Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube

For the lazy:

* Page 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223219&p=2

* Page 3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223219&p=3

* Page 4: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223219&p=4

I made this a collapsed stub comment to collect replies, since we don't want to distract the top of the thread too much.

I noticed this is the second thread that you’ve posted this message on within the same week.

Why not include some basic, numeric pagination links before comments start? Ex:

1 2 ... 5

Here are some numbers to keep you up at night, they are very scary:

Google controls 91.89% of the search market [1]

G controls 68% of the browser market [2]

G's android is on 84% of phones operating systems [3]

G has 73% of the search advertising market [4]

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/544400/market-share-of-i... [3] https://beta.trimread.com/articles/16433 [4] https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-gaining-google-search-a...

But is it replaced with "I'm an American company?"

There's a deep rabbit-hole of hyper-nationalism right next to the deep rabbit-hole of hyper-corporatism. Does a YouTube beholden to the US government get banned from being used in China at all? And if it does, what happens when China creates a competing product that is more successful than YouTube, and YouTube gets displaced globally by a product that is beholden to China's censorship policies in general, not just in isolated cases?

We have loads of communication channel alternatives. People freely choose google and should be allowed to continue freely choosing whatever platform they please. The idea that some governing body can better choose my communication platform for my personal needs than I can for myself doesn't seem logical from my point of view.

I’m always really worried about the unintended consequences of having the government regulate what Google can and cannot moderate on their platform. That strikes me as a larger free speech issue than our current system.

I’d recommend just breaking Google’s monopoly; which is an idea that has more benefits and less downside risk.

>>The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this.>>

Sure they could. They had the East India Tea Company.

I'm not a legal expert but it seems like the fundamentals are pretty simple and timeless. If they have a monopoly, then their private get-out-jail-free card no longer applies.

That would be why the US Justice department is looking at an antitrust suit, Anti-trust is the remedy that came about in 1890 when the Standard Oil trust seemed unstoppable.

That said, I see this sort of thing a bit differently.

If Google is all powerful and a monopoly and never in danger of being killed, why comply with an authoritarian foreign nation to remove comments that are amplifying an anti-government sentiment? Why should Google care if the government of China is feeling a bit insecure about their own population's loyalty?

I worked at Google during "China Debacle #1", where Google went to China as an uncensored search engine, left in the middle of China Debacle #2, when China infiltrated Google's infrastructure to use it to track dissidents, and watched from the outside (as many here did) for China Debacle #3, when Google tried to create a censored search engine for China.

Why does Google need China so badly, that they are willing to compromise their values (debacle #3 and this comment censoring behavior)?

I don't think you need the antitrust legislation. I think Google is slowly dying and as they die their ideals wash away. Clean user experience, gone, Useful free services with return only positive feelings for the brand, gone. Employee perks, fading away. Lofty slogans of not being evil, gone.

This compliance, sometimes forced by edict in the EU's antitrust case, sometimes forced by coercion, tells me that Google isn't powerful, it is weak. It has lost its way and may not survive if it is unable to find its way back to something good.

> a single private company having a near-monopoly on various public communication channels

Does Google rise to this level? Facebook, Twitter, cable TV and every newspaper and blog would seem to present a decent front of competition.

The Founding Fathers totally predicted this. The USPS existed in some form before the founding of the nation. The postal service was vital for allowing communication and dispersal of news through the nation. Without this neutral party a private mail carrier could opt to not deliver for any reason, like after they've opened your mail and read the contents they find politically disagreeable.

The very first multi-national companies were neck deep in looting India and smuggling opium to China. The American founding fathers were very aware of this.

Sure, a more fundamental problem. But many people don't have enough imagination and foresight and for them concrete examples are more convincing. Same with the country I'm currently in - democracy has been rotting for the last several years as the ruling party has been busy disabling protection mechanisms and pulling out screws. It's only now that the government is blatant in its abuse of law and police fine people with no chance of appeal and straight up beat them, nurses get pay CUTS... that citizens realize what suckers they've been. That laws and procedures exist for a reason.

Maybe they're not just stupid, but have a different way of thinking. Bottom-up versus top-down.

google search is a utility class service at this point, a tier below tap water and electricity. the world would be an objectively worse place without it for billions of people. with great power comes great responsibility is how the saying goes, but i can see them fighting tooth and nail to not be labeled as such. same for facebook and others like them.

> a single private company having a near-monopoly on various public communication channels > The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this.

Financial, political, religious entities controlling newspapers and book publishers is a problem known (and well documented) across thousands of years.

Same for near-monopolies of means of transportation, materials, water, and other.

> Google's "We're a private company" get-out-jail-free card cannot continue to apply.

It can, should, must and most importantly, will.

What's really not acceptable is their monopoloy position on information, not that they, as a private company, have a right to decide what to publish.

>The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this.

The Founding Fathers used this to their advantage.

They colluded with the handful of major publishers of the time to orchestrate a rolling, synchronized release of the Federalist Papers, saturating the already-monopolized (due to the massive expense of presses and paper) media market with their ideas.

The authors of the Anti-Federalist Papers had no such deal. They had to print out their responses on their own and distribute them by hand.

