*edit
But in the US tech sector, the Chinese market is at best an after-thought. We're also living through probably the strongest seller's market in history when it comes to venture funding. My guess is that in most situations if a fund like Tencent tried to force an Internet startup to censor their content, they'd get laughed in the face as the founders just walked next door to the next VC firm on Sand Hill Road.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a SV insider by any stretch. So take these speculations on my part with a big grain of salt...)
> Tencent tried to force an Internet startup to censor their content
I assume you are referring to Tencent's recent investment in popular social media site Reddit, during their $300mm series D, at a $3B valuation, so they've already taken the money, whether they will laugh across across sand hill road is another question.
There is not yet direct evidence, of such censorship having yet occurred, but once it does happen, could any outsiders prove censorship beyond a shadow of a doubt? Give it time, first, for corporate censorship to become normalized on the English areas of the site, before pro-Hong Kong viewpoints become demonized, and Chinese mainland views propagate. Like, honestly, weird memes of shirtless Putin on horseback.
This is coming around especially as censorship in the US is also slowly becoming normalized. Try saying the phrase global climate change/warming as a government scientist. And then watch the people that try to justify it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/chinareddits/comments/bz177v/got_ba...
Tencent recently invested in Reddit.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-11/reddit-users-revolt-o...
I had a lawyer friend who liked to post in a legal advice sub, moderated by someone in law enforcement, who banned him for posting information about your rights if you're arrested.
Are either of these claims falsifiable?
Unless it's a term I'm not aware of, a full investigation is still limited to human actors and limits.
I realize what the parent was attempting to say, but internet rumormongering is poor form.
The scientist seeking to determine if it is falsifiable. That no scientist has the resources necessary to do so now does not have bearing on determining if some claim is falsifiable or not.
I think Flickr had this back when they were a big property. You'd have site admins look at your complaint and follow up as necessary.
It's be nice to have and if they have it that it'd be more active to keep things from going off the rails --within reason.
Any user supporting the incumbent government or speaking against Islamic terrorism gets banned.
Similar scenario on r/worldnews. Anti-Muslim posts get removed and users banned, while Anti-Hindu posts get to the front-page.
Reddit should make atleast the 'Official Country' subreddits from obvious bias/influence.
A lot of comments still up are even more directly critical of Beijing than that post. Mods flagged it for "vote manipulation."
So I don't know what to make of this.
A sympathetic voting ring could have boosted the comment without the commenter knowing, confusing everyone here.
Or maybe Tencent really is picking specific posts to complain about to Reddit admins, or planting mods in high profile subs (but those mods can only catch so much).
Is there any way to sample which comments have been deleted by mods, to see if there's a consistent bias?
https://www.removeddit.com/r/pics/comments/byjify/arial_view...
Any user supporting the incumbent government or speaking against Islamic terrorism gets banned.
Similar scenario on r/worldnews. Anti-Muslim posts get removed and users banned, while Anti-Hindu posts get to the front-page.
Not surprising, since there are 3 mods who moderate both r/worldnews & r/india
Indian Agency RAW is the major sponsor of terrorist attacks and still Muslims are terrorists.
Muslims are being killed in Palestine by Israel and still Muslims are terrorists.
US attacked Afghanistan for oil and still Muslims are terrorists.
US threatening to attack Iran and still Muslims are terrorists.
On another note,
>Muslims are being killed in Palestine by Israel and still Muslims are terrorists.
>US attacked Afghanistan for oil and still Muslims are terrorists.
>US threatening to attack Iran and still Muslims are terrorists.
You can talk about and criticize all three of these things freely if you want, without worrying about being retaliated against physically by extremists or being censored by platforms who are afraid of the lashback if they fail to do so as Muslims are somehow a protected minority.
In any case, to suggest Chinese influence on reddit censorship, either the reddit admins are doing the censorship, or the Chinese influence is somehow reaching the mods.
No one has made a good case for that that I've seen.
Ah yes, conspiracy!
Seriously, it’s like worldnews doesn’t have an army of mods, and senior mods who agree with the actions of their fellow mods.
It can’t have anything to do with the subs and users who are banned from r/India for harassing normal people, islamaphobia, Alls for genocide and so on, right?
I mean, it’s not like there’s THREE right wing pro govt Indian subreddits which constantly harangue and badger the main sub, attack ABCDesis and are coordinating some sort of absurd propaganda war to make it seem that r/India is.... what?
No no. It’s a conspiracy.
The reddit frontpage is a cesspool worse than 4chan. At least in 4chan people don't try to hide behind fake veneers of moral superiority.
I stopped visiting the site after the pulse shooting in Orlando when moderators deleted my post listing blood donation facilities in the Orlando area.
"Tencent imposes new regulations on streamers in China"
Yes, these regulations are currently China-specific, but (1) that's bad enough itself, (2) Companies may apply censorship worldwide as a an engineering-simplification measure.
> they'd get laughed in the face as the founders just walked next door to the next VC firm on Sand Hill Road.
Money talks, and Tencent and other Chinese companies have a lot. Once they've bought their stake, they can't be simply laughed off.
I don't think it's so easy, because the issue wouldn't come up during funding, it'd happen later.
Also - the vast majoriy of companies do not 'waltz into VC to raise money'. Consider that if they are taking Chinese money, it might be a sign they had difficulty with American firms, because why would you take money from a super foreign investor if some entity in the Valley would fund you? 'Better terms'? Well, those terms might have 'strings attached'.
