YouTube takes down Xinjiang videos, forcing rights group to seek alternative

The director that makes that move is going to be fired faster than China start to think to go back to normal.

The problem from the start is the trade between USA (& Europe) and China is unbalanced. The USA is way more dependent to China than the other way around.

This was the same mistake that the USA did with Japan. Move production there, think that they are stupid and never have any control over the manufacturing.

Now it is obvious that China is not stupid, but it is too late and there is too many personal interests on growing in China. Many CEOs bonuses depend on what happens in China, meanwhile their business in the USA is guaranteed by monopolies and oligopolies. So, why bother about making USA citizens happy if they have not a choice?

This is easy to solve with political will. Instead of antagonizing China, the solution is to increase USA education, infrastructure and be able again to produce what nowadays can only be produced in China.

> Call their bluff.

tldr; China will call Google's bluff, not the other way around.

> They're imagining future revenue streams that won't exist. Furthermore, Chinese companies will reach parity and will compete back on the home turf.

I seriously doubt that the US wouldn't be practicing protectionism themselves by that point - at least towards major rivals on the world stage.

MBA thinking guides these companies.

There's no cost to suppressing coverage of the Uyghur genocide because Western boycotts are virtually nonexistent.

The upside of suppressing coverage of the Uyghur genocide can be calculated as the probability of the Chinese market opening up multiplied by the potential value of that market. As long as the probability is nonzero, this upside is huge.

Yes and it is not just in Tech as well, if you look around Fortune Global 500 the are pretty much the same. But tech is used as an example here because of its reach and HN's audience.

I meant why didn't they used some existing Peertube instance. Since they went with Odysee they did some research into alternatives.

I mean it could just be as simple as Odysee having better marketing, though personally i've seen Peertube be mentioned very often and this thread is the first time i heard about Odysee.

The parents would have no way of stopping it. If you want to allow child friendly content on YouTube you could not block YouTube on the computer. If YouTube put all nsfw content on nsfw.youtube.com then maybe you could make the argument but the average parent has no clue how to block a domain. I am not making the argument porn should be banned, only that certain platforms should not be required to host it especially if they have a large child audience.

The problem is a parent might be signed into their Google account and allow their child to watch YouTube without signing out.

Tom Cotton is challenging the CRT take in the military citing some divisions between 'conservates' and 'liberal' members of the military raised by whistleblowers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtgnIXnvxlw

Also, in the recent news, many conservates are calling off General Milley after his rather heated exchange with Gaetz. I am sure you can find the source.

I suppose the parent poster referred to the recent spat related to a navy admiral who advised troops to read Ibram Kendi's book advocating racism under the guise of anti-racism [1]. There have been more such clashes but this is one of the most visible examples. If this divisive ideology really gets a hold on the US armed forces it will be an enormous boon for potential opponents since it will demoralise troops just as effectively as it managed to demoralise police forces all over the USA. The results of the latter can be seen clearly by the number of officers deciding to quit and the increase in crime rates all over the USA.

We can only hope that the former will not become apparent - and I'm saying this as a European. The USA exports its culture quite effectively to our parts of the world, both the good parts as well as the bad. The latter category includes a bevy of critical theory spin-offs which have grown like wildfire in academia from where they managed to escape into the real world where they're wreaking havoc. While it is clear that these movements are self-extinguishing due to their dependence on an ever-increasing number of identity groups vying for a position in the oppression hierarchy the amount of damage they can do - and have already done - to societal cohesion is enormous.

[1] https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-fiery-explosive-challen...

I haven’t looked at RT recently, but I didnt see conspiracy talk. I never saw a truther debate there. RT doesn’t have to lie at all to document many of the problems in the west. It was usually what should be Capt. Obvious stuff, stories not covered in the US media, Syria/Iraq/Afghanistan coverage, Snowden and Assange (take off the RT logo and the HN crowd would be orgasming to it), stories of racial inequality, financial fraud, crazy defense budgets, etc.

I suppose giving Commies like Chris Hedges and Noam Chomskys of the world a platform (that they can’t get in US media) is some noxious evil compared to mainlining on MSNBC or Fox.

Propaganda can be 100% true, and from what I remember, they were quite good at it.

> Of course Russia and China are spreading it.

You know the US has and does do this too right?

It would be a real bummer to not be able to talk to my cousin in China for the high crime of teaching English in a foreign country.

Really it's a classic boy who called wolf situation.

If you blame everything on china, people won't want to believe you when there are legitimate things

What agenda is the US interference pursuing? Some agendas could be positive things for the country, like supporting pro-democracy movements.