The country probably would not have even gotten to the point of needing a debate about a constitution, one-sided as it was, if it hadn't been for publishers telling non-conforming opinions to fuck off.

And please, nobody chime in with "publisher v. platform": it is irrelevant, you're wrong.

Am I crazy or was there a comment in this thread calling out the moderators of HN and their own censorship? Did it disappear as well?

It would be very interesting to see a complete list of all the banned words, could some google employee leak it?

>> The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this.

HA! The founding fathers were all lawyers and newspaper owners. They were very aware that private interests, through control of available media, could exert influence all manner of public debates.

Right-wingers are afraid of power of governments, while left-wingers of power of multinational corporations. Both are right: we should be afraid of any organization that gets that big. Sadly, there's no political ideology that has a coherent plan to keep both in check.

I agree with you and the commenter who replied with the market share stats that the numbers are worrisome, but literally no one laid a gun to the commenters’ heads and asked them to leave a YouTube comment. They could embed the video (or link to it) and offer a comment on their blogs.

There was an article about RSS on HN recently — in the end, people voted with their feet away from a decentralised web to the YouTubes and Twitters and Facebooks of today.

Maybe we need more actions like these to remind ourselves of the perils of lease-holding.

It's not "We're a private company" as much as "Google cannot practically force you".

Google also doesn't have anywhere near a monopoly position in consumer markets. YouTube isn't an absolute majority of online video and strong alternatives are right in front of you - Twitter and Facebook offer free video hosting. You could even build a private one, or rent space from Vimeo or Dailymotion.

The Founding Fathers can go &&*k themselves. Invoking their name is literally appeal to authority.

This is a problem with monopolies, not censorship. When private companies are forced to publish content, you have fundamentally lost the notion of a free press.

Google even more outrageous qet-out-of-jail-free card is the "our servers aren't in your country so we don't have to obey your laws"

That is a bigger issue for our society, yes. But it's also understandable that people might be very interested in alleged problems that strike closer to home for them. In this case, if there is an issue worth considering at HN, exploring it could give insight into the larger issue as well.

We desperately need a Post Office of internet content. At-cost hosting and completely content-agnostic.

The founding fathers gave the USPS a monopoly on the major communication channel of the time. Maybe it's time to update those laws to give them a monopoly over online communication, too?

I see no way this could go wrong.

Pretty sure they were aware of the East India Company (both Dutch and British), and other powerful mercantile organizations.

We need to redefine what is considered a public space.

I think the solution to this is simple: Pay for every service you use.

The question was historically then how do teenagers (or the developing world for that matter) pay for electronic services and cue Facebook and Google.

> having a near-monopoly on various public communication channels

Since when did Google became the defacto public communication channel?

They are using public right-of-ways an spectrum to carry their data, so free speech ought to apply.

It's not only Google, some argue we have been slowly moving from an Internet to a Trinet where GOOG-FB-AMZN control the majority of the web traffic while staying out of each others way [0]

[0] https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...

Google can do whatever they like. They're a company, not the government. And as such, they will always bend to the mercurial whims of both rich investors and the government (who is also owned by the rich).

The only way to fix that is a nearly-uncensored#, non-profit& communications and streaming platform that is globally-distributed and doesn't have a SPoF. Trying to get a content creators' union is all-well-and-good, but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem of reliance on corporate greed that will never assure access to speech.

# There are only a few topics that shouldn't be enabled like child porn and actually planning mass murder.

& Nonprofit itself while it supports monetization for creators with only minimal fees to cover costs.

> having a near-monopoly on various public communication channels

> Google's "We're a private company" get-out-jail-free card cannot continue to apply

You're upset that they have a monopoly on their own website/business? What the hell are you even talking about?

Do you even remember the internet before Google? I do. You know how I found new websites? By typing random domain names into the URL bar and trying different combinations of TLDs.

Then I used Yahoo. Excite. AltaVista. Lycos. Ask Jeeves. Dmoz. Alltheweb. They all kinda sucked in their own unique ways. And then Google came around, and I could actually find what the hell I was looking for in one go.

Your outrage is pure entitlement. You don't like the way the world works, so you think you deserve to change everything to function exactly the way you want. As if that's in any way rational, fair, or ethical. Presumably you think of yourself as a good person. How is it good to demand unreasonable things from people who do not owe you anything? Do you really think this is the best way to effect societal change?

Not that long ago, capability (yes, some dictionarys show also; skill, appearance, behaivior and other around orchestrated topics ^^) btt: capability wons importance, cos growing globalisation and toughening competition - in terms of the commerce, with shorter product life cycles, higher complexity and much more influences.

In such a environment, a premise for life is a permanent monitoring on all levels of performance, to have the option to bring on steering and governance, if a discrepancy in goal-reaching or goal-setting occurs.

no, that was'nt english enough, let me try better:

"'Sharks' are speaking of 'satisfied' when a half of the profits result by dividends and from Performance."

Exploiting the central-bank-agitation

so big on a global scale, more in detailed,... now you...

Do you want to continue to support art, like 'google will eat itself'? (-;

The solution is to realize "hate speech" is mostly subjective and revert back to the clear rules that we had last decade before the current political climate of gratuitous outrage.

