I helped build ByteDance's censorship machine | Hacker News Reader

I helped build ByteDance's censorship machine

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199 pointshker120 comments

Has this article been discussed here before? I could have sworn I recall seeing this article maybe a week or two ago on the front page but I can’t find a past thread with any activity.

It has: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26192988

(You have a good memory!)

Yeah I don't get it. I submitted it last week but it got no attention. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26190172 )

It's a really eye-opening article because everybody does Trust & Safety differently and in ByteDance's case there appears to be a huge divide between how US and Chinese users are treated.

> there appears to be a huge divide between how US and Chinese users are treated.

TikTok is not Douyin. TikTok serves users outside of China, and ByteDance is aware that such extensive censorship would cause massive backlash against the app, so it is not done - especially when the public perception of China makes the company so precariously placed. As such, this is why you can still see posts about Uyighur Muslims and anti-China rhetoric on your FYP in TikTok rather easily.

With Douyin, censorship is state mandated. Practically every big Chinese tech company will have some advanced state-of-the-art censorship infrastructure for their Chinese users.

This is HN - you need frontpage or it’s dead. So someone that incidentally shares your interest needs to spot it in the stream of “new” posts, a bunch of friends upvote you, or it’s manually boosted by the staff. Just keep posting and don’t feel bad if it doesn’t get traction :)

It would be interesting if someone from China could comment on censorship in China. Is there a fraction of people who agrees with it or is almost it universally disapproved of?

Some of these arguments for censorship made in this article sound eerily similar to how we justify censorship in the West.

> Our role was to make sure that low-level content moderators could find "harmful and dangerous content" as soon as possible.

Without context this could apply to any Western social media platform. Of course in the West its companies not politicians who call the shots, but the language to justify the actions is certainly similar.

I'm not trying to equate Western censorship to Chinese censorship, but in the West it's certainly fair to say many people are happy and even welcoming of censorship – is the same in China?

Not China, but in Iran, everyone fucking hates it.

To be fair, how well your country plays a big factor in how you view your countries policies. While life in China is far from perfect, China has been growing at a strong steady pace, and I'm sure people are much more likely to accept the way things are if things are getting better, whereas Iran has been stuck in a rut of sactions for a very long time, and especially once Iranian people compare themselves to the prosperity they had before, it's a hard pill to swallow.

This is it. Relative economic prosperity, at least as long as it's somewhat widely distributed among a large proportion of the population, usually seems to be quite helpful in smoothing over any roughness of the general political situation for most. In any place, one might disagree ideologically with the way certain things are unfolding politically, but people will usually be much more likely to accept it so long as their material situation is improving, be it real or perceived. Of course, if that economic prosperity or general perception of it goes into decline, the situation can suddenly become quite ugly politically.

Definitely true, not something that can be applied elsewhere.

There's also a silencing effect if you're in a good quality of life that you don't want to potentially risk that by being annoyed about some aspects of society.

I think that applies to China and it applies to Iran. And you can see it in other countries where they have no policy change, but due to outside reasons the quality of life decreases and people start demanding policy and regime change.

Isn’t one of the problem the risk of retaliation towards family and friends in China? With speech and face recognition this can also be done for everyone commenting on China even in the West?

> It would be interesting if someone from China could comment on censorship in China. Is there a fraction of people who agrees with it or is almost it universally disapproved of?

In general people don't agree with it. However, for a lot of people, it's not actually on their radar.

The reality is most people in China are so engrossed in their work and day-to-day life that censorship isn't really actually an issue for them, and taking political action is not something that an average citizen would do considering the grave risks to your career.

Also, it's worth noting that most citizens prioritize safety over free speech. If changes in the law indirectly mean that there will be riots on the streets, most citizens would rather have whatever it takes to have no riots. That isn't to say people agree with censorship, but for what it's worth, people are happy that you can more or less walk around anywhere in China without much fear of your personal safety. Most people in Shenzhen were extremely happy they were in Shenzhen where you could walk around freely instead of "free" Hong Kong where you had to be in fear of idiot high school students throwing Molotov cocktails and beating up anyone who spoke Mandarin.

You're really conflating a couple other issues in with the original idea here.

That attitude is catching on in America. The censorship and consent apparatus is more privatized and not officially backed by state power (but see threats from politicians to tech companies to remove “disinformation” “or else”) but most people just put their heads down and toe the “official” line. You might even put on a little show about how woke you are to prove your loyalty. Such acting is common in all regimes.

This happens in every society. There is an official ideology and whether through central direction or self-organizing systems, that ideology is enforced. Occasional periods of lighter repression (when the official ideology is something like classical or Rawlsian liberalism) end up just being openings for more assertive ideologies to take control. America recently exited such a period.

What point would you define as the beginning of that period that we're supposedly exiting?

The 50s and 60s. It was in full swing by the 70s. If I had to point to one iconic development, it would be the Warren court, and in particular its free speech cases. Those marked the decisive defeat of traditional conservatism, which never again was a powerful force in national politics (unless you count some elements of the Trump coalition) despite occasional lip service and token concessions by Reagan and Bush 43.