But I think it's right to point out the possibility that this mightn't be rampant.
Maybe it's more common, possibly on a case to case basis, but I don't think startups are acting in the 'strategic interest of Donald Trumps trade war' plan, so to speak.
Agreed. I've said this before and say it again - if a Chinese acquirer is willing to buy your company for a much higher multiplier than their Western counterparts then there is an obvious reason.
If Reddit is the "forum of the internet" then it won't matter if it slowly erodes into a Fox News like media presence. It will exert the gravity over other forums through its "reasonability" on non-sensitive topics.
Kind of like how most modern politicians don't say anything bad about Israel.
And people governed by the recipients of that aid are rightly suspicious of the strings attached.
There is a growing movement in Taiwan to give up on this claim and instead pursue an existence as a de jure, rather than merely de facto independent nation.
I'd bet that PG/sama have thought about this set of issues, and they probably have their redlines drawn, but are probably also not advertising them, as is strategically prudent.
Absolutely nobody but a very select few people would care. YC is not even on the radar of lots of tech start-ups or their founders, the world is a lot larger than what you might think from hanging out here. And that's with full knowledge of the sea change that YC has brought for founders and the absolutely incredible number of companies it has generated, there are still many more people - and founders - in the world that have never heard of YC compared to those that have.
Are you kidding me, it would be on the front page of the Journal. People would care after that.
If YC has to stop doing business in China, it will be a very momentary blip and China will most definitely not change course because of a PG blogpost.
And also, do you really know multiple people who do not know what year 9/11 happened? C'mon
It's not a strawman when that is exactly what you wrote:
>> Meh...PG writing a blog post entitled "Why YC Is Quitting China" would cause plenty of tsoris in Beijing, and the Chinese certainly know this.
>> Absolutely nobody but a very select few people would care.
> Are you kidding me, it would be on the front page of the Journal. People would care after that.
YC is incredibly important to the start-up world but strategic priorities of the PRC aside if YC leaves China then that's not going to move any needles. If Google isn't powerful enough to make a play there you can just about forget what influence YC has there. To think that PG can influence Chinese policy with a blogpost is ridiculous.
> And also, do you really know multiple people who do not know what year 9/11 happened?
Yes. They typically know it was somewhere in the early 00's but not what specific year. It baffles me, but it is about as solid a fact as I have about this given that I've tried this many times now. Feel free to conduct your own little experiment and see what happens. I think in part it is because everybody always talks about 9/11 without adding the year.
Edit: FWIW: I just checked one more person and they did not in fact remember what year it was, only be linking it to some event in their own life were they able to make the connection.
I didn't say that this would drive a policy change after the fact. Quite the opposite, it would likely result in some kind of drama related to the CPC digging in its heels and attempting to recast the drama in a nationalist context. But, the initial loss of face would still be bad from their perspective.
I do think that YC/PG do in fact have some leverage/deterrence power with regard to being politically pressured by the CPC leadership because of their ability to walk away from the table in a publicly embarrassing manner.
Does that clear things up, and do you agree or disagree?
Given the number of fuerdai in elite US schools, you really don't think that the CPC leadership would care about a public spat with YC?
I'm not trying to be right here, I'm honestly curious and would be honored to be disabused of my ignorance by a more informed perspective.
You really think a single VC company that plays no critical role in national security is even on their radar?
I know that. May I answer ? It's 2003... November 9, to be more precise.
Paul Graham is not as well-known or influential as you think.
Can we say with certainty that American money isn't coming to other countries with strings attached ?
https://twitter.com/benrileysmith/status/1137831840188948485
At any rate none of this is different from what Saudi citizens have been doing for years in Europe and USA.
The US is an enabler of Saudi nonsense, but the Saudi state is not being propped up with American resources. They would be powerful in the region regardless of American support.
At the same level? I have my doubts. If they weren't a close ally of the US, terrorist financing/leading stings would be going much further. Would they be able to do their thing in Yemen without US support? Or would they be a pariah on the world stage because of their acts, which are hard to tell apart from those of ISIS/ISIL? Not that I'm a big fan of the Iranian Mullahs and their backwards idea of how to run a society, but they appear somewhat moderate compared to the wahabi style.
The United States meets its own definition of a rogue state.
No, they don't want to be a separate nation. It's a more complex situation than that. Taiwan considers itself as the Republic of China, where they consider the government in Beijing to be illegitimate, and reject communist rule.
Note that the rest of the world has also moved on, when we say "China" we also mean the one ruled by the government in Beijing, which makes the whole situation more complex.
> No, they don't want to be a separate nation. It's a more complex situation than that. Taiwan considers itself as the Republic of China, where they consider the government in Beijing to be illegitimate, and reject communist rule.
Tell that to the currently-ruling Democratic Progressive Party (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Progressive_Party#P...):
> The current official position of the party is that the "Republic of China (Taiwan)" is an independent and sovereign country whose territory consists of Taiwan and its surrounding smaller islands and whose sovereignty derives only from the ROC citizens living in Taiwan (similar philosophy of self-determination), based on the "Resolution on Taiwan's Future" in 1999. It considers Taiwan independence to be a current fact, making a formal declaration of independence unnecessary.
It is a more complex situation, but your view is dated. Taiwan has to maintain the fiction that it still supports a one-China policy, because to do otherwise and declare independence would invite Beijing's wrath: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_status_of_Taiwan#PRC...