Twitter locks account of China's US embassy over its defence of Xinjiang policy | Hacker News Reader

Twitter locks account of China's US embassy over its defence of Xinjiang policy

reuters.com

84 pointspseudolus98 comments

I miss being a teenager and thinking pervasive computing and connectivity would bring freedom rather than just rebuild traditional social structures but with complicated software mixed into them.

In some sense, the additional connectivity has (or seems to have) worsened those social structures. Namely, Twitter and co have groomed us to hate each other much more (more efficiently?) than traditional media--even cable news--had ever done. Of course, at this point traditional media are really stepping up their game. I'm assuming of course that we're ready to admit our hatred issue and that we're not still pretending that our hatred for the other side is good, moral, just, and indeed the only way to cure racism, cancer, etc? Hopefully I'm not being too optimistic. And it's not just hate for the sake of ad clicks; previously lobbying was a problem and now we have lobbying plus social media giants selling influence over us (including our votes) to the highest bidder. Maybe this all boils down to ad driven revenue model such that we can address it with regulation, and the positive aspects of the Internet can remain?

> I miss being a teenager and thinking pervasive computing and connectivity would bring freedom rather than just rebuild traditional social structures but with complicated software mixed into them.

I miss being a teenager and thinking pervasive computing and connectivity would bring unbounded forms of communication & evolving, personalized mediums & interchanges rather than just ongoing increasing centralization of all speech activity into fewer and fewer large hubs (which we then under ever-increasing pressure war over how they ought be run).

I'm on the fediverse, where text is hosted almost entirely with two systems, Mastodon & Pleroma, which is better but still such a limited form of diversity/alternative. Projects such as scuttlebutt/ssb & gemini come to mind, as other people trying things. There's so much anger & distrust & hate of Big Tech, but I see almost none of the proportioned response I would expect, none of the resistance, the trying & supporting other attempts. The main thing that makes me miserable is how miserable everyone else seems to want to be. Go forth, find your golden paths all. The future is open to us. Build it. If we build it, we will come. I believe.

In the early days of the internet, when technology was strictly the domain of engineers, we had such a utopia. When the "normal" people joined, all the problems started ...

Back when cyberspace was a separate world, not just a digital representation of this one. I feel the same about the industry regarding work - the work place and ways of working have changed, and I no longer enjoy it. Where is the new off-world to escape to?

There’s a new internet [1].

[1] https://youtu.be/Q3QbXMFjro0

VR inhabited by GPT? I don’t want it, but I feel it coming.

I imagine that’s true. I don’t expect that the researchers building early networks behaved as people do online today.

It’s a shame that this thing that excited me (internet) has become something that I now consider a huge barrier. Not that we should be without the benefits; I simply don’t know how we reconcile the vile aspects.

Eternal September:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Academia could be more involved in the creation of new internet protocols. And the activity of building FOSS software that enables more freedom (such as Mozilla's Firefox) should be valued more in academic circles.

Alas, before September... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

I believe that's provably false.

Here, we have Mockapetris and Dunlap reflecting on rolling out DNS to UC Berkeley (the B in BSD) between 1985 and 1988 [0, 1]:

> Educating even the sophisticated Berkeley user community on the new form of [DNS] addressing turned out to be a major task.

They're complaining about how some of the most technically inclined users and researchers at one of the most technically advanced organizations couldn't RTFM. It seems like, depending on your perspective, the Eternal September might've started a bit early that decade.

0: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/52324.52338

1: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA203901.pdf

Not just that, now the culture clash is whose traditional social structure to extend to the internet.

Same. I remember reading McLuhan as a teen thinking the future would be a golden age of communication. Instead resembles a superfund site, politics, graft, and all.

Not sure why your reading of Mcluhan would lead you to that conclusion, he gave countless warnings about how electronic media would destroy the societal institutions founded on literacy and the printing press.

"Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence."

–Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962

But wait - McLuhan was also warning us of this specific potential future and providing a solution. We need to “cool” the media e.g. make the news interactive, discoverable and participatory instead of what we currently have which is the death rattle of cable news attempting to maintain its strangle hold on our attention.

Maybe it hasn't been around for long enough.

Give sufficient detail wrt what that freedom looks like. The moment you do I bet you'll hit up against some laws that your teenage self should have spent decades fighting against instead of writing code.

I assume people need some examples to better understand this, so let's provide some.

DMCA 1201 is totally useless at its state purpose (stopping piracy) because pirates can distribute their circumvention tools in the same channels as the pirated materials. If you could stop that then you wouldn't need DMCA 1201. So what it does in practice is act as an anti-competitive cudgel to prohibit adversarial interoperability.