A half-century later, Rawlsian liberalism has fallen to wokeism, which has become powerful enough to overcome the cultural and procedural obstacles to establishing itself as the new ruling ideology, taking out the liberal framework that enabled its rise, and beginning its own campaign of repression.

Though you could say it was the American Revolution that set things off and that it merely took America 250 years to go through the progression that the French Revolution traveled in a mere 5 years.

I feel like this overemphasizes the legal angle, while ignoring other aspects of censorship. It's true that the Warren court significantly liberalized things by setting very narrow constitutional boundaries in Brandenburg v. Ohio etc. But there's censorship by law, and then there's censorship by public opinion. When you complain about "wokeism", it's mostly the latter - but there was plenty of that in the 70s as well, only with different opinions considered unacceptable to the point where people could get fired for them, or have trouble finding a platform to address large audiences.

I don’t agree. You are suggesting that liberalism was just a mirage for a different underlying ideology. But I don’t think that’s what was happening. People really believed in liberalism. Live and let live is not a very profound philosophy—nor a very self-preserving one, which is why it fell so quickly—but it was real.

I'm not suggesting that. I'm saying that the "golden age of liberalism" was not as golden as is often portrayed, especially in comparison with the current state of affairs. You could, and people were, effectively persecuted for stating their opinions - not in the court of law, but with very real consequences nonetheless.

That people believed it was more real than it actually was, is another matter. But this invites the question - was it really the social consensus? Or consensus among some subgroups of society that simply didn't run afoul of speech taboos?

(FWIW, I'm borderline free speech absolutist, so bear this in mind - I'm not arguing that extreme liberalism in these matters is a bad idea. Only that the past is not a good example of what it should be like, once you set the propaganda and cultural distortion aside.)

I think one useful metric is what percent of the population falls inside of the overton window that makes you unemployable in any upper middle class job (ie jobs that make it possible for you to acquire power). Jared Taylor, for example, was a translator for law firms for a long time after publicly and prominently saying that immigration should be curtailed for the sake of keeping the white percentage of the population higher. It was a quite unpopular view even then but it didn’t matter because whatever, it’s just his personal political views.

Nowadays, even believing something that half or more of the population believes is far outside of the Overton window and will ruin your career.

That example demonstrates that one particular view became less tolerated; what about others? E.g. if one went around openly espousing Maoism around that time, how would that affect employment prospects in law firms?

> Though you could say it was the American Revolution that set things off and that it merely took America 250 years to go through the progression that the French Revolution traveled in a mere 5 years

We're still quite a far way off from literally beheading people in the streets (and no, having your Twitter account banned is not even remotely comparable)

No need to cut heads off. It’s less messy and more palatable to take someone’s entire livelihood away. Any real threat to power comes from the middle class. Make it so their precarious status depends on loyalty to your ideology and you have all the control you need.

Tell it to the slaves bud.

(I mean that we've regressed into repression)

Any assertion of what 'most' Chinese citizens want is unprovable given the lack of any representation on any level of society.

Plenty of China watchers are happy to claim that Chinese people all support their government - and yet the government is curiously unwilling to test this assertion in democratic polls. Tells you something about how strongly held these beliefs are (hint: not very).

Do you think the results of the Harvard Kennedy School's study were fraudulent? https://ash.harvard.edu/publications/understanding-ccp-resil...

A big fallacy is that the "Chinese government" is this big monolithic entity. It's not. Supporting the Chinese government does not equal support censorship.

Do you support the National Park Service?

Do you support the Federal Aviation Administration?

Do you support the USDA?

Do you support Donald Trump?

Do you support the FDA?

Do you support NIST?

Do you support Joe Biden?

Do you support NIH?

Do you support public schools?

Do you support Guantanamo Bay?

Do you support the Environmental Protection Agency?

The Chinese government, although not democratically elected, is similar in one aspect, in that it is a very multi-faceted set of institutions that do a whole lot of things well that the majority of people support, and a few things that the majority of people secretly do not support but are unlikely to be vocal about.

> most citizens would rather have whatever it takes to have no riots

Isn't it a brilliant tactic deployed by the regime, making people think that freedom of speech equals riot on the street. Like the USA is burning in hell with all the black live matters protest and the capitol protest/riot?

> Most people in Shenzhen were extremely happy they were in Shenzhen where you could walk around freely instead of "free" Hong Kong where you had to be in fear of idiot high school students throwing Molotov cocktails and beating up anyone who spoke Mandarin.

In a related matter, I wonder why mainland China came down so aggressively on Hong Kong's autonomy. Was the legal system in Hong Kong so lax that it was impossible to punish severely the main organizers of the illegal demonstrations? Why was the Hong Kong government so incapable of stopping the violence, but the mainland intervention so effective? I'm surprised China chose to abandon its international commitments and make it much harder to get Taiwan to agree with a similar or even more favorable arrangement.

It’s very different. The West begins with privacy as a basic expectation, and is surprised when it doesn’t exist. In China it is never assumed in the first place (between individuals and the state). People accept the surveillance and mostly trust the state to act responsibly, or at least don’t see it as a major problem the way it’s seen in the US. Companies proudly display this kind of censorship and surveillance tech, and get very little social pushback.

I think the concept of privacy directly conflicts with anti-censorship. The most private system is also 100% censored.

By its owner, which is as it should be.