> 共匪 is seen as an insult by a group, but others do not

This is where the legal concept of protected classes may be helpful. They're sets of attributes society has deemed one cannot discriminate against. That tends to line up well with said society's line between insulting and hateful.

As a legal definition, these class definitions tend to be precise. That makes them convenient for exporting.

Notably, political affiliation is not a protected class under U.S. law.

> Youtube is more and more siding towards removing content. I wonder, can US regulators do something about it?

A few weeks ago the discussion here was about how YouTube is not removing enough content (mostly in relation to Covid-19). The consensus was pretty much that they do it on purpose because it makes them money.

I don’t think YouTube (or any large public content platform) has a winning move in this discussion. Any move will be perceived as nefarious.

Can't we hate, and express that hate? Why can't I say "I hate Scientology, I hate Scientologists. Brainwashed bandits, they are! Hate them so much!". It seems a lot of things we want to express include hating. Isn't speech a lot about getting things off your chest? Can the frustration build up and explode and be worse that just expressing what you hate?

Fundamentally, this is the issue with international corporations in the speech realm. People will believe and argue they shouldn't be subject to a given country's laws or have to apply that law globally, but in a real world sense, they must follow all of the laws of any country they want to operate in, no matter how ridiculous or unfair they might feel. Because if you aren't obeying a country's laws, they'll shut you out.

Strongly disagree, there are some blurred lines around hate speech, but this isn’t one of them at all. This is a critique of a political party, that’s clear cut not hate speech.

舔共(which means curry favor of CCP) also will be deleted. We can confirm that Google is 舔共ing!

As an aside, I'm of the opinion that selective censorship marginalizes groups that don't readily have representation at companies like Google. I'm talking about with terms like "redneck" or even "dumb American" that we (me included) mention that go with the flow of current mainstream discourse that some groups likely find offensive. Perhaps that is why there can be a divide and we end up with such insular communities like infowars or thedonald.

Any opinion in this world can be categorised as hate speech.

Third solution: take those people who consider some speech harmful off your platform

Twitter has a choice to be a platform for as many people as possible, or a platform for as much speech as possible. They have made that choice, but aren't too consistent in communicating it.

It seems the problem is often scale. When you can't automate something at the same mistake level a human could, scaling it either requires compromises or extreme resource expenditure via something like tens of thousands of human moderators.

its sad to see a company from "Don't be evil" to kowtow but whatever

Youtube this is absolutely ridiculous.

Now is the word "ridiculous" towards Google or Youtube considered as hate speech?

I mean if you look around YouTube, there are lots of name calling, idiots, rude words that starts with F and S. None of the them were considered as hate speech, but all of a sudden every single negative word used to describe Communist "共" ( Which is in no specific to Chinese Communist, after all there are still a few Communist regime around the world ), and that includes "licking" ( "舔" ) communist, which the word licking in itself isn't in anyway "hateful", is now also considered as inappropriate or hate speech and be removed?

Using the Chinese Communist standards, anything that used to support the Hong Kong movement or demand will be considered as an act of attack on China and also as hate speech. Because you are in support of Hong Kong independence. For those who are not aware none of the five demands in Hong Kong specifically mentioned independence or separation, but that label has been used as any disobedience against CCP to be considered as one. So at what point will words used to support Hong Kong, or even US Government in sanction of China considered as hate speech? Especially when Youtube is already removing lots of content that is in support of the movement.

Edit: Yes Keep up with the downvoting.

It's almost like they have to make difficult decisions like everybody else does.

> hate speech

This is not a real thing. It is not based on a standard we can agree to easily or for a long time. The law (in the US) already handled this situation and made certain things illegal. Those laws are good enough.

YouTube only gets bad PR, if it doesn't police "hate speech", among the vocal minority of leftist progressive nitwits that have nothing better to do than complain about nothing. The normal, "everyday person", does not care about such things.

"hate speech" is easily abused because the premise is based on crappy ideas.

Youtube, and Google as a whole, are in for a world of pain in politics. Google pushes "quality and relevance" when they promote news articles, but this leads to them heavily emphasizing established outlets like BBC / NYT / etc. There is an increasing number of calls from official government representatives for promoting "alternative" news. What will Google do when they get a DOJ request to promote or dissuade a specific political viewpoint that isn't endorsed by their chosen "reputable" media outlets? Is the current anti-trust action against Google happening because of their perceived bias against Trump-friendly news?

"Facebook, Google accused of anti-conservative bias at U.S. Senate hearing"

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-congress-socialmedia-...

The volume of low quality biased news is set to explode in the coming years, and Google/Youtube will be attacked by various governments (Turkey, Hungary, USA, Brazil, China, Russia) when they avoid promoting this flood of content, and when Google promotes news and speech that various countries dislike.

Youtube will be forced to remove viral videos like "Plandemic" constantly. Imagine when they start getting calls from the Senate for scrubbing some powerful government official's [conspiracy of the month] youtube video. Or when US House members escalate from personally suing Twitter to creating the House Committee on Online Censorship and use official government subpoenas to harass companies that host content that harm their political allies under the guise of "online fairness".