The CFAA does something similar -- it's excessively broad and basically everything it prohibits which is actually bad was already prohibited by other laws.

There are a wide variety of financial regulations (mandatory chargebacks, KYC) that effectively require the result that you can't have a low-friction anonymous digital payments system. This means that if you want to consume media on the internet where the author gets paid instead of them paying to host content, without all your media consumption ending up in a dangerous central database associated with your social security number, it has to be supported by advertising. And then we're back to the dangerous central database.

These laws are harmful to a free and democratic society.

It seems like some segment of people with power have decided that the lesson to be learned from China is that the great firewall is effective.

Not gonna lie, the chatbot comparison where the Chinese internet trained bot became friendly and helpful and the U.S. trained bot became a psychopath was pretty convincing.

I know about Microsoft's Tay. I assume that's what you're referring to, for the US example. Which bot was trained on the Chinese internet?

Game theory comes into play. If we have to compete with China then we can predict both nations copy each other. State level intervention in corporations, censorship in the name of public safety, maybe even re-education camps if some of the younger congresspeople had their way. We become more like our rivals when we compete with them.

> maybe even re-education camps if some of the younger congresspeople had their way

Which younger congresspeople would want 're-education camps' of Muslims? Or at all? Incendiary suggestion and not true.

> If we have to compete with China

Why do we have to do that?

If you look at my history of comments you'll see how much I dislike the CCP but I still think this is wrong.

What now? Are they going to stop doing what they're doing? They now have another excuse to show their people how bad and anti-Chinese the West is.

Why is the last point a problem? If you take "Chinese" to mean the Chinese government, I am anti-chinese.

Because I don't like the idea of Chinese people thinking I hate them because I don't.

Any kind of governance requires some consent from people, even if it is not in majority. A lone dictator with no support from the people fails pretty quickly based on our experience in the past a hundred years.

>Any kind of governance requires some consent from people

Well no, the whole point of totalitarianism is that the people aren't even allowed a choice in the first place. A lot of people did speak out in Tiananmen Square and it didn't work out so well for them.

As it is hard to swallow for what happened in 1989, that was a fraction of people, not all people as a monolithic sense. And that fraction is not strong enough to overturn the existing ruling class with military support.

Russian later did succeed at overthrown their government with military support.

For what its worth, the Chinese people are only going to see what the CCP wants them to see anyway, or at least in the lens through which the CCP wants them to interpret it. We shouldn't let "how the Chinese might perceive us" to influence us very much.

That said, I think there are other reasons to not like this; specifically while I appreciate some acknowledgment of the human rights issue, I don't especially like Twitter playing moderator for so much of the world's discourse--even if it correctly moderates a handful of high profile issues, it can still shape the enormous torrent of lower profile issues to its liking and deceptively point to those high profile cases when people challenge its neutrality. Consider for example how easy it would be for Twitter to turn a knob tomorrow and boost the amount of subtly pro-CCP content we see (or replace pro-CCP with whatever issue you don't think we should want more people exposed to). While yes, Twitter is a private entity and (in many western countries, anyway) they are legally free to moderate how they like, I still don't think it's a social good--I don't know that our various free speech laws considered the possibility that so much communication could be at the discretion of a single private entity (or even a small handful of private entities).

So Twitter should let them get away with breaking the rules because...it's China? Or something?

If they have rules against dehumanizing messages, it makes sense to enforce said rules. That the PRC is playing dumb about what they said isn't fooling anyone here.

No. Maybe deleting the tweet but not banning the account is a better idea.

Or now that the Trump administration has declared it a genocide, it could be tagged just as their tagged Trump's tweets.

My point is. I don't see how banning a foreign embassy from Twitter will solve anything.

It will solve, or at least mitigate, the problem of there being dehumanizing tweets on Twitter.

I dunno, this seems like a pretty straightforward "how rules work" kind of situation.

Twitter is banned in China. Why should Twitter let the CCP use their platform for propaganda campaigns? Do you think Twitter banning them is as bad as CCP concentration camps in Xinjiang?

>Twitter is banned in China. Why should Twitter let the CCP use their platform for propaganda campaigns?

So because somebody else limits freedom of speech, we should abandon our values and limit theirs?

>Do you think Twitter banning them is as bad as CCP concentration camps in Xinjiang?

Do you think Twitter banning them helps those interred in concentration camps?

No people will see this in China because Twitter is banned there.

Incorrect. A lot of Chinese people will see this.

