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Comment by dcolkitt | Hacker News Reader

Not that this isn't a valid concern, but is there really any evidence that this is happening in Silicon Valley? Hong Kong's a different matter because of just how comparatively dominating and close by the mainland Chinese market is compared to the tiny city state.

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...)

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A reddit user from Hong Kong was recently banned from the /r/pics/ subreddit for posting about their support for the Hong Kong protests against

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...

Speaking of Reddit, a citizen of Hong Kong had a post this morning make it to the front page giving out a bit of info about the protest. Nearly half the comments were purged by the mods. Reddit had gone down hell in the last few years, but this was something else.

Aren't all Reddit subs driven by their own moderators? Or are there core subs that are Reddit-moderated?

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.

I suspect that Reddit intentionally keeps the moderators of core subs a group of "normal users" (who will follow any requests by the admins) as a level of obfuscation for any corporate-driven censorship or vote-tampering.

And I suspect there's a secret cabal of mole-men (and -women) who are selecting presidential candidates for the Democratic primaries.

Are either of these claims falsifiable?

Yes, their claim can be easily falsified by a full investigation.

What is the answer if the result of said investigation is "well, we have no direct evidence"?

That has no bearing on if the claim is falsifiable or not.

> falsified by a full investigation

Unless it's a term I'm not aware of, a full investigation is still limited to human actors and limits.

The result of the investigation isn't a factor in determining if a claim is falsifiable or not, only the question if the investigation is possible. This is confusing falsifiable with falsified.

A full investigation by whom? They've broken no laws. Voluntary? Ha.

I realize what the parent was attempting to say, but internet rumormongering is poor form.

>A full investigation by whom?

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 consider claims in which there is no realistic path to falsifiability non-falsifiable.

I would agree with that, especially for their biggest and most influential subs like /r/news and /r/politics. Reddit's owners have shown they're not above selling out some of these subs to firms like ShareBlue. It would make sense as part of their contract, they'd ensure that the mods were 'suited' to their customers' goals.

Shareblue was banned from r/politics and a bunch of other popular subs long ago.

Linking to the domain was banned. I doubt reddit has the technical capabilities to effectively prevent them from continuing their alleged bot/vote-manipulation activities.

The lion share of subs are moderated by a relative few mods. There was a post showing the graph of control recently, I found it disturbing. Unfortunately Reddit has critical mass now, I think it can survive what ever it becomes. It could lose every user who wishes it was like the first 5 years and hardly notuce. There won't be a Digg moment for Reddit.

Does Reddit have a system to appeal mod decisionmaking for important (and not so important) subreddits?

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.

Many dominate players on the internet have been kicked to the curve. It starts with complacency which lack of real competition seems to always create.

The blatant censorship situation in r/india 'official India subreddit' is similar.

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.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/byjify/arial_view_of_...

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?

You can change `reddit.com` -> `removeditt.com` to see (some) of the deleted comments on a thread.

https://www.removeddit.com/r/pics/comments/byjify/arial_view...

The blatant censorship situation in r/india 'official India subreddit' is similar.

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

Islamic terrorism? Indian Army is killing a number of people in Kashmir daily and still Muslims are terrorists?

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.

Other people doing bad things does not negate that Muslims also do bad things. I hate this deflection/whataboutism as if it means anything.

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.

Moderators on reddit reserve the right to censor their subreddits. This is not censorship by reddit, this is censorship by the users who created that community. Some communities use it quite effectively like askscience and askhistory to limit responses to certified experts, others use to enforce some minimum standard of content and to deter shitposting, while some use it to control the narrative and shape opinion.

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.

>3 mods who mod both...

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 situation is a nightmare on any "official" subreddit. So much so that I have taken to completely stay of the frontpage, remove all the default subreddits and only explicitly whitelist subreddits based on my interests.

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 stand by my belief that reddit is one of the worst sites on the net and far far worse than Facebook when it comes to reinforcing echo chamber mentalities.

I stopped visiting the site after the pulse shooting in Orlando when moderators deleted my post listing blood donation facilities in the Orlando area.

https://www.pcgamer.com/tencent-imposes-new-regulations-on-s...

"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.

As someone who just spends a lot of time in engineering slack channels, comments seem to alternate every other day on how hard or how easy it is to raise money. I've been through fund raising once (~5 years ago) as a small-time founder and can't help but believe the reality is somewhere in between gold-rush and desert.

If you're an SV sweetheart it's easy. Otherwise it depends on the business.

are these public channels?

Gophers, hangops, Google Cloud Platform, to name a few.

(I don't have access to the actual article due to WSJ paywall.)

> 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.

" they'd get laughed in the face as the founders just walked next door to the next VC firm on Sand Hill Road."

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.

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