Enough mainstream and fringe politics has now migrated onto the internet that there are no longer neutral platforms, only platforms that have not yet taken a political and editorial stance on speech.

I don't think it would be that tough. They need to make sure their engineers are as objective and neutral as possible, and technically only allow Americans to say anything they want, but they would still have authority to remove foreigner content, especially since many countries will reach out to YT to do so because those countries censor their populace on a daily basis and have an industry around it.

>> I wonder, can US regulators do something about it?

No. 1st Amendment protects hate speech ("Effectively, the Supreme Court unanimously reaffirmed that there is no 'hate speech' exception to the First Amendment."), but this applies only to government, private companies or people can do whatever they want. Not great, but better than the obvious alternatives.

They should honestly consider outsourcing the legal work on their platforms to various law firms around the world. There's clearly no will within the company to do legal heavy lifting and trying to develop tech solutions for this is a band aid at best

"some consider hateful"...

There will always be "some people" to consider anything hateful. Maybe we should just all stop communicating with each other, so nobody gets "hurt".

The words “communist bandit” are not “hate speech”. This is ridiculous. How infantilised have we become these days?

This is why I cannot separate hate speech from free speech. I don't like hate speech. I don't condone it. But I cannot conceive of a safe way to separate the two. The first step must be to define what hate speech is, but we can't even all agree on that.

All speech is free speech, even the parts I don't like - hate, lies, slander, and everything in between. That said, it's okay to regulate speech in some circumstances. You are legally obligated to tell the truth in court. It is rightfully illegal to lie about who you are in many scenarios.

YouTube is private property and Google has the legal right to censor whatever speech they want on it. I don't think we should regulate that. However, who and what they censor shows us who they consider to be most valuable on their platform.

Anyone who depends on YouTube should keep a close eye on Google's censorship patterns and constantly weigh their options. If you want to have any serious discussions about existing communist regimes, you'd be foolish to stay dependent on YouTube.

EDIT: If you can come up with a way to distinguish between hate speech and free speech that can't be easily abused, I'm all ears.

well do we have a list of words or symbols they automatically delete?

Douglas Murray said it well [1]:

TLDR; the problem is that the tech companies have been flooded with people of a particular political kind after their political factions lost. They went to Facebook and google bringing strong convictions with them.

They try to deal with things like hate without having thought deeply about it. What’s the next human emotion you’ll try to eradicate? Lustfulness? Gluttony? Envy? A war on pride?

Once you’ve decided you’ll take on the self appointed task of eradicating hate you’ll also take out some things that are true. Who is worthy of this kind of power? Who can do it well?

Western civilization has struggled with how to deal with human emotional excesses over hundreds of years, spilling lots of blood and tears, and we’ve learned that we have to reconcile within ourselves that there is something ineradicable about them.

We can expose human excesses, but as long as there is no incitement we just have to live with the fact that at some level people will say things we may not like or find wrong.

[1] https://youtu.be/YmNfm88pIe8

Do not conflate this with hatespeech, it leads the discussion away from the issue. Communist bandit refers to the government, not a protected class. It's not in any way similar to posting a racist/sexist/homophobic comment.

To be clear: hatespeech by definition relates to race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation. Communist bandit is unrelated to any of those categories.

Compounding this is the veritable explosion of what words which are considered “harmful”, not to mention how vogue it is to be offended (“harmed”) on behalf of another group.

If google is hoping to appease these groups, they’re in for a futile challenge.

Actually it's super-easy; barely an inconvenience.

Most Western customers really do not care. Like, really-really. The default attitude is "Well, China has its rules and the Western nations have theirs. They can get along." Leaks between rulesets are relatively rare in the sea of regular day-to-day operations.

And honestly, I don't think the CCP's goals are as far different from the goals of, say, the US government's as some believe. The countries are trading buddies. They're both empires with a number of citizens that is too-big-a-number-to-visualize-in-one's-head. If they ever came into direct conflict, these differences would start to put Western-headquartered countries in difficult positions, but that's not the current state of things.

The bigger question is why google/youtube cares. Isn't youtube/google banned in china?

It goes beyond private companies. We can't even rely on the WHO to do the right thing when it risks annoying the CCP.

> “I can't fathom how private companies still think that they can make the CCP happy AND their western customers”

It’s easy. The amount of profits that can be made from China’s 800M and growing middle class is worth the hit of westerners forming a negative opinion. Westerners will forget over time just like everything else.

Unfortunately, for most of the Western would values like democracy, freedom of speech, human rights, etc. are more of a vague ideal than something to live by. They surely support it, in words, but if it costs them more than $100 to uphold these values, if there's any substantial risk in it, if you have to risk losing money for standing up to CCP - forget about it. As a society, we'd rather spend weeks debating whether wearing sombrero, growing cauliflowers and drinking craft beer is racist (yes, that's real debates that people have) or whether it's OK to have a particular picture as a logo of a company, than address people being put in concentration camps and disassembled for spare parts by CCP. Maybe if CCP actions cause a pandemic that kills hundreds of thousands we vaguely consider doing something... but nah, arresting single surfers for "not social distancing" sounds more fun.

So don't put too much hope in "western customers". They'd allow likes of Google to get away with a lot, unfortunately.

