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Comment by ssnistfajen | Hacker News Reader

Facebook, Google, and Apple would all do the same thing WeChat/AliPay did if regulations in the West moved faster and were more accommodating.

Nobody mandated the author to order delivery, follow social media, buy movie tickets, do online shopping, pay rent, use bikeshare, call cabs, etc, etc, etc. through WeChat. They are, for the most part, services owned by companies other than Tencent. WeChat just compiles a giant menu for users to link their accounts from these services into WeChat. These gateways exist because consumers find it more convenient than quitting WeChat and opening another app/website.

It's perfectly healthy to be concerned about the impact of centralized tech giants on our daily lives but so far all I'm seeing is fearmongering about this ever-more-elusive "dystopia" which coincidentally seems to only exist in a place that's easy for the English-speaking world to hate on.

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If every one of my friends and even my employer used an app to conduct business and I refused to get it no matter how much they tried to tell me to because I was concerned about my privacy I'd be ostracized. This did happen to me with Facebook to an extent, and Facebook isn't nearly as much of a mammoth as WeChat. Stop pretending it's a choice.

Just choose to use wechat for messaging, and use apps for everything else. And stop complaining about why wechat is getting popular for other people. If your friends are on Facebook, it is not your problem to worry about. It is like if your friend is dating a girl you don’t like, get over it. People made their choices already.

Why did you assume I "pretended" it's a choice? It IS a choice and it has always been. Most people just decided the trade-off of being denied employment and other opportunities is not worth preserving whatever privacy these tech giants are trying to "steal" from you. Market economies rarely cater to the few. That has always been the exception and not the norm.

By that line of reasoning, I have a choice of whether or not to hand over my wallet when someone mugs me -- I've just decided that the tradeoff of getting a knife in my stomach is not worth whatever money is being stolen from me.

What you're proposing is an interesting philosophical argument, but not a particularly useful way to think when building a society. We're trying to limit Hobson's Choices, even if we can't completely eliminate them all the time.

No, you are not going to get arrested in America for making a joke about George Washington.

Enough with the irresponsible moral equivalence arguments.

There are glaringly material differences between 'Google software scanning your mails to target ads' and 'the police having $2/hour folks reading private chats to arrest you for totally arbitrary reasons'.

>No, you are not going to get arrested in America for making a joke about George Washington.

If someone leaks you joking about repeating a historical terrorist attack the chances that the police at least pay you a visit is very high, in the United States and other Western countries.

There's actually a whole array of news articles you can find on your search engine of choice about arrests after people made social media posts about threatening politicians. Which I might add, joke or not is very reasonable.

Joke about a person vs planning a terrorist attack

and authorities don't know whether you joke or not, so this falls squarely into the category of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes", and again this is the same in the US. Quite a lot of people have been joked about killing Obama, and got a pretty quick visit by the police as a result. This isn't unique to China and there's nothing wrong with it.

Yes, if you joke about 'murdering the head of state' - any reasonable state is probably going to look into it.

But in this case, joking about a historical event, inviting a foreign country to invade is way beyond reality, obviously.

So, if you invited the 'Germans to invade America' again, nobody will come knocking except the Twitter Nazis. (Pun intended).

It's not the US, but UK police do carry out arrests for jokes on social media:

- https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/12/23/glasgow-crash-tw...

- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43478925

- https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/02/social_media_arrest...

Yes, it's terrible, especially considering that these are for 'offensive jokes' not even specific calls for violence.

But this is the states terrible job at trying to hamper hate speech, mostly with fines. The world is not turning upside down.

If people dissapear off the streets because they say 'we deserve democracy' then we have a problem.

Is this fear-mongering?

"Despite WeChat’s somewhat more private design, Amnesty International, in a 2016 report on user privacy, gave WeChat zero out of a 100 for its lack of freedom of speech protection and lack of end-to-end encryption. By comparison, Facebook scored 73. People are regularly arrested for messages they send in supposedly “private” group chats. In 2017, two people were arrested in Nanjing for separate instances of making satirical comments referring the massacre in the city by the Japanese in 1937.5 One person, seeking a job in the city and down on his luck, wrote in a group for job-seekers that “Nanjing is a pit. We should let the Japanese come slaughter again.” He was detained two days later. A similar case that same year saw a 31-year-old man jailed for joking about joining the Islamic State in a group-chat. He was arrested under China’s anti-terrorism laws and given a 9-month prison sentence."

If you talk about joining the IS in the West using non-encrypted messaging services, you are more than likely to end up on a watchlist or receive a visit from law enforcement (depending on context and severity) as well. Expressing sentiments akin to Holocaust denial or any other mass tragedy also more than likely invites action from the platform you are on depending on their policy.

People are being persecuted by law enforcement because it is the very entity that mandated WeChat to do this in the first place. I don't see how placing the whole blame on WeChat itself is rational at all.

> If you talk about joining the IS in the West using non-encrypted messaging services, you are more than likely to end up on a watchlist or receive a visit from law enforcement (depending on context and severity) as well.

Aye, but if you get sent to prison for merely talking about it - much less joking - the ACLU and Twitter would have a field day.

> Expressing sentiments akin to Holocaust denial or any other mass tragedy also more than likely invites action from the platform you are on depending on their policy.

EDIT: That's a platform-specific problem - one that I happen to disagree with vehemently. If all speech isn't free, then no speech is.

> I don't see how placing the whole blame on WeChat itself is rational at all.

I'm not. I'm placing the blame on the PRC, of which, unfortunately, major Chinese corporations seem to be an operating arm of.

>Is this fear-mongering?

depends on whether the action was taken by wechat or someone reported the user from the group, because if that's the case all the encryption in the world isn't going to help you. (and it's not particularly unlikely depending on the size)

Also as the other user suggested, you probably shouldn't advocate joining isis on a platform in a country where said action is illegal, wechat like any other company anywhere has the duty to enforce the law.

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