Chinese people know Twitter is blocked but largely don't care because Weibo is more fun. Whether that's a good thing or bad thing is left as an exercise to the readers.

>Chinese people know Twitter is blocked but largely don't care because Weibo is more fun.

Ah yes. The grapes are sour anyway.

It's no different than a newspaper opting not to print a letter to the editor. It's not state censorship. It's an exercise of editorial discretion.

It IS different. Newspapers are publishers, they choose what they publish and they are responsible for it.

Social media companies are NOT publishers, therefore they are not responsible for what other publish. If they were like a newspaper they would be sued and out of business in matter of days after all the illegal stuff that it's being posted daily.

Read Section 230. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230

> It IS different.

No, it's not.

> Newspapers are publishers, they choose what they publish and they are responsible for it.

Correct.

> Social media companies are NOT publishers, therefore they are not responsible for what other publish. If

Social media companies are publishers except for a defined subset of civil liability purposes; an exception (Section 230) which exists explicitly to avoid discouraging them from acting like publishers.

> Read Section 230.

I have. And I've read the arguments for it at the time it was adopted (both at the time and several times since.) Section 230 supports exactly the opposite position you are making: online media companies have exactly the editorial freedom of newspapers, plus (with regard to actions concerning user-generated rather than first-party-produced content) some liability immunities designed specifically to encourage them to take an editorial role rather than act as neutral unmoderated platforms.

The argument that they lose editorial freedom because of Section 230 (or would lose Section 230 protection as a result of exercising editorial freedom) contravenes both the text of and the very explicit motivation for Section 230.

And even newsstands can choose not to carry a paper.

Good point. It's often overlooked that distributors, who aren't publishers and don't have publisher-like liability, are also selective and are, generally uncontroversially, exercising expressive freedom in that selectivity.

I don't mind if people downvote me, I don't really post to get internet points but I'd like to see an argument. Where am I wrong? What am I missing?

> What now? Are they going to stop doing what they're doing? They now have another excuse to show their people how bad and anti-Chinese the West is.

If a regular person or company account tweeted a defense of genocide, their account would be censored. I believe this is the right move if we are not to apply double standards between regular people and government accounts on the platform.

Another instance of hiding objectionable speech that's too weak to stand on its own. I wish they would just leave these things out in the open to die their own natural deaths at first exposure to reason and contrary arguments.

Edit: Thread is duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25855653

Also previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25853749

I now wonder what will happen to US Embassy's Weibo account. My impression is that their Weibo account promotes "unpopular" opinions but has mostly been left alone.

But I haven't been a Weibo user for the past >5 years so my impression could be way off.

I wonder if Twitter has crossed some kind of imaginary line now that almost compelled it to censor more. I would have liked to see more actions like this in the past, but maybe Twitter needed to cross the Rubicon and censor the president in order to feel comfortable with censoring other countries and entities

Good on Twitter, companies moving themselves away from being soulless, mindless machines where anything goes, is a step in the right direction.

There's asymmetry between Chinese propaganda able to operate freely on western platforms, while western propaganda are filtered on Chinese platforms. This is a real foreign policy conundrum since both parties are following relevant local regulations. It's a asymmetry of values, and I was always curious if west would find solutions without adopting similar anti-values of Chinese censorship. But they're converging more and more every year.

Up till now, Twitter labels foreign missions / media as warning (though biasedly, i.e. CGTN is labelled state media where BBC is not). Regardless, wholesale deplatforming of a foreign mission is a line that even China has not crossed on weibo. Occasional posts will be removed or shadowbanned, but nothing on this scale. Let that sink in.

This is tantamount to private company influencing foreign policy, or further validation of Chinese censorship policy. Either way this reaffirms the Chinese model. I'm sure there's going to be much rationalization and wank over differences between private and government control and muh liberal values. But IMO it's perfunctory. When pro democracy activists and Merkel who grew up in east Germany commented recent deplatforms are going too far, maybe listen.

Up till now, Twitter labels foreign missions / media as warning (though biasedly, i.e. CGTN is labelled state media where BBC is not)

To be fair, when's the last time a sitting PM asked for "absolute loyalty" from the BBC [0]? My impression is that while both are state-funded, the Beeb is much more free in its editorial voice [1].

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/19/xi-jinping-tou...

[1] https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/27282/why-shoul...

Many diaspora from the global south, who grew up in countries with state media, but now lives in the west will tell you even the free-est western fifth estate is prone to manufactured consent that is frequently indistinguishable from state propaganda. IMO perfunctory rationalization extends into this labelling as well. Of all media sources, state media is probably the easiest to identify. Presumably that's what Twitter's labelling is for, unless it's actually a wiki style reliable source list, in which case it should be advertised as such. If not then BBC / CBC is government funded state media and should be labelled as such.