Wow.

No Wikipedia articles on him either, and reports of people getting permanently banned from Wikipedia for trying to create that article, or even mentioning him in another.

Facebook deletes posts with that name in it as well. You're not allowed, even if the name appears in "main steam" press. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/11/11/face-n11.html

Anyone at Google, you can see the complete list here: http://cs/Eric+Ciaramella

Interesting, but there is a pretty clear difference between censorship to protect an individual and censorship of critisising a government.

That's a strange equivalence, and a malevolent comment.

Outing whistle-blowers (or supposed whistle-blowers) is bad for democracy. The government is supposed to be transparent to the people. This does not mean that the people should be transparent to the government, or that dissidents should be outed.

Wow. But this case raises the additional point that the subject definitely wants, deserves and is legally entitled to anonymity.

I have posted a link to a list elsewhere in the thread. (Not sure if it would be spam to repost it in this reply, sorry for the inconvenience.)

Wow I just verified this for myself

I wonder if that name is also blocked from HN. According to google there is only one hit besides this comment section.

Someone create a worm/virus that just spams this name across the web.

Gotta love this site. Snowden is revered around here yet a whistleblower goes through the proper channels to report wrongdoing by the US government and they still get outed, named, and trampled. Do you want government oversight or not? Do you want whistleblowers or not?

And dang is nowhere to be found

It's more complex than that. Imagine that you are a US company operating in Germany that provides German citizens with an incredible amount of information that wouldn't otherwise be available. You have thousands of people working in Germany. Occasionally, the Nazis ask you to censor things, If you don't, your entire team is at risk and will all loose their employment and citizens of Germany will loose access to an incredible amount of information and services. It's not cut and dry.

There s no “we” in the IT community, theres the “well funded groupthink” and “the sea of the unknowns”. When did the IT band together to achieve something?

The CCP is not the same as nazis. This is silly.

> We know China runs slave camps near the NK border

We don't, actually.

> slavery is typically demonized here in America

No it's not, it's just hidden so liberals (including republicans) don't have to think about it. It's the prison industrial complex.

> Do we really think they wouldn't prefer a Winnie the Pooh image of their leader over slave camps? Even Tiananmen Square is preferable to forced human organ harvesting.

Anything you read in the western media about China or North Korea should be second-guessed and double-checked against eastern media, usually chinese language, for facts. The so-called "free press" is really a coordinated operation run by a few media companies in the interests of the capitalist class. People supposedly iced by Kim Jong Un have been magically resurrected many times. Western media tries to put all the blame of the coronavirus deaths in the US on China "not coming forward" when they had months and months to prepare. The US has entire media structures like "Radio Free Asia" to spread anti-China propaganda.

What if "共匪" is presented graphically? Do the sniffers have the image recognition to flag those too?

Just tried it on a video about WHO and Bruce Alyward. It's still up after 6 minutes. Either we're inundating their censor bot, it's been shadowbanned, or Google has stopped under the flak. I'll keep checking later.

It looks like Google translate doesn’t offer suggested synonyms/related words for that term either. It translate the word to “gangster”.

So, are the people commenting 共匪 flagged at Google, now ?

Holy shit, it's true.

Deleted for me too. Wow.

Mine's been up for [edit: an hour]; make of that what you will.

Notably, there are a lot of YouTube videos and playlists that contain 共匪 in the title. So they're not banning it in every text field, just comments.

Except YouTube is blocked in China, so no one really should be trying to solve this to begin with...

> He adds a new rule to the detector. Mark as spam if it contains the "共匪" sub-string

But they have the best people of the industry who are highly paid for their engineering and problem solving skills.

Isn't this the kind of problem they are supposed to solve ?

> As a software engineer I understand these sort of bugs.

As a software engineer I would have understood this sort of bug if it was some startup.

If you’re right, Google will stop removing these comments now that it has gotten publicity (although personally I heard about it ~a week ago) and apologise.

I won’t be holding my breath.

Edit: I’ve just noticed the Google support claim here was posted in late 2019. It’s somewhat hard to believe that this has just flown under Google’s radar.

I like how there are a bunch of comments in those other threads insisting Google doesn't do anything moderation that's "political".

To be fair, Google is in a no-win situation. Post-2016 election, there has been enormous pressure put on Google (and Facebook and Twitter) to ramp up their censorship from the anti-Trump center/center-left/left. The mainstream media is on it too and relishes taking shots at social media every chance they get (the YouTube 'adpocalypse' was spurned by a hit piece by Washington Post against some minor doofus thing that PewdiePie did, and explicitly targetted advertisers of YouTube).

Even tech commentators are in on it. Kara Swisher, for example, has been railing at social media companies every chance she gets to get them to ramp up censorship against things she deems offensive.

Good luck with that. Their services are essential to my life and I don't think they're doing this dramatic draconian version of censorship everyone thinks. Never seen this kind of hate from the HN crowd towards amazon or apple's manufacturers and warehouse workers working in deplorable conditions, which is far and away the worst thing a company could be doing. Not whatever this is.

Who decides what is intelligent, well-reasoned critique?