Part of the issue we often forget, here in countries without mass censorship, is what people under these regimes actually experience.

If you are born into, grow up in, and continue to live in a society where all external information flowing into your society is filtered through government censors... would you even know it? If you did, would you think it's bad? Or is that just your government protecting you?

It's literally all you would know.

To understand that it's not that way everywhere... to understand there is a better way of life outside what you've experienced... to understand unfettered access to raw information is a good thing even if it makes your government/country look bad - takes experiencing it first-hand to contrast it against what you've got.

No, people there are aware of the censorship, anti-censorship tools are actively developed and quite a lot of teenagers (to say the least) have access to them, although the tools are frequently replaced due to advancement in censorship technology.

Although they are annoyed by the censorship, some of them would think that the censorship may be good for the country as it prevents 'unintelligible' people from being 'brainwashed' by western ideas, and act against the government/society or whatsoever. They claim that the censorship is to filter out those 'unintelligible' people from accessing information that they should not know, although this can't really justify the efforts the state put into censorship technology.

Those people are pretty happy to recent cases in western countries, such as COVID, BLM, Trump, and claimed that this is the advantage of their system that prevents such problem... And they also think that the western media also censor information, such as Facebook and Twitter bans.

Also, the great firewall is also beneficial to the internet companies, as this helps them to avoid competition with foreign companies, and can often just build a knock-off of the products of foreign companies... So the government really have the economic incentives to keep it.

Edit:

I am not living in mainland, but I know quite a lot of friends from there and I often read the articles in mainland websites (although I can't really post/edit them, as I don't have my identity verified for those sites).

For me, I would say that censorship is essential in every country. It may be helpful to censor information as done by Facebook and Twitter, but what mainland does is not only censorship: they arrest people for posting information against them, and their censorship is mostly not regarding fake information (as claimed by them), but rather information against the government. Some of them think that maintaining a harmony is good for the people, but censorship can't really make harmony, everyone understand that it is fake, but well, our opinion don't really matter now anyway.

I would characterize the biggest difference is that Chinese people are actually aware they are being massively censored, while Americans think they have no censorship.

In some ways, you're right, but Americans feel most strongly about the freedom of speech when it comes to specifically political speech, and I think the biggest difference is that I, as an American, can choose to say "I think our President of the United States is a fascist and a criminal and he should be arrested for his crimes" and I am in no way worried that the government will track me down and punish me in any manner, nor will they pressure Hacker News to strike my post. Meanwhile, the Chinese government will literally disappear a billionaire celebrity for saying something mildly critical of the government. That's a prospect that's pretty much anathema to an American way of thinking about freedom.

That's not to say that America doesn't have LOTS of problems with censorship. We do. Oodles. Some of it's secret and some if it's blatant and in the open. But China is orders of magnitude worse for political speech.

If you speak freely, and it is not powerful enough to cause any consequences, then are you freely speaking at all?

Sounds like a great way to make us feel like we have political power and that our speech has power, when in reality the moment our speech can disrupt the establishment it gets clamped down. One big difference here vs China is that the establishment is a bit more distributed.

The people in power here are just as eager to censor as the people in power in China. The only difference is the people in power in China are mostly the people in control of the government. But the one bigger difference is that we only seem to think the government is capable of censorship, when really it's a matter of the people in power.

yes, that’s speaking freely without convincing anyone of anything.

As someone who has lived in dictatorships and now lives in the US, I don’t see the point to your (rhetorical?) question at all. I’ve seen firsthand how much more relaxed people become when they don’t need to constantly worry about government informants (I’m from Tunisia).

Of course, for the vast majority of people, living in a poor democracy is objectively worse than living in a rich dictatorship.

I can't speak for Tunisia but people in China generally don't have such worries. I'm really trying to compare two relatively stable governments, with one employing centralized censorship and power preservation and one employing decentralized censorship and power preservation.

If you throw say a less well off and also oppressive government then it's a different matter.

Well, your statement was quite general :)

My point is that free speech without impact is vastly better than no free speech at all, which is why I don’t see how it even makes sense to ask that question.

I think the key point is that free speech is the basic mechanism the public has to make societal or political changes. If speaking or protesting against the government is a crime, it means the public is lacking the basic mechanism to even propose such changes, let alone make them.

Yes? Freedom is speech is not equivalent to complete political equity. Those are separate ideas. You can be in a free, open society and still feel or even be powerless. You can be in a free society and be destitute.

In western countries, speech is free, but the microphones are controlled tightly by a privileged few. Not saying china is better, but just different ways the political elites are controlling the masses

Speech in the US is powerful enough to cause consequences, not really sure what you're talking about.

The US just changed administrations & congressional leadership twice in 4 years based on nothing more than ballot speech, which involved the humiliating defeat of one of the most well funded "establishment" politicians in favor of a non-politician that made a mockery of establishment practices for 4 years. Congress has representatives reviled by practically all of their colleagues and party management, yet they consistently get re-elected through ballot speech.

A series of news reports took down an entire presidency and the whole government couldn't do anything about it.

Allegations of sexual misconduct alone have sunk the careers of some of the most respected and powerful figures in multiple industries.

Protests & news reporting have directly led to historic civil rights legislation, and more recently: local council votes on police spending measures.

