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Comment by ddingus | Hacker News Reader

This is not OK with me. Nothing wrong with people in the world being informed.

What the hell?

Feeling like censorship is escalating too quickly here.

Did you read the article? This is a disinformation campaign by a nation state. This is information like literally made-up-for-clicks fake news articles on Facebook is information.

The article doesn't actually claim that - it just says that the accounts were posting using VPNs (which anyone visiting YouTube from China will be) and they appeared to be acting in a co-ordinated manner. I know there was some suggestion in the previous discussion that Twitter etc were likely responding to a campaign by a specific, very large online community of aggressively patriotic Chinese people.

Google, which owns YouTube, provided no details on how popular the YouTube channels were or how many videos had been posted to the channels.

Ahem.

Not sure you can even show me enough to support your statement. Those details are of high importance.

We do not know much of anything here, sadly.

We do know Google says some stuff about it.

How do you know? Not being a jerk. Genuinely curious.

This smells like sealioning.

> Sealioning is a type of trolling or harassment which consists of pursuing people with persistent requests for evidence or repeated questions. The harasser who uses this tactic also uses fake civility so as to discredit their target.

Where is the harassment? There was a question asked. No persistence. No repeated questions. You are also assuming the intent to be malicious. What is your goal?

Its "or" harassment. The approach is to generally ask benign seeming questions that are very complex to answer. In the gp if of my comment there is already context and is a reply to something else. Bypassing all of that to ask how the entire thing works is likely a disingenuous attempt at using an asymmetrically simple question asking for a huge answer.

Ridiculous effort to help avoid answering an honest question.

You can choose to feel that way about it. the gp of my reply is pointing to the article, content and thereforce context therein. Not addressing any single part with a question done in the spirit of casting doubt knowing full well how the answer goes is perfectly within the description of sealioning.

Nah

So ban Fox news?

https://www.youtube.com/user/CCTVNEWSbeijing/videos

There are armies of weird looking accounts posting and upvoting obsessively in odd, non-organic patterns. Someone is obviously running a massive sockpuppet army.

Well it's the official state apparatus with 1.2 billion viewers with 10x the viewership of BBC.

There's tons of ways you can criticize it but sockpuppetry is probably not the best one to go for.

> Well it's the official state apparatus with 1.2 billion viewers with 10x the viewership of BBC.

No it's not. Youtube is blocked from the 1.2b viewers.

Also, not everyone in China watch CCTV. Young people don't even watch TV anymore.

This was state propaganda that was shut down.

Even if that is true, so? Who are we to make judgments for other people, or who are we to deprive them of the opportunity to make their own judgments? I know, YouTube can do as it pleases and they do not need to provide a reason either, but these answers make me think that they justify censorship as long as it is something "I believe is propaganda" or "I do not like" and the like.

Yeah?

Got details?

This still baffles me.. why not using YouReporter for this kind of things? Google is known to be bribed and corrupted by governments

Would love a source for this "is known" business...

I don't think that it's correct to call Google corrupted, but I tend to believe that a corporation will sink as low as its' host government needs it to -- and the United States doesn't have too great a track record with regards to fair global politics and open/honest behavior.

In other words : When your government asks your business to play ball, you'll more often than not do so.

'Irish Google' is only a nice tax evasion -- Google itself is at the beck and call of the US -- if only for how hard it'd be to operate without their support.

Genuine exchange of views and information should be protected. However these where not genuine people. It just like stopping someone who is trying to sell magic crystals that cure cancer.

>However these where not genuine people. It just like stopping someone who is trying to sell magic crystals that cure cancer.

My problem with that whole concept is that someone has to make that judgement about whether or not 'people are genuine', and that someone may get it wrong eventually.

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