YouTube deleting Palmer Luckey’s comments about CCP’s Wumao division

https://twitter.com/PalmerLuckey/status/1265077232176775168

by emsy • 6 years ago

157 57 6 years ago

dTal• 6 years ago

Reposting my comment from my own submission:

This is a reported issue[0] since last year, but is now apparently going viral [1]. 五毛 translates as "50 cent party", the somewhat well-known CCP astroturfing division.

According to the comments in [1], another apparently banned phrase is "gongfei" ( 共匪 ) , which supposedly translates as "communist bandit".

[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/17821466?hl=en [1]https://imgur.com/gallery/KQPcEkB

dpbriggs• 6 years ago

Don't they realize that people will just generate euphemisms?

Idiotic.

Freak_NL• 6 years ago

Doesn't that just mean Winnie-the-Pooh gets banned as well?

SuoDuanDao2• 6 years ago

An arms race like that favours the trolls though.

I do believe the answer to an overly snoopy surveillance state is to drown it in data.

JumpCrisscross• 6 years ago

Don't they realize that people will just generate euphemisms?

This still chills discourse. The cognitive load of staying on top of an accelerating treadmill of euphemisms shouldn’t be discounted.

droopyEyelids• 6 years ago

I believe that associating the euphemisms with their original context is the type of problem machine learning is well equipped to solve- anyone have the expertise to share their conjecture?

speechisaright9• 6 years ago

The scary part is that there is a significant contingent of people in tech who believe Youtube is morally justified in doing this because it's a private platform, and therefore and not subject to human rights standards like freedom of speech. Want to criticize an abusive regime? Build your own Youtube clone!

catsdanxe• 6 years ago

Isn't that exactly what bitchute and other platforms are doing?

henriquez• 6 years ago

Yes, but it will be tough for them to compete with YouTube, which has lost money consistently since Google acquired them in the early 2000’s. Google is effectively offering YouTube below cost which creates an anticompetitive effect.

judge20202• 6 years ago

I don't think you can say they're morally justified in doing this, just legally. We can/should use outrage and bad PR to get them to change how their platform works.

marcinzm2• 6 years ago

The problem as we've seen is that giving unlimited freedom of speech on these social platforms results in very bad things as state actors use it to incite social unrest. Of course, in protecting Europe and America's ability to remain safe democracies you also end up protecting China's ability to be a dictatorship. Keep in mind that western governments generally support China so you'd have a private company go against the government policies of the nation it is based in.

gonzo412• 6 years ago

People have a choice. Money or democracy, you can have a lot of money and still have democracy. But w hensmall numbers of people have most of the money, the less democracy there is.

I know at least in Australia, our political class has certainly decided to make that trade. China has a stack of cash, and we have standards to sell.

gonzo412• 6 years ago

Don't be evil meh. These are the people who desire to be billionaires, they really do have a devil may care attitude about it all.

BiteCode_dev• 6 years ago

But the same persons would be scandalized if youtube would censor US politicians propaganda.

Because I tell you, looking at Fox News as a European, I can't understand how it qualifies as "news", yet many americans are very attached to it.

I'm sure there are plenty of chinese people that feels like Fox News viewers about their own news sources. And they think they are right just as much.

And each camp will say "you can't compare us to them because...".

It's always the same story: it's not about the truth, it's about power and believes.

marcinzm2• 6 years ago

Google blocks what governments don't want spread since it wants to be on good relations with them. Same way it's blocking covid-19 related things that are deemed fake news. And in Germany it'll block Nazis.

eqdw• 6 years ago

Fox news is a laughably pathetic excuse for news.

But, so are the rest of the major corporate news outlets. In the US, they're all garbage, and Fox isn't any worse than the others.

The best way I can describe this is by analogizing to Canada, where I'm from. In Canada, when you watch or read the news (eg CBC), for the most part it just tells you what happened. In the US, when you watch or read the news, for the most part, it tells you how you're supposed to feel. Of course, Fox tells you you're supposed to feel conservative and (eg) NBC tells you you're supposed to feel progressive. But they all do this. They all editorialize. They all try to manipulate your emotions. None of them are willing to just present facts and let you think for yourself.

flr03• 6 years ago

Things are not black or white, I'm afraid. My comment is not directly related to this matter about the Chinese Gov. Freedom of Speech will always collide with questions of hate speech, massive spread of fake informations, astroturfing... You'll always have to draw a line between moderation and censorship, and yes economical interests will be involved but way before that it's already a complex subject.

Things are very much grey.

Natsu3• 6 years ago

China, though, is known to have a large group of astroturfers making pro-CCP comments, not just to demand censoring terms.

Also, it seems odd that this would apply to commenters outside of China.

Enginerrrd• 6 years ago

There's a startup idea... Build a platform for free expression of ideas that caters to a Chinese market and then wait for the Chinese government to pay you to give them censorship privileges.

docmars• 6 years ago

Brilliant!

manuelabeledo• 6 years ago

It looks to me like another example of failed automatic comment moderation. But again, it will be interpreted as big tech kneeling to the CCP.

wendyshu2• 6 years ago

How could we do a test to determine which is the true cause?