Sure, US politicians can be eager to censor but there are political & legal mechanisms that restrict and stop them. There is no such thing for the CCP. I've yet to see any checks on its power or speech about the CCP's atrocities & coverups affect the CCP's permanent leadership.

I'm not as sure if China or US is worse about political speech anymore.

In US, the government may not come for you like China.

But in US, there are multi-national corporations, NGOs, think tanks, activist groups, social media mob who can just as effectively and "humanely" strip your power, influence and livelihood just as well as Chinese government can.

Also at least with China, rules are pretty black and white. Don't mess with the Chinese government's received view. However in US, it's ever-changing goal post, where opinions, jokes, scientific studies which were mainstream just a couple of years ago can potentially get you fired, bank account closed, socially shunned and be labeled with all kinds of things.

Is US actually better about freedom of speech than China in practice culturally?

Yes, the US is actually better about freedom of speech than China in practice.

To give you a negative example, a significant number of people organized a literal coup attempt, largely in the open, via social media, and nothing happened to them until they actually stormed the US Capitol building, after which some of them were arrested.

Large media companies with massive audiences broadcast divisive lies accusing the current President of being illegitimate due a fraudulent election. It is completely legal, and the government has taken no action to stop them.

Meanwhile, Jack Ma issued mild criticism of the Chinese government's financial regulation policies and promptly disappeared. And you're comparing that to "cancel culture?"

Yes, the US is actually better about freedom of speech than China.

That coup attempted happened because the powers at hand missed it. In the aftermath Parlor is shut down, and the powers at hand would never allow such a thing to happen again. So at best you can say the censorship apparatus in the US is less effective, but still present.

And yes, the US government didn't do the censorship, but rather the private platforms that wield the power did so.

But why did they miss it? I believe they did so because this kind of speech is not unusual. So even though it was out in the open, likely reported many times as people do on social platforms - it was missed because it was regarded as people saying extreme thngs but not going to act on them. In other words, there's a lot of this kind of speech in modern times, but it doesn't get censored and so actually dangerous speech gets missed.

And then they actually went through with it - so many private organizations took action. And yet, the government did not force their hand.

Well the guy in charge of monitoring security and being ahead of this stuff was fired. So I’d assume if we had been tolerant before we won’t be so tolerant of this speech in the future.

It seems rather naive to believe that Jack Ma disappeared due to mild criticism of the Chinese government's financial regulation policies.

ANT group has financial network power that can challenge the Chinese government's control over the country. In the future, if the power is unchecked now, it definitely can challenge the Chinese government. I am not casting a judgement whether that's right or wrong that a company has power like that. I'm just denying that Jack Ma's insignificant comment is what got him in trouble. What got Jack Ma in trouble is truly existential threat ANT group may pose down the future when a single entity fully controls financial activities of the entire Chinese population.

Compare to that, a bunch of idiots storming the capital building, is just that. A bunch of idiots storming the physical building. It's no threat. American regime barely was tickled by such an incident. It's embarrassing, but nothing significant will come out of it other than amazing leverage for the left to use. So props to that.

In comparison, Jack Ma and the ANT group's current and future influence in China is actually significant, lasting and potent, that can even rival Chinese government.

I am seeing this all the time. America is doing this too, why just blame China.

Yes, governments around the world have one thing in common, they are full of ASSHOLES. Actually, in general people are assholes. Bad things tend to happen.

You can have CNN and Fox broadcast different views somethings extreme, and many other media outlets expressing views somewhere between them. Try that in China, you would think twice if you are not even trying to PRAISE the government.

You cannot compare a demacracy to a authoritarian/dictatorship. They certainly always have something in common, the difference is level of oppression. The authoritarian are always on the extreme side, that's why they are called authoritarians.

Comparing demaracies to authoritarian is giving execuses to keep the oppressions going.

It's nice and necessary that you can criticize your government even in public. Don't give dictators execuses when your government pisses you off.

You should worry about your own oppression too, not just the imagined ones of others.

A Russian meets up with an American. "We have freedom of speech," the Russian says. "I can post that Russian elections are falsified on social media."

"What's the big deal?" asks the American. "I too can write that Russian elections are falsified on social media."

Original: https://youtu.be/gNXpa0M-UdY

Since when was it not possible or legal to write that American elections were falsified on social media? This joke itself seems to be based on the recent wave of loud & public accusations that the American elections are falsified. I guess Twitter/Facebook independently banned some of it, are those companies now considered to be the whole of social media?

That’s like asking if the Republican and Democratic parties now considered to be the whole of US government? The answer is in practice yes, and neither of those two private organizations operate democratically (they operate based on seniority, and can create arbitrary rules like super delegate voting).

Well no, in practice Facebook/Twitter constitute a majority of the social media market (~75% IIRC) but it isn't a mutually exclusive share like the two parties that occupy fixed seats in the US government. Speech on non-majority social media is still effectively free speech; Unlike the governments in China & Russia, Facebook & Twitter can't do anything to stop your speech from reaching even their users if their users choose to listen to your speech because users aren't locked into using one social media platform.