Those in power have an incentive to categorize anything that threatens them as "hate speech" or "obscene" or "threatening to the social order".

You're conflating censorship and moderation.

Moderation can create a productive discussion, but no automated word filter is going to fix that community if people are motivated to be hateful, troll or spam.

Besides, the subject in question is not "hateful spam" or a "hateful" meme. It's charged, opinionated political speech but you'd really have to be stretching the meaning of "hateful" to apply it here.

Of course, expanding that definition is the political strategy of some interest groups right now. But this is a great illustration of how fuzzy and easily abused that advocacy really is.

You have quite an expansive definition of slur!

It's an insult to every anti-racist, anti-bigotry campaign in history to say that any political party should get to hide behind this kind of crybaby b.s. -- much less a party that operates concentration camps. Or are they, too, "people simply trying to keep the room clean" in your book?

Wait, but China is also doing the same. Have you watched any of the press conferences in China? They were frank and forthcoming with information, there were many reddit threads applauding it until everything got politicized around March.

Uh... western companies do a ton of business with Taiwan. The best semiconductor manufacterer in the world is Taiwanese, for goodness sake.

The problem here is not that Taiwan is being ignored. In fact it's got nothing to do with Taiwan at all.

Western companies don’t talk about values, Western governments do. The past few decades have seen an aggressive destruction in the power of Western governments to subdue them to Corporate power. The US is a prime example where the Republican party’s only policy platform (not even exaggerating) is “tax cuts are the solution to every problem”.

The US government specifically has been declawed and dismembered by the current administration to the point of uselessness. The only time it’s willing to assert power is to enable the corrupt dealings of political appointees and lobbyists.

Youtube is blocked in China though, so using VPNs technically Google shouldn't know they are based in CN.

Viral noticing is fed by widespread predispositions, which change over time like fashion.

There is a critical mass of people paying attention to censorship in general, and recently a critical mass of people attentive to the evils of the CCP.

Also, seems to have been at least since 2012

https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2012/jun/all-blocked-keywords-...

This site will shadow ban comments they disagree with, even if it's not trolling or abusive.

Yes, posting the date for 2 months before Tiananmen Square is clearly going to rile the Chinese.

I hope your youtube account isn't linked to a gmail account you consider important.

Because the Chinese market is huge. Because freedom of speech in the Western world is an individual liberty which platforms such as YouTube do not need to guarantee, whereas censorship in China is an absolute requirement they must abide by. The payoffs are asymmetric. If we had legislation in the EU or in the US that demanded that YouTube not tamper with users’ comments, then they’d have to choose between one side and the other. As it is, they’re not legislated as a utility, so they have editorial oversight.

The most charitable explanation would be, that this phrase is considered derogatory and offensive towards some, akin to say the N-word, and they have banned it on those grounds. Seems unlikely though.

Maybe if HN got a couple billion more users...

To be honest, I think that many, if not most, of israeli and diaspors Jews (and quite a lot of religious, too) would be banned from YouTube for antisemitism if they voiced their opinions on Hasidim there.

Learned something new today, thanks.

Got excited for a moment, then I read the "About" section and closed my browser tab at "crypto decentralized".

You won't ever see a youtube competitor. Youtube is running with google's proprietary search engine and has a decade and a half of content a competitor simply wont have. It will always be better than its competitors and some nonsense ban on a word won't stop anyone except 10 or 11 people on hackernews.

Peertube is more promising, since it is distributed.

If that's the case, shouldn't Youtube ban words like 'cuck', 'libtard' and 'snowflake'?

Youtube doesn't censor most pejoratives in comments, as you can tell by reading any of the comments.

They definitely don’t ban the word “commie” in English, so why ban the Chinese one?

A banded together band of bandits bandying about their propaganda. Communists are not US citizens, and even if they were, the US does not have laws to protect softies from "pejorative speech." Clearly, someone claimed it was "hate speech" -- which it is not -- and now it's banned globally on YouTube because US laws stipulate they must not entertain Hate Speech, but until a US judge says "Communist Bandito" is hate speech, zero relevance.

Subtle creeping influence is often more effective is the long term than just an all once take over

I was just about to post this:

Communist bandit (Chinese: 共匪; pinyin: gòngfěi) is an anti-communist insult directed to the Chinese Communist Party. The term originated from the Nationalist Government in 1927.

This is direct censorship on behalf of the Chinese Government.

Drew, ever since sourcehut got a little positive attention you seem to have adopted this mindset of "I started my own company and don't have to work for the man anymore, why doesn't everyone else just do the same?" You need to realize that this is an extremely narrow minded view to have. Not everyone can start their own business. What would you have done if sourcehut hadn't gained enough popularity to be successful? You would probably be working for [CORP ABC] who surely would be doing something you disliked, too. That would not make you a "bootlicker".

In fact, I'd like to ask this question of you: your website is undoubtedly being used by people to build software that you disagree with, perhaps even censorship. How do you justify still hosting your site instead of shutting it down? Enough of the cognitive dissonance. Face your choices and tell me how you square yourself with them.

Is it because you need the money from your site? So do Google employees (probably).

Is it because you still enjoy the work of building your site? So do Google employees (probably)?

