Teen's TikTok video about China's Muslim camps goes viral | Hacker News Reader

Teen's TikTok video about China's Muslim camps goes viral

bbc.co.uk

92 pointslewisflude16 comments

I've noticed that stories related to Chinese state censorship garner less comments in HN than stories about US or western government censorship.

Why is that? I'm not making accusations, and if people are not comfortable about talking about this in this forum that's fine.

inb4: "There's no proof, you failed to quantify your observation, which is anecdotal and all in your head." Similar such comments were made in the 1940s.

> I've noticed

That is sample bias. People notice what they dislike and disagree with much more than what they like or agree with.

There have been tons of HN threads about Chinese state activity and nearly all are overwhelmingly critical. The HN Search box at the bottom of the page is helpful for finding things.

> I'm not making accusations

Since that insinuates just the opposite, your comment breaks the site guideline which asks "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Interesting way of getting around censorship. Although I’m curious - if YouTube can demonetize a video because it hears sweet child of mine playing in the background, could it not also listen for certain words, and immediately censor it?

there was a recent article[1] that explained how Tiktok is doing its censoring (for German videos). Interestingly, the censors usually only watch frames of the videos (no sound!) and only have 30 seconds to decide what to do with the video (if they want to fulfill their ratio), meaning the kind of tactic this woman used is actually perfect for circumventing the censors (at least in the short-term)... until they change their proceedings (which they will, they are working on algorithms).

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21619098

Does the average chinese person care about this? Does the average human care about this?

Are we propagating negative chinese news? I am not suggesting it's fake news, and I am sure it's happening. But literally nothing will come of it. If this is a holocaust, we aren't doing anything about it. There are multiple genocides, and we do nothing about it.

> Are we propagating negative Chinese news?

Yes? Should we not care what one of the largest economies in the world is doing to its people?

> literally nothing will come of it.

How do you figure that?

Are you arguing that we shouldn’t cover something newsworthy because you’re convinced nothing will change?

Quite a lot of humans care about this. Public pressure can have an influence.

The interesting part here is that TikTok kept the video up. That does make their claims that they aren't exporting Chinese-style censorship somewhat convincing.

By the letter, sure. It was alredy too late.

They did punish her in every other way, shutting off other phones and other accounts. Not exactly indicitave of integrity.

Chinese-style censorship frequently happens after it's "too late" and thousands of people have watched raw footage the government would prefer to keep secret. But that's not actually too late to remove it from recommendations, prevent related hashtags from trending, ignore relevant search terms and delete reuploads to thoroughly kill virality.

It doesn't look like TikTok did any of that in this case, since the BBC didn't appear to have had any trouble finding the video.

From the article it sounds like those punishments were for something else, and happened before she uploaded this video.

We have too many business interests there to speak up. See YCs recent exit.

Honest question ... Is that what the govt wants ... change your religion and you walk free? Why not change then? Are there people who have changed?

My (western) understanding is that this is in response to a lot of activity (terrorism might be the right word, or it might not) around cultural repression. The goal from the government is integration and safety/control, as I understand it.

As far as "just change", I'm not sure what to say in response to this. I don't mean this as an attack or anything, but "come on just give up your life/culture/values" seems a bit... crass?

I agree with the premise or at least used to agree that religions are bad and people need to move away from them ... but by force? That is definitely inhuman. Reading about this stuff is making me go WTF! On a side note, I consider it deeply hypocritical that the government supports traditional medicine.

I do consider religion as a form of mental illness. Just google end times and watch the insanity roll. It's not rational to think about "end times" however you put it. People can drop out of religion rather willingly.

This is Your Brain on God | Michael Ferguson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocuqguH1OIw

Based on the above talk, if you have a neurological need for "god" then removing religion leaves other personality cults, cults or ideologies to take root. That seems to be what is happening in this case.

> terrorism might be the right word, or it might not

It is not. Educate yourself.

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