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Comment by xvector | Hacker News Reader

TikTok's developers should be ashamed of themselves.

I have nothing but derision for employees who take part in implementing something so obviously horrible but do not make an attempt to move out of their job or even acknowledge what they are doing wrong.

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I don't think you understand.

There are people going to work every day in China doing the job of censor and they reckon they are doing something good and patriotic. Even at the level of policy makers, the censorship is there in the first place and continues to be there because many legitimately think it is good for the country.

Without being educated on a topic, you're unlikely to figure out most things about it on your own. Without an education in rights and civil liberties, you're unlikely to conclude on your own that censorship in principle is bad.

If you want to make a difference, get off your high horse and construct an argument against censorship for someone who wasn't educated in a Western country like you were.

Even a significant chunk of educated Chinese with exposure to Western democracy and political system often justifies the censorship with "most Chinese people are not educated and get easily influenced by things on the internet and this results in social instability". I can see the reasoning behind that, and can't think of a satisfying counter-argument.

It would be a good argument if censorship were actually used to protect the uneducated e.g. from scammers selling miracle cures to the desperate, but that's not what happens. Instead, the scammers are better organized than their victims and can co-opt the censorship mechanism for their own purposes. Someone sceptical of the scam might check Zhihu to find out whether it is legit, so the scammers can ask a question and answer it themselves, claiming that it totally works. Then when a burned victim tries to post their own answer to warn others, the scammers report it for illegal content, causing an account suspension.

The government is too busy hiding embarrassing mistakes like confusing 农 and 衣 to even think about benevolent uses of censorship.

They should indeed, but I guess it's hard for those engineers in China to find a domestic company that allows them to do differently.

Moving to a foreign company in China may not actually solve the problem, and moving to a different country may not be an option at all, so they end up keep doing the bad things and pretend not to know. I have a friend there who seems to be like this.

TikTok/ByteDance has offices in both the Bay Area and Los Angeles here in the US. I know a former colleague who is not Chinese who works there. Point is there are certainly many non-Chinese citizens who work there that are complicit in enforcing such rules.

I didn't know ByteDance was the same company, they've been pushing their analytics api on mobile developers... no idea what data they are phoning home with that or what they are doing with it.

Maybe a few, but I’ve heard their US offices are more than 90% Chinese.

> TikTok's developers should be ashamed of themselves.

Well, there are enough developers from Western companies like FAANG and alike on here, which do not acknowledge that they are doing something wrong, either. Why should Chinese developers be more to blame?

The FAANG developers that engage in similarly destructive policies should be similarly ashamed. More, even, because they have more context on what our freedom means to us.

In China you either comply and have a chance to build a company or have a job somewhere, or you don’t and... you don’t have a career.

It seems they are just motivating the smart people to leave the country.

Punch `China exit ban` into your favorite search engine.

It's looking more and more like a "bug fixed" Soviet empire.

From a quick web search, these seem to be more about foreign nationals being detained in China for political reasons or to compel compliance. Not great, but also not really relevant to what I thought we were talking about (ie. Chinese businesses having to make concessions to the government in order to operate).

Their solution to brain drain from foreign educated students in the 90s was in fact to send even more students to the States.

It’s actually worked very well for them as now they have a huge number coming back after studying abroad. And as our immigration policy becomes more restrictive, China will be getting even more of their best and brightest right back.

They (generally) don't think like that because they are taught an extreme sense of nationalism/collectivism.

Anyone with enough money to emigrate has a much stronger incentive to stay and play along with the system.

I doubt they think about the implications of what they're being asked to do, especially with things like this becoming more of a norm in China.

All societies censor. China censors Tienanmen square and gays, the West censors child porn and terrorist videos. All "for the good of society", we just happen to disagree what "the good of society" is.

So the real blame doesn't fall upon developers, but on their encompassing societies / governments, and on us, because we have to decide what technological platforms we want to use, and which society's standards of morality to import.

They may have completely values. Your shame does not quite matter for them.

The real solution is either find a way to reshape their value or conquer them.

Are you referring to the PRISM project?

Yes, the same logic applies.

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