Is it because on the aggregate you think that your site still provides benefit to society, despite it possibly being used for things you disagree with? So do Google employees (probably).

There are plenty of reasons why people still work for Google, and you probably would relate to them too if you stopped being so combative towards anyone who works for [big corp].

I have a bunch of friends at Google; it's a mix of "not my department," "the pay is good," and a few "true believers."

I’m not a Google employee, but really all companies of large enough size care only about the bottom line. Large companies don’t have morals, they just try to make money at all costs, full stop. Google is a bit more hypocritical in that they pretend to be about more than this, but lots of companies are similarly hypocritical, especially tech companies. It’s really only small businesses that have any sort of humanity (sometimes).

Google pay better than most, and if you’re on the right team I assume you get to work on very interesting/challenging projects. They’re just as heartless/selfish as any other bigco, but I don’t know that they’re worse.

Other than the hn-liberitarian anything that resembles censorship in any form is bad circlejerk, I don't actually see what the fuss is about here.

Assume I believe that moderation is a reasonable action. Why is this unreasonable moderation, who is harmed?

Put another way, assume that I have some line on the sand drawn on when I would leave. Assume also that I believe that what I'm doing at Google has net-positive impact. Why should I move my line in the sand back to <whatever this is>?

How do you justify being a citizen of your country? (not sure what country that is, but most of them have done bad things in the past). It's possible to be a part of a large organization and not agree with its every action.

I guess the same as consultants working for McKinsey, or bankers working for Goldman

"Not my department / group / office"

"Just a few bad apples"

I mean yes, those are valid points - and I'd imagine most junior workers being there just for the future (career) opportunities.

No junior engineer at google is going to have any say in strategic and political decisions like censorship.

I don't work there anymore, but this is a confused argument born of zealotry. Taking Google's money to work on open source is totally fine. More money spent on good things might even mean less spent on bad things.

For example, nothing good would come from the Go team quitting over unrelated political stuff.

Money. Being part of a massive company with lots of compartmentalization. A majority left-leaning political affiliation which tends to be softer on China and against nationalism/borders.

> Google & YouTube employees on HN: how do you justify still working at this company?

Not a Google Employee , but in 99% of the case it's money + experience/situation.

This is similar to what others tech company are doing ( Reddit , Adobe etc.. ) in terms of arbitrage when they decide to enter Chinese Market , Partner with Chinese VC or with ideas that challenge their values.

Regardless of where you'll go in tech you'll end up in Amoral corporations like Google/Amazon/Microsoft which are driven solely by Money and Growth , regardless of the consequences. ( Remember Gillette and Child Labour ? Nestlé ? )

Also , the last people who tried to Unionize at Google , which could have enable them to do something about it , got laid off instantly[0] , same pattern happened in all others tech companies...

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/25/20983053/google-fires-fo...

Not a Google or YouTube employee, but, practically, what would change? In the most likely case, a bunch of Googlers who believe it's important to be apolitical at work would take over the product and implement much stronger censorship to get promo. In the unlikely event all of them (and every applicant drooling for a FAANG job) had a change of heart too, Tencent would gladly step into the vacuum.

Laughing all the way to the bank... It justifies the behavior to people who think for themselves and not for some intangible global internet community. i'm not trolling.

"To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

"The world's" doesn't mean "The part of the world we like most." "Universally" doesn't mean "Nobody in China gets to use our system until the Chinese government adopts Western notions of information control."

Google would operate in North Korea if it could, because as a point of philosophy, it's believed that access to more informtion, even curtailed by the government, is better than access to only information controlled by the government.

How do you buy hardware? I’m genuinely asking because where I live it’s impossible to buy stuff that wasn’t made in China.

It’s almost impossible to lead en ethical life in this day and age if you do anything related to tech.

Google is a pretty huge company. What if they're working on something unrelated - maybe even something that benefits the world?

They look at their bank accounts.

It doesn't have to be "cognitive dissonance". They simply might not share your political views.

- Not a google employee

- Am an employee of a large company whose practices would probably also not stand up to public scrutiny

First question is has this been verified beyond "someone said so"? Perhaps it has - but any search I do ultimately leads back to the same comment.

Second, google is hardly the only company to occasionally kowtow the the PRC. I don't think any large company wants to a face-off with them. Are there more ethical employers? Probably, but they're probably small and not everyone wants to work at a small company pace. Also, if the company got larger and push came to shove, I suspect they'd do what they needed to do to stay on China's good side. It's a better option than going under.

Really a lot of employers are ethically shaky.

- Is it better to work for the DoD? Some people say no.

- Is it better to work for a Big Bank? Some people say no.

- Is it better to work for Big Pharm? Some people say no.

- Is it better to work for a place that frankly abuses their warehouse workers? I think we've had that discussion.

I'm not sure where that leaves anyone who likes gainful employment, particularly outside the Silicon Valley startup culture.

That doesn't necessarily translate to 'throw up our hands' but it does meant a more nuanced approach to where we work, how we feel about our employer, and how we measure that against all the other places we do business with that also have their dark sides.

It has been harder and harder every year, and frankly I'm really disheartened and demoralized these days. Articles like this one don't really surprise me anymore. It's not my department, but I feel complicit none-the-less.