Aside about the two parties: yes the two parties don't operate democratically, but they don't need to for the system to be democratic. Ultimately the voters choose and parties are held accountable for whatever actions they take. If a party subverts the will of voters, it will lose votes, or worse case scenario the parties die (eg. the Whig party, which was a major party).

> Speech on non-majority social media is still effectively free speech

You talking about Parlor or something else? I mean, when people can't use their non-majority social media of choice (whatever the reason stopping them may be), are they really free?

Yes they are really free, freedom is not entitlement to your social media of choice. Americans are free to speak whatever they want on platforms that are available to them. They are also free to invent their own social media that doesn't have the same restrictions as the popular ones. The government doesn't interfere with this choice, but platform operators also have the freedom to not associate with certain customers.

Parlor is one option, there's also Reddit, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, the *chans, etc. There are decentralized networks like Mastodon. Neither the government or social media companies can stop you from choosing any number of social media platforms (or other communication platforms) to speak on. That is simply not the case in China.

> Americans are free to speak whatever they want on platforms that are available to them

You can swap out "Americans" with "Chinese" and you end up with the exact same thing.

"Chinese are free to speak whatever they want on platforms that are available to them." So are they now free too?

No, that statement would simply be false. China's social media & communication services are monitored and the government forces all platforms to apply censorship or identify dissent, they are certainly not free to say whatever they want. Services that don't adhere to these restrictions are not permitted in the country (like Google).

China also pursues dissent beyond its borders. Zoom, a company primarily develops their product in China, actually shutdown meetings with foreign participants because they were related to the Tiananmen massacre. The US FBI has revealed a covert CCP program called Operation Fox Hunt to coerce foreign dissidents into either committing suicide or returning to China's jurisdiction by threatening their family in China.

Frankly the difference between the US & China in degree of freedom of speech, both practical and theoretical, is astronomical. The two could not be further apart and even the most glib comparisons don't track.

If you are trying to say they are the same in magnitude then the phrase "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" comes to mind.

Magnitudes will always be different, but also irrelevant. If a system allows censorship to happen magnitudes of censorship will shift depending on the threat to established power. If powers are threatened you bet they will leverage more or less censorship to preserve their power as the situation demands.

So a more stable society will enjoy more censorship, and a less stable one may employ more, but that is constantly shifting and pointless to compare.

What is important to compare is the awareness of the participants that the system isn't fundamentally different (both systems allow for censorship, and actively employ it to control and preserve power). The problem isn't where this is more or less censorship, it's that in America we're taught that censorship, propaganda, and such dystopian tools are something unique to the Soviet Union, communists, China, etc, when really it's a universal tool employed by everyone from Donald Trump's office to Kellog's cereal commercials, and yes, the Communist Party of China. Yea sure, we have a million news outlets and China maybe has one, but if these tools are employed by those in power to preserve their power then you can be the people here in power employ them too. At the end of the day our million news outlets don't matter if 99% of the power is concentrated in 1%. It creates an illusion that there is independence when really the only thing matter is who has power and is in control, because they can rally these "independent" players when needed.

> Some of these arguments for censorship made in this article sound eerily similar to how we justify censorship in the West.

The gist of any centralized top-down censorship is that some ideas are just too dangerous to allow them in public discourse. It can be dressed up in slightly different terms - "social harmony" or "threat to democracy" etc - but it's fundamentally about the same thing.

Chinese national here.

> Is there a fraction of people who agrees with it or is almost it universally disapproved of?

There is a fraction of people who agrees with it. Otherwise it wouldn't be there.

But most people dislike, or at least are annoyed by, the censorship.

There are several different kind of dislike. There are people who are opposed to censorship in principle. There are people who find certain rules or mechanisms too ridiculous. There are people who only complain when it inconvenience them.

There are several types of supports. There are a small fraction of people who think that whatever the government does is for the greater good of the country. There are people who are happy when the fist hammers down on contents that they don't like, e.g. porn, anti-patriotic speech.

I'd say, anecdotally, most people find the current state of censorship somewhat unreasonable, but at the same time, have accepted it as a trait of the Chinese society that isn't going away in the forseeable future.

Sounds a lot like everywhere else, like America. I bet if Americans and Chinese looked, we have more in common with each other than we have with our politicians.

I definitely agree that THE PEOPLE have a lot in common. Almost everyone all over the world just wants to enjoy life.

This is why the us vs them dichotomy is so important to those in power. Dividing us is the only thing that keeps them in power. Unfortunately there are so many values of “us” and “them” now that it’s obscured the only definition that really matters.

I agree 1000x. Noam Chomsky has a great quote about this from The Common Good:

"Now that ... workers are superfluous, what do you do with them? First of all, you have to make sure they don't notice that society is unfair and try to change that, and the best way to distract them is to get them to hate and fear one another."

I have a Chinese coworker -- fairly young. He's an awesome guy, we hit it off very quickly and ended up sharing a lot of interests. One of the things that we settled on early was that, if nothing else, the people of the world can agree on at least one thing: a dislike and distrust of politicians/elite leaders. He wasn't foaming-at-the-mouth angry or anything, but he also wasn't fawning. Fawning over China as a cultural entity, yes, but we were able to have a good number of fairly frank discussions.