I agree. At the same time, the BBC and CGTN fall into materially different categories with respect to editorial independence. So does PBS, for that matter; while they're funded in part by the taxpayer, their coverage of the Trump administration has been anything but subservient, and indeed at times quite critical [0].

Putting these organizations in the same class of media bias seems to erase some important, and measurable, distinctions.

[0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/january-6-2021-pbs-newshou...

What's with the sudden blocking spree Twitter has gone on? Has there been a change of leadership somewhere in the company?

Perhaps they noticed the laissez-faire approach doesn't work.

Twitter employees have been wanting to ban Donald Trump and other right wingers for years. But now that the Republicans are out of power they don't have to worry about repercussions from said Republicans. The capitol riot was certainly a catalyst, but keep in mind that the main reason Donald Trump wasn't banned between 2016 and 2020 was that he was POTUS.

I'm starting to think that the degeneration of society into a 1984-style dystopia may now be unavoidable. We need to take power back from big tech and we need to do it now.

I think Twitter has put itself in an impossible situation.

By banning certain politicians, it now has to maintain consistency... which means banning thousands more globally.... which means making itself irrelevant to huge swaths of the global population.

It's no longer a ubiquitous utility. ... but that's what people want. they don't want their toaster to judge what food they make.

They've doomed themselves.

> that’s what people want

It’s not what I want. I don’t want my social network promoting violence anymore than I want my toast poisoning my family.

If a post author is promoting violence, lay the blame with the post author, not the social network. As I understand it the legal basis and protections for the network using this simple valid logic already exists. They’ve been operating with this protection for years now. What has changed is the increased appetite for authoritarianism from many of a particular political persuasion.

You have a choice to put poison in your toaster and kill yourself, just like you have the choice to not read hate-speech if you don't want to.

If you don't think you, as an adult, are capable of seeing hate-speech without disregarding it, then you should use a child-friendly platform.

I'm skeptical that Twitter cares about consistency. The company is run by Bay Area progressives and I doubt the Democrats in congress want to do anything to stop Twitter from going after right wing accounts. Sure, the conservative people will try to leave for an alternative but I think the majority of average people will just stay on twitter and the net effect will be that the platform will lurch even farther to the left.

What for blocking the Chinese embassy? Nah, they should have done this ages ago.

I think Twitter is even firewalled from the PRC, so why they let PRC propaganda propagate on their servers is beyond me.

> I'm starting to think that the degeneration of society into a 1984-style dystopia may now be unavoidable. We need to take power back from big tech and we need to do it now.

Look, lying is bad, and there is no nobility in defending lies. It's pretty clear that something's broken with how people think about free speech when they make hysterical 1984 comparisons when someone makes it slightly less easy for a massively powerful authoritarian country to spread its lies. It's not just you, I see this all over.

I mean, 1984 was all about a massively powerful authoritarian government making it impossible for the little guy to spread truth. Comparing this to that literally turns the novel on its head.

I would wager a good number of people who crow on about "1984 is here - dystopia is upon us!" either didn't read it, or took away a different meaning than the author actually intended.

I read a book last year about marketin. It talked about this bracketing of the public’s perception of an issue in to a box. Once you get the pereption confined in a box, you can begin to shift that box towards the true goal. I thought a lot about that and how big tech, and the government are pushing us towards some perception, and I’m worried that the more it pushes the harder it will be to ever move it back.

When billion dollar companies are zero cost to the users there will likely always be a problem.

I don't know if you're wrong, but this is not evidence. As long as the Chinese embassy can put out press releases on their own platform, they're not being silenced. If anything, we need to break everyone's ridiculous dependency on a handful of platforms, not the platforms themselves.

How is "break everyone's ridiculous dependency on a handful of platforms" meaningfully different from GPs version, "take power back from big tech"?

Doesn't big tech have power because so many people depend on this small set of platforms?

What prevents presidents and other officials from holding "old-fashioned" press conferences, like they used to do just a few years ago? Has big tech supplanted the media?

Any government official can hold press conferences and make press releases just like they used to. However in practical terms the reach of those messages is severely limited. Did you know the President has a weekly radio address?

Besides inauguration day, do you remember reading official documents on the whitehouse.gov website? I never have. Nor have I ever gone to AOC's official house.gov site to read her messages. But I do know what she's saying on Twitter.

Not to belabor the point but where the message is delivered is a huge factor in whether or not the message will even be noticed.