Meanwhile, as for mastering tactics, all China has to do is similarly support activists and opposition groups financially by funneling them cash. It's quite likely they do so in all their rivals. There was a scandal decades ago with China giving campaign contributions to US politicians.

In 2018, I was one barraged by about 200 comments in the span of less than an hour in reply to my reply to a story on r/news about someone hitting a protestor with their car. For reference, I objected to violence against protestors.

The hundreds of replies were a variation of about three talking points: that people should be afraid of protestors, that the protestors will kill you, and that killing them first is justified. They were posting things like "What if the protestors drag you out of your car?", "If protestors bang on my windows trying to kill me I'm going to run them over" and or "If you stop your car, the protestors will kill you" etc. They also replied to other posts about the same topic on Reddit with the same talking points.

The posts used the same few phrases and the same punctuation and style. They would delete their comments if a comment's karma went negative and then reply to me again. Many of the accounts had similar naming patterns, and no other comments in their history, as well. r/news requires a certain amount of karma in order to comment, so they had to have deleted their old comments before replying in that subreddit.

I revisited the post and accounts a few days later and saw that some of the account owners had deleted their accounts entirely, and a majority of them had deleted (and not removed by a moderator) their violence-instigating replies to my comment, too. I figure some of them did this to keep the karma and recycle the accounts, and deleted the comments so they can be used in the future without it looking weird or getting banned.

I suspect it was coordinated in some way, even if it was just a bunch of people in a Discord chat.

But what stuck with me was that there is a somewhat large group of people who want (other) Americans to die. They want people to respond to free speech and dissent with murder. They want people to be afraid of what other people will do to them if they speak up and organize. They want people to fear each other so much that they can justify murder with that fear.

Yes exactly, they are pursuers of profit. When they host the videos it merely aligns with their profit motives. When they block something it is because it interferes with their profit motives. I have no issue with this whatsoever, it's what I expect.

I'm curious how this negates the criticism of them rather than enhances the case for it? We cannot trust Google to behave in the public interest (information about human rights abuses qualifies in my mind) when it conflicts with their own interests. Hence people's dismay over the amount of control they wield over the distribution of information.

Do you think a news org that wiped coverage of Uighur repression from its site to protect its business in China wouldn't face similar outrage? And they wield significantly less power than Google does.

Tech companies in particular like to present themselves as enlightened and socially conscious. Hardly surprising that when the mask slips people are outraged.

> Daniel Dunbrill

This guy?

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3127611/chi...:

> Dumbrill’s YouTube channel has 140,000 subscribers while his videos, commentaries and interviews – on topics such as the Hong Kong protests – have previously appeared on CGTN. His long track record of providing fodder for Chinese state media to throw at the West has earned him special privileges not accorded to veteran foreign correspondents in the country.

> Last year, he partnered with CGTN to travel the length of the Tibet autonomous region, interviewing residents and visiting schools to highlight the successes of the Communist Party’s poverty alleviation campaign. In contrast, foreign journalists who gain permission to enter Tibet are accompanied by government minders and forced to strictly adhere to an imposed itinerary, with little time for independent reporting.

> While Chinese and foreign reporters do not need prior permission to enter the Xinjiang autonomous region, many journalists from Western media outlets have reported being tailed by security forces on arrival.

CGTN is China's version of Russia Today.

This is what real reporters encounter when they try to go there:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/insider/china-xinjiang-re...:

> Chinese authorities have made the [Xinjiang] story a huge challenge to cover. Their constant following makes true reporting almost impossible. In Kashgar, the best I could do was take photos and videos and hope police wouldn’t delete them.

> ...Another time, a police officer stopped us close to our hotel. Inspecting Chris’s photos, he deleted a shot of a camel. When Chris asked why that photo was deleted, the man turned to Chris and said, “In China, there are no whys.”

> It was good advice. As we pulled down another road in search of a re-education camp, a car sped in front of us, cut us off, and stopped. Men jumped out unfurling a spike strip directly in front of our car.

> “Road’s closed,” we were told. We didn’t ask why.

> Each evening as we returned to our hotel, we would pass a boarding school surrounded by tall fences topped with barbed wire. Socializing in clusters in the twilight, the adolescent students looked very much like prisoners.

> How they came to be there was impossible to discern and we couldn’t safely ask them. With the followers on our heels, any contact would be dangerous. Often we were left with the painful necessity of remaining remote, even when locals tried to be friendly.

This is worth a read: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/06/22/technology/xi...

> Can you link some more sources about the gray zone? Being banned from Wikipedia just makes sense because they are a blog and not a primary source.

