.
If the US were an Imperial Power, all the Oil in Iraq and in Saudi Arabia would belong to it.
Ironically, as the US 5th Fleet today provides protection for all merchant craft in the Gulf at this very moment, so that that everyone is free to move, buy and sell from/with whom they please - considerably more of that Oil goes to China than the US.
To be honest, I think focusing away from that is an ideological operation. It sounds very inspiring: "you don't have to do this!" Yeah, well, tell that to the people requiring the censorship.
Should we keep hiring, sponsoring and giving away residency to engineers who made the decision to help building these platforms? Or collectively decide not to reward these behaviors?
"Just do it."
It's easy to say that, but it's obviously not working in the real world. You have to create incentive structures that reward the desired behavior.
And by moderate I'm not even talking about the content. I mean completely abused by folks who will turn it into a spam/hosting operation.
Email is not a good example because it is controlled by a handful of providers.
And just to use the same quote. This sentence is just a spin to say the least. Before TikTok, ByteDance's main product was Jinri Toutiao, which translate as Today's Headlines. It was Number one "news" Apps in China.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toutiao
Funny how censorship which makes these platforms entirely untrustworthy as a view into the world is filed under "Trust" in the org chart.
It's sort of like how Facebook's faux grassroots "community standards" are just the rules Facebook dictates to its community.
NEXT!
Unverifiable anecdotal evidence? Check.
Somehow I’m not surprised that HN users don’t express the faintest bit of skepticism on topics that confirm their pre-existing biases.
“Alarmingly, only 14 percent of American students were able to reliably distinguish fact from opinion in reading tests.” [0]
[0] https://bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/pisa-test-chin...
Could it be that you are drawing conclusions without evidence here?
How do you know anything about the skepticism or biases of those who don’t express them?
i didn't see any evidence in comment post that contradicts the post.
the only link i see right now is for an article praising chinese kids, which is highly interesting given the contents of the original post.
> Unverifiable anecdotal evidence? Check.
Have you ever wondered why there is no Edward Snowden of China, despite the fact the Chinese equivalence of NSA is undoubtedly as much aggressive, if not more? Such a person would have been suicidal, not to mention no news organizations would be willing to publish their information. In such an environment anonymous source is the norm. It has to be.
Unfortunately that also provides plausible deniability, as your post illustrates.
Makes sense how they had the resources to brute force TikTok into the American consciousness so quickly.
What do you mean "in other words"? Are there other words? How does one get into this situation without realizing what they are really doing? It looks obvious in retrospect, but what is not obvious back then?
We shouldn’t admonish those failing to stand-up for our ideals, when they live in a world where those ideals get you at best censored, and at worst disappeared.
People are paying tens of thousands to get employee referral to get into these big tech companies, and I'd say that the majority of their employee are deeply patriotic and believe what they are doing is necessary and right since they are the winners of the social system.
Disgusting.
The same people behind the Iraq war are now outrage machines trying to drum up support for censorship in the name of stopping a new threat... "homegrown Al Qaeda" wearing a MAGA hat. I know this will be divisive, but the NYT needs to formally retract their reporting of the attacks on the capitol:
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-false-and-exaggerated-c...
It's like siding with Putin because RT will find some sort of dirt on the opposition.
He's just given time on Fox so they could say "See - the swamp is real, even this leftist says so! That's why you should never trust those liberals."
But please give Glenn some slack. If it wasn't for him Edward Snowden may be in Guantanamo, instead of regularly giving interviews over livestreams.
Calling the last 6 weeks "reporting mistakes" is way too generous. These are planted stories to shape public opinion. Glenn recognizes this and clearly explains using these events as a basis to censor the entire internet is unbelievably dangerous. Not since the Patriot Act has there been a danger to democracy so egregious. I hope people see realize it before it's too late.
There is significant liberal discourse around errors in right media already: its a crowded beat already (and it often devolves into fruitless filter bubble circle jerks).
Non-partisan criticism of liberal discourse is a fairly empty beat in modern discourse, which is why I value his reporting.
Personally, I think the idea that journalists should try to balance both sides of every issue is without basis unless you're specifically trying to make an institution like NYT that tries to cover essentially everything.
No, it's not.
It's mostly targeting the Democratic Party establishment and centrist media. He’s still playing the role of a leftist critic of the elite centrist establishment.
Of course, it's hard not to notice that though he will still ritually make perfunctory negative comments about the Right in the course of doing so, the content of his criticism is carefully calibrated to match current right-wing narratives about the same outlets as he is criticizing.