Natsu3• 6 years ago

Well, there's this thing called the 50 mao party, due to them being paid 50 mao cents for each propaganda comment they post on behalf of the CCP.

We should see if we can discuss that party on youtube, or if wu3 mao2 dang3 gets censored. According to the article, every mention of wu3 mao2 dang3 is being suppressed.

https://www.chinasmack.com/glossary#%E4%BA%94%E6%AF%9B%E5%85...

judge20202• 6 years ago

Youtube certainly doesn't have enough moderators to look at every comment, best they can do is have watch words/phrases that flag a comment either for automatic deletion/shadow deletion/human moderation.

text70• 6 years ago

Have a poorly constructed comment referencing a made up society.

"The CCP must be eliminated. I will not stand by idly while the Clown Collective of Pittsburgh goes on strike."

thoughtstheseus• 6 years ago

I’m curious what google would not censor. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding this but it looks like google is supporting a political party here. The dollar value of this must be huge.

wendyshu2• 6 years ago

A glossary for those interested in Chinese internet terminology: https://www.chinasmack.com/glossary#%E4%BA%94%E6%AF%9B%E5%85...

baylearn• 6 years ago

How come this was on the front page an hour ago, but no longer there? Seems it got taken off quite fast.

eggy2• 6 years ago

This is why I believe it is important to teach our children from first principles; we can no longer rely on media, left or right, to convey a large percentage of truth. I am old enough that the cliche "believe only half of what you read" is still good advice. Too many people glued to their devices, knee-jerk responses without much thought and propagate misinformation at almost the speed of electrons without consulting their slower-thinking, rational mind. I find relief in going back to first principles for many things now even if it is time consuming. I lived in Macau for 7 years and Indonesia for 1 year. I used a VPN when I first arrived in Macau due to trips to the mainland. Hong Kongers are looking for VPNs like crazy this week, since the CCP announced new efforts to monitor "trouble makers" in HK. HK will never be the same.

frandroid2• 6 years ago

left or right

There are very few false news actors on the left. Most fake news is either corporate or state-sponsored, and /somehow/ that heavily skews very right.

gonehome• 6 years ago

There's an interesting story about this.

In Steven Levy's new book (which I really liked), Facebook: The Inside Story, he talks about teenagers in Macedonia pushing fake political news stories to drive traffic to their ad-laden websites so they could make money.

They didn't care about the political content, the incentive was to figure out what would get shared the most/fastest so they could drive traffic. They tried fake news targeting the left, but it wouldn't get very far because people would call it out in comments and then the posters would delete/remove it.

Fake news targeting the right (primarily crazy anti-hillary stories) would spread without any resistance and drive a ton of traffic, so they ended up focusing their attention there.

I think this is pretty good evidence that there's a bigger problem on the right since the Macedonian teenagers didn't care about the politics and just wanted to drive traffic for money.

There are lots of other interesting details in that book - it's good.

eggy2• 6 years ago

I didn't write false or fake news. I wrote we cannot rely on media, left or right, to convey a large percentage of truth. My comment is more one of bias, and if you think bias is mainly a right thing, and very little bias on the left well,...to paraphrase David Foster Wallace's short parable: "Water? What's water?" - a fish.

verylittlemeat• 6 years ago

How about the nytimes printing the names of 100,000 people who died of covid-19?

Jommi3• 6 years ago

Anyone have actual sources noting that this "wumao" thing actually exists and isn't just a slander phrasing against CCPs supposed censorship efforts?

etcet• 6 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party#References

Jommi3• 6 years ago

Thanks, seems like most is based on a leaked gov memo.

jannes• 6 years ago

And now this story has been flagged on hacker news... It's already off the front page despite 103 upvotes in 1 hour

calibas4• 6 years ago

I've noticed that if you even try to talk about the manipulation of HN, things like abusing flags to get posts buried, the comments get downvoted.

Certain posts disappear very quickly, and there's almost always a clear political reason for why some group wouldn't want people seeing that post.

JoeAltmaier3• 6 years ago

Its contrary to policy, to talk about voting in posts not about voting. I shouldn't even be posting this.

ihuman• 6 years ago

I think people are flagging this because this topic has already been discussed here recently. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23312169

TheChaplain• 6 years ago

I use the mirror hckrnews.com where items doesn't disappear as quick.

detaro• 6 years ago

Previous discussions of YT censoring some chinese terms in the last 14 days:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223219

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221264

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23172564

resheku• 6 years ago

hold on, isn't this against some constitutional freedoms of our american friends? or am I misunderstanding something here?

0xdeadb00f• 6 years ago

This should surprise no one.

This is the same company that created an alternate version of their browser + search engine specifically for the CCP in order to censor citizen's online activities.

YouTube deleting Palmer Luckey’s comments about CCP’s Wumao division

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