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Comment by speechisaright9 | Hacker News Reader

The scary part is that there is a significant contingent of people in tech who believe Youtube is morally justified in doing this because it's a private platform, and therefore and not subject to human rights standards like freedom of speech. Want to criticize an abusive regime? Build your own Youtube clone!

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But the same persons would be scandalized if youtube would censor US politicians propaganda.

Because I tell you, looking at Fox News as a European, I can't understand how it qualifies as "news", yet many americans are very attached to it.

I'm sure there are plenty of chinese people that feels like Fox News viewers about their own news sources. And they think they are right just as much.

And each camp will say "you can't compare us to them because...".

It's always the same story: it's not about the truth, it's about power and believes.

Google blocks what governments don't want spread since it wants to be on good relations with them. Same way it's blocking covid-19 related things that are deemed fake news. And in Germany it'll block Nazis.

Fox news is a laughably pathetic excuse for news.

But, so are the rest of the major corporate news outlets. In the US, they're all garbage, and Fox isn't any worse than the others.

The best way I can describe this is by analogizing to Canada, where I'm from. In Canada, when you watch or read the news (eg CBC), for the most part it just tells you what happened. In the US, when you watch or read the news, for the most part, it tells you how you're supposed to feel. Of course, Fox tells you you're supposed to feel conservative and (eg) NBC tells you you're supposed to feel progressive. But they all do this. They all editorialize. They all try to manipulate your emotions. None of them are willing to just present facts and let you think for yourself.

This is exactly my feeling with French news as well (the mainstream ones at least).

Since one of our national sports is to protest, people complain that "they" (the bad news paper or station) is showing one side only, and that "we" are different.

In reality they all tell the same thing, objectively without even editorializing it. So I can read Le Monde, Le Figaro, l'Obs, la Croix or l'Humanité and get the same info. And this is very good.

eqdw: >Fox news is a laughably pathetic excuse for news. >But, so are the rest of the major corporate news outlets. In the US, they're all garbage, and Fox isn't any worse than the others.

I agree that all the major corporate news outlets are pretty bad. But Fox News is _significantly_ worse. They push patently false narratives on purpose. Up until March, Sean Hannity was calling the Coronavirus a "leftist hoax". He never apologized or corrected himself and even had the audacity to further report "we've always reported accurately on the Coronavirus". Most of their shows push some form of the "deep state" conspiracy theory. And now they're helping the president push this "Obama-Gate" hoax.

Everything they do is designed to help the GOP and the president.

Jon Stewart once put it very well when he said (paraphrasing) - "other news orgs are sensationalist and maybe a little bit lazy, but none are as activist as Fox News".

There are other ways to shape discourse, too, though. For example, cover some stories to the point of obsession and simply completely ignore others, even if they should qualify as big news. The best way to counter that is to read a lot of widely varied news stories and insist that all of them present solid, factual and scientific grounding.

Things are not black or white, I'm afraid. My comment is not directly related to this matter about the Chinese Gov. Freedom of Speech will always collide with questions of hate speech, massive spread of fake informations, astroturfing... You'll always have to draw a line between moderation and censorship, and yes economical interests will be involved but way before that it's already a complex subject.

Things are very much grey.

China, though, is known to have a large group of astroturfers making pro-CCP comments, not just to demand censoring terms.

Also, it seems odd that this would apply to commenters outside of China.

I don't think you can say they're morally justified in doing this, just legally. We can/should use outrage and bad PR to get them to change how their platform works.

There's a startup idea... Build a platform for free expression of ideas that caters to a Chinese market and then wait for the Chinese government to pay you to give them censorship privileges.

Brilliant!

The problem as we've seen is that giving unlimited freedom of speech on these social platforms results in very bad things as state actors use it to incite social unrest. Of course, in protecting Europe and America's ability to remain safe democracies you also end up protecting China's ability to be a dictatorship. Keep in mind that western governments generally support China so you'd have a private company go against the government policies of the nation it is based in.

People have a choice. Money or democracy, you can have a lot of money and still have democracy. But w hensmall numbers of people have most of the money, the less democracy there is.

I know at least in Australia, our political class has certainly decided to make that trade. China has a stack of cash, and we have standards to sell.

Don't be evil meh. These are the people who desire to be billionaires, they really do have a devil may care attitude about it all.

Isn't that exactly what bitchute and other platforms are doing?

Yes, but it will be tough for them to compete with YouTube, which has lost money consistently since Google acquired them in the early 2000’s. Google is effectively offering YouTube below cost which creates an anticompetitive effect.

YouTube no longer loses money - far from it. It generated 15 billion dollars in revenue in 2019, ~10% of Google's revenue.

https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2019Q4_alphabet_earnings...

That does not mean it doesn't lose money. You're talking about revenue.

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