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Comment by mjal | Hacker News Reader

That doesn't have to be the case at all. They could send the password (plaintext, hashed or otherwise) elsewhere to get checked that just takes a little bit of time, and get some form of positive/negative response back. Or any number of similar alternatives. It's still bad, but let's not jump to conclusions.

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The OP is Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, a China reporter that's likely on the CCP shitlist. Most likely there are actions specifically targeting her account that she's conflating with general policy. Also she could... just be embellishing. As someone who follows the space, her reporting is occasionally very questionable. But my money is her account was being monitored there's a trigger to ban if she takes account changing actions. This way CCP can slowly weed out foreign reporters instead of blanket ban.

But why would they be doing that? It’s possible, but doesn’t make a lot of sense.

> But why would they be doing that?

Because the CCP is a totalitarian state with an interest in controlling expression, even in passwords?

Is it more likely that they want people to have nice passwords so set up filters to make sure, or that they know everyone’s password because they want to be able to see what all of China is saying to each other? I’ll continue to believe it’s the latter unless I see a better explanation.

It's highly unlikely they need folks' passwords to "see what all of China is saying to each other". I'd fully expect the Chinese government to have full access to that, without any need for a password.

Unless they assume the average Chinese user is just like the average user everywhere else on the planet which tends to reuse password in multiple locations.

If that were the motivation, you wouldn't tip your hand to it by banning a user for using an impermissible password.

What makes more sense, is it is a fabrication, a story for twitter clickbait.

Just because WeChat does numerous, dislikable things, doesn't mean they monitor passwords. Or did this.

You might be right. Just to test I signed up for it, set it the exact same password, and 45 seconds is long past, but I don't appear to be banned.

I think the fact that she is a western journalist who speaks out against the CCP makes a reasonable explanation that her account is more 'watched' then the average account.

Well I would imagine they would just automate such thing?

And why would you do fuckery with a journalists password? Seems like especially stupid thing to do

I even tried to change my name too FUCK CCP, and it went ok. But then I got into a problem:

https://imgur.com/a/JbUclhL

Is there like only one xi jingling in the whole china? If not, what at others supposed to do?

> Is there like only one xi jingling in the whole china? If not, what at others supposed to do?

Change their surnames

Others probably use Chinese characters, not a romanized version.

What makes more sense, a platform known for censorship and asshatery censored someone, or a journalist who's income relies on her reputation made up a small largely non-story that won't earn her any money but will ruin her reputation if it's proved to be false?

One nice property of this largely non-story is it simply can’t be proven false; it doesn’t even come with any evidence.

A caring dev sneaking in a blacklist to reduce the risk of physical harm for users who unexpectedly find themselves in a rubber hose attack?

Surely the least likely of all possible explanations, but an easter egg blocking passwords that are variations of "I refuse to cooperate" would be a hidden artistic statement in its own way.

That is actually worse.

Would you trust the third party that flagged this as offensive:

F*ckCCP89

Edit: given that her account was permanently deleted after just 45 seconds, I actually think some party member working at WeChat is monitoring her activities in real-time. The password probably get him angry enough to push the permadelete button.

If the account was blocked in 45 seconds then it would be highly unlikely it was moderated by a human.

But given that people have not been able to reproduce this suggests this was probably not automated.

Also, I have hard time seeing an automated system that deletes someone's account including all data for using the f-word in their password.

Maybe the people trying to reproduce it didn't already have strikes against their account and this reported could have.

Why? China does flag people for monitoring 24/7. Is it hard to believe that in China where the party values stability over everything else that they would not have ID people that they feel post / report unfavorably on the CCP as someone to be tracked / watch by a human at all times? The Chinese state security apparatus is quite good and has near unlimited budget and man power.

Actually, the timeline indicates to me that it was automatic. Considering that they wouldn't assign someone solely to watch one journalist's account for infrequent changes, I think it's unlikely that any human saw it in the first few seconds after it happened and took it on themselves to take irrevocable action in the next second after that. My feeling is that queueing delays of various sorts took up most of the 45 seconds, but I would love to hear better ideas on that point.

Would a native Chinese speaker even have that visceral emotional reaction to English profanity? I'm curious about how that impact translates.

They don't need to have a visceral emotional reaction, they just need to know it's a strong anti-CCP sentiment. Given how frequently we use Fuck ____ in English for things we don't like (Fuck Cancer, Fuck the police, etc), it's a pretty obvious one.

I'd also assume they'd assign the english speaking North American dissidents to a monitoring person who speaks good english.

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