> Has big tech supplanted the media?

Yes. Traditional media is struggling greatly because of tech in general and big tech in particular. The profitability has been squeezed out and what remains of media is less trustworthy because of that.

“Traditional media”, sure, but the question as posed was about the media.

Craigslist and the New York Times website probably did more to harm the profitability of newspapers around the country than any FAANG company, and there’s no shortage of new websites claiming to report the news.

Tech is the media’s biggest supporter, but maybe not the media that you grew up with. What’s driving down the price of news isn’t tech, but the new forms of competition tech—big, small, medium, XL, etc.— enables.

> Has big tech supplanted the media?

No.

I think big tech has all of the power because they have all of the platforms, and if any platform attempts to take some of that power, the big technology companies shut them down. I’m not making an excuse or an apology for a service like Parler, but eventually the deck becomes so stacked against us where we are damned if we do damned if we don’t.

The phrase "take back power", especially when it comes in the context of "they're blocking people and must be stopped!", seems to boil down to not letting tech companies block who they want to block. I just want competition.

> seems to boil down to not letting tech companies block who they want to block. I just want competition.

The problem is that when the market is already consolidated, you need one to get the other.

Suppose you want to compete with the major phone platforms. Your biggest problem is apps. No apps, no users; no users, no app developers.

A way to fix this is to create a cross-platform app development framework. Developers would love that -- write your app once and it runs on both the existing major platforms and any new ones? Great!

Except that the incumbents block it. You can't create a competing app store for the existing platforms, which means you can't leverage that into a competing platform.

But without competition there, they can also do this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24304275

So there goes your competition for Twitter and Facebook.

Constrain them from limiting competing app stores. Works a lot better than doing nothing.

App store policy is rather different from content moderation. I still don't like it, but I'd be a lot more comfortable with forcing Apple to allow cross-platform apps than forcing Twitter to accept Trump.

Ok, I see. That makes sense.

It seems there are perhaps three(?) options that come up:

1) Constrain big tech via regulation (thereby in some sense transferring the power to regulators/government, with the hope that it would in turn be influenced by democratic processes)

2) Or, directly influence big tech behaviour through boycotts and other consumer action.

3) Or, break up big tech forcibly or again through consumer action to switch to alternatives, thereby diffusing this power.

And you prefer 3. I think I do too.

Eh, 3 is the closest, but I can't say I like anything that involves directly mucking with existing companies. In my dream world, the government funds federated software to the point that it can compete with twitter for most people. It's unclear how realistic that is, I'm just very confident that government dictating moderation policy will go horribly wrong.

#3 Force federation gets my vote

The means are vastly different? Use the power of government to force private companies into some strange, complex, government-backed content policy, or let people realize they need a variety of trusted media in their diet and don't use one platform for all comms.

Who will give the Chinese Communist Party a voice now they have been censored? What's that? Oh they own all the newspapers, TV, radio and internet in the country of China.

Why is Twitter being treated as a public entity by the news lately

I don't use Twitter myself, but a lot of people do. So many, in fact, that you could argue that in a sense maybe it is. This notion is/was strengthened by the previous U.S. President using Twitter as (basically?) his sole media outlet.

As an alternative to ending free speech for everyone; perhaps users should have to pass a course on critical thinking; before being allowed to use twitter.

The reason for the ban is that the tweet violated Twitter's policy against "dehumanisation". The text of the tweet is the following:

"Study shows that in the process of eradicating extremism, the minds of Uygur women in Xinjiang were emancipated and gender equality and reproductive health were promoted, making them no longer baby-making machines. They are more confident and independent."

While that "baby-making machines" is tone deaf, I don't see how this is per se "dehumanising" without taking a precise stands on what the real actions of the Chinese government are with regards to the Uighur population.

I wonder what the cross section is between people that object to this but think permanently banning Trump was ok, and vice versa.

They’re both ok with me. Twitter started as a global water cooler, but became possibly the world’s largest propaganda machine. Something had to be done.

So far, this thread seems surprisingly concerned about whether a giant government can get its message out about how great its genocide is. I would like to suggest, humbly, that they examine their hearts and determine whether advocating genocide is the type of thing they would want to restrict in their own terms of service. If not, please avoid criticizing Facebook for their role in spreading the propaganda used to justify the genocide in Myanmar. And if it is, please ease up on Twitter for enforcing that policy.

Personally, while I think you should be able to set up a personal webpage saying whatever you like, I find this stuff extremely distasteful and did report the Chinese embassy for advocating violence towards specific ethnic groups. It is a violation of Twitter's terms and tremendously odious.

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