IIRC, it was mainly banned because "there is consensus that The Grayzone publishes false or fabricated information" (as the summary states). I believe this was one of the examples: https://www.thedailybeast.com/in-nicaragua-torture-is-used-t... (Grayzone presenting the forced confession of an anti-regime activist as legitimate). Here's another about Max Blumenthal himself fabricating a quote: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/12/di.... There were questions about its editorial oversight, but those were secondary. Basically it's one of those sites, like RT, that has a political position and has little problem with pushing disinformation to support it.

Ideally the parent's comment is forward hopeful. As in, in the near future big tech will be shackled as Ma Bell was, and then carved up.

Several of the big tech monsters started a fight they can't win with half of the country that now absolutely hates them (and will at one time or another control vast amounts of political power), and the other half which still wants to see them restricted anyway. The question is how far the Feds and states will go in curbing big tech's abuses on eg cancel culture and content censorship, given the various monopoly positions of these companies. Florida's law on deplatforming is a small, correct first step. Texas is guaranteed to follow, and a lot more restrictions will follow after that.

The notion that they can do whatever they want with their monopoly platforms, is already probably not an accurate premise. In the near future, it will definitely not be. We're in about inning one of laying down innumerable restrictions on what big tech can do with their platforms. The odds are quite high the regulators will in fact go further than they should over time, severely damaging the US tech economy.

The free-run days for big tech are very clearly over. They're merely too arrogant to recognize it. What was the last major acquisition by Facebook? There are three other prominent US social networks out there with a collective $200b in market cap now. Everything Facebook has is very stale, boring. Instagram is a giant yawn at this point, it's old, increasingly boring and lame. Which is why young people flocked to TikTok so quickly. Facebook has been de facto barred for a long time from eating any of their major competitors. All that money piling up to the ceiling and FB can't even use it to further their monopoly, and they know it. The party is largely over, although big tech will continue to drift for a while on enormous momentum.

If Amazon were smart, they'd be in the process of spinning off AWS right now, to unshackle it from so much anti-trust attention that the parent draws, to get far out in front of that. That's guaranteed to happen within the ten or so years after the Bezos era regardless. Google could probably do the same with YouTube, but they'll aggressively fight against that (Amazon will willingly spin off AWS as their stock stagnates, in the typical unlock shareholder value move).

But since the issue at hand is that people often believe people should get to behave however they want with their own platforms, you only need to point to one high-profile counter example to disprove that that's some universal maxim: that the law currently usually sides with Google doesn't mean the "it's their platform" argument is sufficient.

I've heard China encourages/allows/supports some creators on YouTube for cultural export too.

I mean if YouTube is 'banned' then someone like Dianxi Xiaoge with 7.5 million subscribers isn't exactly under the radar if they wanted to enforce their rules.

But aren't all of Google's services indiscriminately blocked in China?

Freedom is slavery.

It's the fact that the censors are there to step in for things that are plausibly true. There isn't any need to censor flat-earth theories. Nobody cares, it doesn't have any implications and it easy to disprove (eg, the fact that the horizon dips away).

The censors only get really active for things that could plausibly be true or things that are absolutely true but inconvenient to the people who control the censorship office.

Flat earth is 5% idiots and some damn near remainder trolling, but the other two… what if they were right?

Obviously they aren’t.

But in this scenario, what if they were and you were part of the useful idiots covering up for someone? You would be the bad guy directly hurting society… so instead, how about a free marketplace of thoughts and opinions and allow the “orthodoxy” to be organic even if it might slightly be flawed on average (to the example we land on “no vaccines aren’t bad, but we have a lot more required testing and liability just incase”).

What makes your pet theories better than anyone else’s? Why “can’t” you be wrong?

Do you trust YT to decide for you what is nonsense and what is not? I do not, and I think I could make a pretty good case as to why not.

This skeleton is not in the closet, it’s on the front yard and still being punched in the face every day. Meaning they have not stopped oppressing which is needed for it to be a skeleton in the closet.

I’ve seen this kind of crap all over Twitter and other social media. Always these galaxy brain compilation threads that rely on the reader not clicking any links. It’s loosely cobbled together, spurious trash.

Eg- first section, the “investigations” are heavily stage-managed by CCP guides, just like WHO/Wuhan. They usually look at some one specific place, like the World Bank covering it’s ass on a particular vocational school project it funded.

These threads are always full of holes, broken logic and twisted context.

But Zenz hardly matters. There’s far too many sources and data streams from others for this to hinge on Zenz.