Of course, there are still topics that felt totally taboo in such half-personal/half-professional relationships; Hong Kong was a sticking point that we avoided, for instance, and I never would have dreamed of bringing up Tiananmen.

FWIW I'd wager Tiananmen would be less controversial to discuss with him than Hong Kong.

I can comment as I grew up in China my entire life and came to the west just a few years ago, attending international school. People obviously know censorship exists and most believe is for the greater good, as China needs social stability above all. Most people just want to live their lives, have children receive a good education, make money, have safety, etc. There is no need to bad mouth the government after everything they do for the people. So many families are now wealthy, business is booming, people can afford nicer houses, and the economy is doing better than ever. Crime and danger pretty much does not exist, cities are walkable, life is safe. My family and friends families were low-middle class when I was a kid and are now in the upper class by western standards. Also, you have to understand that Chinese culture, especially Han culture, is very united and shares a lot of patriotism. Family values are very strong, cultural morals I think are very homogenous. This makes it very easy for everyone to agree with government decisions. Contrary to the west, we have very high faith the the government is always doing the most efficient and safe decisions for the general public, and people are happy about it because this has been shown to be true with how it has concretely affected hundreds of millions of people's lives. So many people taken out of poverty within a short span of time.

Social media censorship is not a big deal because we don't miss what we don't know. For example, people don't care they can't use google, facebook, instagram, because we have our own social networks. Also, people know not to talk about political subjects in these platforms because it is in bad taste and we know how to self-censor. Also, we Chinese see the chaos and mess from the news coming from the west regarding polarization, fighting between political parties, and social unrest and we don't want that. Contrary to the middle east, I would say most Chinese do not believe they are oppressed at all. They are happy with how the government handles things.

I'd say people are happy with the censorship because they believe it brings stronger national security, social stability, and reinforces shared cultural values most Chinese have with each other. Please keep in mind that we have different social values in the east than the west. Our perception of freedom and values that matter to society are quite different. Although this may seem extreme to you, your views sometimes seem extreme to us. Thank you for your time.

I think most Westerns see pro China posts as propaganda. But I think there is more relatable concern about well fare and prosperity. People in American live their lives seperate from politics anyway. I don't really think of Trump all the time going to work and I frankly don't really want to either.

I've lived in China for few years.

I haven't asked everyone I know, but based on my feeling most people don't like it. That being said, for most Chinese not liking the censorship is kind of like not liking a bad weather. You don't like it, but you accept it and move on.

Also based on my experience, most white collars (or at least ones working for international companies) in China have either direct or indirect access to the uncensored internet. Companies are allowed to purchase access to VPNs (legal, government approved) to bypass the censorship. This is so that they can access Google, YouTube, banned social media etc. to help them to do international business. Lot of companies integrate these VPNs directly into their corporate wifis meaning that all employees in the company network can bypass the censorship.

Despite having the unblocked access, I've noticed that only very few Chinese are interested in reading foreign news sources or using foreign social media/video platforms.

> Despite having the unblocked access, I've noticed that only very few Chinese are interested in reading foreign news sources or using foreign social media/video platforms.

To be fair, I assume language is also a barrier.

I'm sure not going out of my way to learn Chinese to access Chinese language information sources. I would hardly expect the inverse.

But many Chinese speak English because they deal with international trade. So this doesn't really work the same both ways.

A significant number of Chinese can understand English if not speak it. 1% of China is still 20% of the UK.

It is the same pattern in most autocracies I've been to. As long as people are getting food, jobs, education and some form of the erstwhile American dream, nobody complains anywhere, or outwardly supports it. People don't care much for the big international news in any of those places, but rather the local tabloidy content. An article about a local food market taking place will get far more hits than an international piece on a COVID vaccine. Government workings are barely reported, unless it's for some "glorious" achievement. This is the model in China, Singapore, UAE, Saudi Arabia, etc.

Of course, for dictatorships that don't manage to achieve the dream for their citizens, you'll see a lot of cursing, name calling politicians, and even outright revolutions. People are essentially politically charged and actively involved with spreading news. This is seen in places such as Egypt and Venezuela, where the governments are only surviving because of being propped up by external agents, usually from the former type of autocracies. This mentality is also seen in quite a few flawed democracies.

And then there are the third type of autocracies, where people are simply desensitized to any news whatsoever. Places such as pseudo-democratic Afghanistan or autocratic Syria. People there only care about wanting to move away from that hell hole.

> Is there a fraction of people who agrees with it or is almost it universally disapproved of?

That seems like a loaded question. To be clear I don't live there and am not speaking for them, but from my perspective, as long as the country is getting more prosperous, people will overlook quite a lot. The same is true in the US, how well the economy does is what matters most in elections.

Considering the strong steady growth [0] they've had, I'm sure people are much more likely to overlook things like censorship if they think it will lead to better lives. And honestly, it may. I'm not promoting their censorship, but look how much better of a job they did handling COVID (after the initial cover up), while on the other hand look at the whole mess that the US had with the election and Capitol riot. The US makes it very easy for China to sell its way of government to its people.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/YRTBrlx.png

Someone signed up to make this pro-CCP comment, which was then flagged within minutes - rather ironic given the context in which it was posted. Although I disagreed with several of the premises and the logic of the comment, I vouched for it as an interesting and valid contribution.

