Unwitting users of WeChat aid the app’s blacklisting of sensitive images | Hacker News Reader

Unwitting users of WeChat aid the app’s blacklisting of sensitive images

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31 pointslarrysalibra17 comments

Still not clear how users are 'helping' exactly? Seems like they just have their chats filtered. What am I missing?

This is a frustrating article to read. Every sentence and paragraph from the start to about 3/4 down just repeats the same information as is in the headline over and over again in a different format.

After reading the article it seems to me that, contrary to the title, the users don't do anything to actively "aid" the built-in blacklisting in the app?

Well, that's the meaning of "unwitting". I think the article is only saying that tencent collect (information on) the pictures shared by users through the service.

> that's the meaning of "unwitting".

No: they don‘t aid, period. They just use the service which uses blacklist technologies. That‘s all I see there.

If the image classification for censorship is applied to all images sent worldwide, but only China-based accounts get censored, then just by using the app among non-China-registered accounts to share images that would be sensitive in China, uncensored users are unwittingly helping to build the censored image database before users in China ever try to share the material.

By that logic every internet user everywhere is “helping“ because wechat can train their algorithms on any public picture “before”.

It‘s just a false claim that the “users” are helping.

abbridged: hash of an image, ocr to detect forbidden phrases, manual post-fact clsasification by contractors and:

"Image filtering only occurred when at least one of the chat participants had an account registered to a mainland Chinese number"

Users don't do anything because they don't care. Chinese people have the mentality that makes them think, I didn't do anything wrong so what am I afraid of?

Good job on generalizing more than 1 billion people in one fell swoop, i.e. thrice the population of the US.

It's obviously a generalization. Of course there's edge cases where it doesn't apply and groups who it applies to less. That's part of the nature of generalizations. They're not meant to be comprehensive. Complaining that it ignores the nuance is like complaining a knife makes a bad spoon.

The same mentality can be seen in the West too.

>The same mentality can be seen in the West too.

Most demonstrated, IMPE, by the phrase, "You have nothing to fear, if you have nothing hide."

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