But when I look out at the tech industry landscape, it is clear that I can do more good from within, because I have more freedom and influence on the work, and I believe that the work is net positive for the technology ecosystem.

Businesses large and small seem to have their heads on backwards here in Silicon Valley. Their founders are all highly profit-motivated, and don't truly seek to make the world a better place. Those that wear a facade of idealism give me no reason to believe they are any better than Google. If I left Google, where would I go where I can work without shame? I even have a hard time imagining starting my own business without falling prey to the same broken mechanics that brought us to where we are today.

At least at Google, I can say with confidence that there is ongoing work by people I trust - who in turn are given a lot of autonomy by the company - to make the world a better place with technology.

It might be easy to say this, but I believe I would quit if I was asked to implement something like that. But perhaps I'd be different if I were paid $300k a year. (I sure hope not, though)

Be careful, HN put a severe post limit on my account for asking this question in threads about Google misdeeds.

The best answer to your question I received from a Google employee, is that the pay is good and the work is interesting.

Other companies have been doing the same for many years?

The companies doing evil things all pay the best.

money

Of all the reasons, that's not the hill I'd die on.

If every HN submission were spammed with "communist bandits," do you think at some point the mods would just write a script to block such comments? It doesn't seem absurd to me to think that they might. It wouldn't bother me in the least if they did. That type of comment is even less edifying than "first" or "top" or "did anyone else come here from 9gag."

I work for Google. It does some things I don't like but this does not prima facie appear to be one of them.

They want to have political influence and believe they are serving society's best interests. They believe dissenting voices must be silenced.

I'm not sure I understand your point. It makes sense that people in Taiwan would use political rhetoric that aligns with their perspective.

The issue is whether societies without political censorship should support their businesses adopting it. Who uses any specific rhetoric (that should be categorically protected) is not salient to the debate.

It goes all the way back to Chiang Kai-shek and Nationalist China. It's an old-fashioned way to insult the Maoists and promote the idea that Taiwan was (and still is) in the right.

It was flagged by users and set off the flamewar detector. We review those, but not while asleep.

The site guidelines specifically ask you not to post like this, but to send such questions to hn@ycombinator.com instead. Would you please review them (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)? The reason we ask that is that such comments routinely spark completely speculative subthreads that range from completely off topic (at the high end!) to outrage mobs. They're extremely repetitive and they basically act like a drug and not a nice one.

We're always happy to answer questions—it just takes time to deal with the firehose. Yes, you have to wait for an email reply, but you've had to wait for a reply to this comment too, and if you'd sent an email you wouldn't have damaged HN. This digression (I'll use a nice word) was the #1 subthread on the #1 story of HN when I saw it.

You can't compute a post's rank from its timestamp and score. The software is more complicated than that, plus user flags affect things, plus moderator action. The "why is this post at rank N when given the score X and the timestamp Y my mental algorithm tells me it should be at rank Z?" question is an HN classic, but people grossly overweight moderator action, or rather sinister-moderator-misdeeds in the answers they give themselves.

I mean, think about it you guys. Do you really think we're suppressing discussion of the suppression of the phrase "communist bandits" from YouTube? I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a.

A few years ago, I reverse-engineered the HN ranking algorithm [1]. Basic ranking is based on votes vs age, but there are numerous other factors. Penalties are applied based on words in the title or the domain. Posts with too many comments got penalized as controversial. A "voting ring detector" triggers other automatic penalties.

HN ranking has probably become more complex since I looked at it. Manual moderation also impacts ranking.

[1] http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...

Some users tend to flag stories about China and censorship because they generate a lot of nationalistic and hot headed comments and very little actual intelligent discussion. Just look at the comments attached to this submission.

Might it be because threads like these often cause toxic, rude, unproductive, and generally tribal discourse in the comments?

Looking around the comment threads, I certainly don't see a lot of intellectual curiosity being stimulated or minds being expanded. I see a lot of dogmatic accusations, hyperbolic bemoaning-the-downfall-of-civilization, and general "how could you possibly believe that?!"-toned rudeness. Not our finest hour.

YCombinator has a financial incentive to support the Chinese regime.

Same thing happened to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20863498. I meant to email dang to ask about it but never got around to it.

I also experienced this on numerous Chinese government-related posts in the past, where front page articles were not flagged, but quickly disappeared. Don't really have an explanation. Would be great if @dang can look into this.

Not the first time I see something like this, would have I not been using hckrnews.com I would have missed it.

I always assumed the activity in comments might affect how long the submission stays on the front page.

I don’t know this for sure and this is just a guess. It would be great to know the details, waiting to learn more seems best.

I had a similar thing happen to my post [1] a month or so ago — one minute it was #1, then after a refresh, it vanished. No flag (that I know of), no explanation.

When things happen like this, explanations are helpful to the submitter and/or the commenters, whichever was causing the problems.

I suppose this opens things up for debate, but not sure a silent removal of content is great for the community either.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22633570

Seems like a child comment has been detached from this thread and moved into a separate top-level thread, that is currently at the top (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223772), while its' former parent (comment that I'm currently responding to) has been moved to the bottom (2nd page). QED.