However, the lack of transparency around flags and vouching on HN makes this meaningless, and I have never seen a flagged comment vouched back to visibility. Accordingly, I have reposted it below, although I would like to emphasize again that this is not an endorsement of its claims..

---- nglengjai 10 minutes ago [dead] | parent | unvouch | favorite | on: I helped build ByteDance's censorship machine

I always recommend to my HN friends to enable the showdead setting on their profile. There is definitely some garbage, but it’s not that bad. This isn’t the first post I’ve seen that definitely adds valuable context and was inexplicably censored away.

Edit: you jinxed it! The post is no longer dead it would seem.

> Social media censorship is not a big deal because we don't miss what we don't know. For example, people don't care they can't use google, facebook, instagram, because we have our own social networks. Also, people know not to talk about political subjects in these platforms because it is in bad taste and we know how to self-censor.

This is exactly why people don't even care about their words being censored. I live in China and 99.5% of my friends and family just use apps and platforms that "exist" in China. Those apps will even censor your private chats. They learned to self-censor and think it's good for them and their family. They just accept the censorship.

> Someone signed up to make this pro-CCP comment, which was then flagged within minutes - rather ironic given the context in which it was posted.

First of all, it's not a pro-CCP comment: it doesn't mention the CCP even once. Secondly, it was [dead] but not [flagged]. Many new accounts start out [dead] as a result of HN's automatic anti-spam measures, no human flagging involved.

Insofar as the government in China and the CCP are synonymous and have been for a long time, most people would regard approval of the government there as implicit approval of the CCP. It did show up as flagged for me.

The CCP is much bigger than the government and most CCP members don't have any government power, while at the same time there are influential posts in parts of the party that exist outside the government hierarchy (e. g. the Communist Youth League.)

So it's entirely possible to think that the CCP is full of parasites trying to mooch off the government while the people actually working in government are at least trying to grow the pie instead of just fighting for a bigger slice, or alternatively that the government is full of power-hungry people and the CCP's internal control mechanisms are at least limiting the worst excesses. So the two are not entirely synonymous.

Regarding the flagging status: this is what you copied:

> ---- nglengjai 10 minutes ago [dead] | parent | unvouch | favorite | on: I helped build ByteDance's censorship machine

If it had been flagged, it would have said so. Compare

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26244625

If it had been flagged, it would have said so. Compare

Good catch, I guess I mixed it up with a different post.

If you're interested in a long read, I found this article informative (though it's not focused only censorship): "Why do Chinese people like their government" https://supchina.com/2019/07/22/why-do-chinese-people-like-t...

Most people (60%) don't care because they find everything they need on the Chinese internet anyways.

25% of the people find it a nuisance, but don't speak out against it.

5% of the people actively use a VPN to circumvent it.

5% of the people oppose it out of principle.

5% of the people actively support it because they think it's a way to prevent "information warfare" from the West.

> Of course in the West its companies not politicians who call the shots, but the language to justify the actions is certainly similar.

Almost identical. "Terrorist" viewpoints/content and "hate speech" are banned and censored in most Western countries.

Btw, censorship in China is often misrepresented here in the western world... For example, we all "know" that Winnie the Pooh is banned...

The reality is a bit different:

https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/133971634103760076...

https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/134857871356311961...

I think that it boils down to: if you're obviously making fun of an head of state (i.e. you have a meme/image with both Winnie and Xi Jinping) it's going to be recognized as such, and taken down... But Winnie by itself (or the memes in foreign contexts) aren't really at risk of getting banned.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-china-blog-40627855

It actually reminds me of something that happened in Italy 15 years ago:

https://www.repubblica.it/2006/11/sezioni/esteri/benedettoxv...

The police entered the newsroom of the Manifesto, from which a bunch of leaflets had been thrown. On it you could read "Pastore Tedesco", referring to the German Pope (a wordplay on him being a pastor, and the German Sheperd dog breed)

Authorities can seem really thin-skinned, given that in both cases it's an almost innocuous comparison that is being teased (to a cartoon bear, or a dog breed)... But given that these were targeted to an head of state, it's not too surprising.

Obviously, censorship is not only about memes...

Am chinese National. Personally I think it's a double edged sword. It's basically protectionism but for information.

On one hand censorship hinders internal transparency and makes it difficult to hold the government accountable. On the other hand information warfare is a thing, especially between geopolitical rivals, censorship is a cheap way to mitigate against them.

For what it's worth, there are increasing voices within the chinese government that are advocating for removing the great firewall because the new generation of chinese are more and more confident with their own political system.

But I see the GFW getting more advanced :)

And I think that it may be more justifiable if the censorship is also towards fake information and hate speech, but sadly this isn't quite true (check weibo or something). This is purely something political.

If we are just talking about GFW I actually think people will eventually realize the CCP got it right all along, data is the new oil, and other government are just too incompetent to protect it.

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26192988

I wonder how much of AI growth in China is driven by this use case - the need to censor at scale.

It's becoming tougher to work for ethical companies, specially in Tech. If it's not the company itself, it's the shares of its mother company in another one.

What's the point of a pseudonym if ByteDance can trivially identify who this was?

“When I was at ByteDance, we received multiple requests from the bases to develop an algorithm that could automatically detect when a Douyin user spoke Uyghur, and then cut off the livestream session...

...every audio clip would be automatically transcribed into text, allowing algorithms to compare the notes with a long and constantly-updated list of sensitive words, dates and names, as well as Natural Language Processing models. Algorithms would then analyze whether the content was risky enough to require individual monitoring.

If a user mentioned a sensitive term, a content moderator would receive the original video clip and the transcript showing where the term appeared. If the moderator deemed the speech sensitive or inappropriate, they would shut down the ongoing livestreaming session and even suspend or delete the account.”

Everybody talks about AI overlords, but the real threat is regular-old overlords using AI as a tool

And where people speaking dialects were warned to switch to Mandarin for better monitoring... that chills me. So damn privileged to live in the West.

The ball is rolling downhill. If we continue to allow centralized social media companies beholden to a government, to be the public square, then we too will turn into this dystopian nightmare given time.

We must reclaim the public square if we wish to retain democracy.

When people have suggested a Hippocratic oath for technology workers in the past I've laughed at the idea.

I think I've changed my mind.

"We didn't have enough Uyghur language data points in our system, and the most popular livestream rooms were already closely monitored."

This deeply saddened me. They reason why the Uyghur dialect wasn't banned wasn't for ethical reasons, but base operational ones.

It's like when the bloody Franco dictatorship forbade the Catalan dialect decades ago.

Wow, that sounds disheartening. Thank goodness nothing like that could happen with tech companies in the U.S.A.

It's at least a little different: The Chinese tech companies are echoing and enforcing the party line, aiding and abetting government censorship.

US tech firms were positioning themselves as adversaries of the previous president. We'll see how things play out with the new administration.

Well, thanks, buddy.

If you want to know where American governance is headed, look to China's regime for a foretaste. Big Tech and its ideological and political allies are taking us there, inch by inch.

Sure, and I helped build Palantir's license-plate-reading, immigrant-processing, and drone-targeting machines. Everyone in the Bay Area is fine with that. No one cares. To an average affluent Bay Area engineer, illegal immigrants and people getting blown up half a world away are extremely abstract concerns. The real sources of pain in a Bay Area engineer's life are their inability to sip lattes through a mask and Planet Granite in Sunnyvale being closed. Meanwhile, my inbox is blowing up with inquiries from companies and I have my pick of lucrative jobs.

Can you expand on that? I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

My guess is: "having no conscience makes you rich".

No, you have it backwards. Having no conscience doesn't make you rich. But the rich do have no conscience worth speaking of.

Seems like indirect sarcasm. I have been seeing more of it here on HN. Unfortunately it lowers the quality of conversations that we are capable of having on here..

My point is that as software engineers, maaaaany of us are complicit in activity that is morally ambiguous at best, a nuisance on average, and in many cases actively misanthropic.

These are the careers that we have chosen and stuck to because the benefit to us outweighs the harm to society. We are aware of what we're doing and also apathetic about it.

A person complaining about their employer being somewhere between morally indifferent and morally monstrous is a reflection of how incredibly normal this is. Users on this site reading this person's complaints and tut-tutting about how bad it sounds is a reflection of how normal this is. We are all neck-deep in the filth of depravity, willingly and gladly, and we're pontificating the important differences between the filth reaching ear-level or just mouth-level.

Surprise, Chinese websites enforce political censorship within China? I am not sure what is news here. Are we going to pretend the NSA doesn’t integrate with PRISM to make lists of its own?

Because they are beholden to the government, corporate control over the public square has us all fucked. Today people cheer Big Tech’s ability to censor distasteful politics from the public square. Tomorrow, when “content moderation” makes civil disobedience impossible to publicize, we will lament the lack of decentralized social media.

In other words, centralized social media cements moves towards authoritarianism, but makes it very difficult to move back in the other direction, especially if attempted via the most tried and true methods in history.

The revolution won’t be televised. You won’t find it on Twitter or Douyin either. So why did anyone expect anything different? Unless the people can take back control of the public square from the corporations, democracy will crack.

Edit: consider responding with something coherent rather than downvoting and moving on

The whataboutism WRT to the NSA detracts from the importance of the issue.

> I am not sure what is news here.

In fact, the Chinese government goes to great lengths to downplay and hide the extent of their censorship efforts, and it might actually be a surprise to some people. It is worthwhile discussing ALL forms of censorship, whether it be by the NSA, Beijing, or corporations. The only way we can deal with these issues is by discussing them at length and raising awareness.

I agree. I added a bit describing how whining about government censorship is pointless so long as we support centralized social media, which is the real problem here. It is hypocritical for HN to cheer on censorship by Twitter and Big Tech while upvoting this article.

The fundamental problem here, underlying both Chinese and American censorship/surveillance, is that we have willingly handed control of the public square over to an entity beholden to one that does not have our best interests in mind.

So long as we let the public square rest in the hands of these entities, democracy will slowly slip from our hands, one ban and censor at a time.

You can’t blame China or ByteDance or Twitter or the NSA for this sort of thing. The natural state of governments and corporations is vying for more power and wealth at all costs, democracy be damned. The blame rests on us, the people, for trusting corporations with our speech.

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