China tightens Web controls; commenters must register real names | Hacker News Reader

China tightens Web controls; commenters must register real names

latimes.com

54 pointsdak155 comments

Before you start thinking "oh, those crazy Chinese...", remember that many people in the USA (and other western countries) fervently believe that we should do the same thing.

I think one can think both that the Chinese government is exceptionally repressive and be scared how many people in the West might be willing to follow their lead.

Thankfully, I don't think a real names policy has much chance in the US for the time being.

Most Norwegian newspapers enforce a full-name policy in their comments sections. Which is frankly ridiculous; anyone who seriously wants to troll just comes up with a fake name. But it's very worrying that this is taken seriously by people in our own society.

Don't know the quality of Norwegian comments on newspapers, but if it's anything like what happens in my country, I can understand them asking for full names. In short, stupid and mean, really mean, YouTube-style. Of course, a full name policy doesn't help. Even when the comments section is powered by Facebook, with most users having real names and being sort of trackable, you still get the same stupid and mean comments, because let's face it, a majority of us on the web are stupid and mean.

I'm really against nation wide policies, but on the other hand here we're talking about web properties. Personally I don't care when those shitty newspapers that I don't even read demanding full names. For one it's their right to do so. And also, as long as this isn't by law, it means that you always have alternatives and that's what competition is about. I mean, really, Reddit has 10 times more users than the population of your country and my country combined.

So they basically just has a full-name policy, but don't actually enforce it.

The difference is in who is requiring this. The site operator/company (such as blog,newspaper,social network) or the central govt. It makes a big difference.

As US custom (e.g. the Federalist Papers) and jurisprudence has anonymity so strongly established, it's hard for me to see such a thing here without a simultaneous hot civil war. It would tread on a very important part of our Constitutionally enshrined core political free speech.

Your federal government is conducting warrantless searches without any claim of probable cause, at every airport and on public transportation systems in your cities.

There is no hot civil war.

And lots of us have replied by no longer using airports (I believe you grossly overstate the searches in public transportation system. Or my sources on VIPR etc. are woefully inadequate, not to mention my friends and my own personal experiences on the DC Metro and the Boston MBTA systems). It is possible, it's even convenient or required for many people.

That's very different from a nationwide, you can't escape this without breaking the law, outlawing of anonymous speech in one or more media.

And I bet if this new Chinese policy were implemented in the US, a lot of you would reply by no longer posting comments. And not much else would happen.

And you base this on what?

Americans' famously peaceful and agreeable nature? Our still having the ingrained habit of tugging our forelocks that was required from where we emigrated?

That our response to the response of our ruling class to Sandy Hook was to buy every weapon of military utility that was available, finishing the last stock of surplus military bolt action rifles (the Russian and Soviet Mosin-Nagants): http://www.bob-owens.com/2012/12/something-funny-happened-on... Look at the adjusted NSSF NICS retail gun purchase figures, all during the grinding Great Recession. We aren't buying these weapons to just polish and admire, as the perpetual post-Obama election ammunition supply problems attests.

Percentage of Americans who know what the Federalist Papers are: <20%

However the percentage who currently care about freedom of speech and of the press jurisprudence will tend to do so (any guesses on ACLU members?), and if this became an issue that started affecting the other >80% that would change real fast. Or maybe just our cultural "DNA" is sufficient, you don't need to know the details if you know and follow the principles.

You know, that is probably true. And if so, that is incredibly depressing and disappointing.

You'd be surprised at what laws could get pushed through should there be another major terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

I don't believe anywhere in my statement that I denied such a thing. I'm just, among other things, stating consequences, assuming of course that e.g. the Supremes don't slap it down as they have other threats to anonymous political speech, or we don't "throw the bums out" as happened after the passage and use of the Alien and Sedition acts, etc. etc.

It's often formulated at soap box, jury box, ballot box, and bullet box. Preclude the use of the first 3 and we're left with the last.

Oh we can get anything pushed through as long as you buy the right politicians. The "will of the people" means very little these days.

Perhaps. But our current ruling class should remember that we are slow to anger, and I see plenty of evidence of they do.

It's weird how everytime there is criticism of some country people pop up to say that the US is also bad in some way. It's a non sequitur. China is fucked up, full stop. Is the US fucked up too? Yes. That doesn't mean China should not be criticized for their fuckupery.

Oh, those crazy Americans...

You made it sound as if we shouldn't call the Chinese crazy over this. When in fact we should call both crazy.

I've even seen support for such measures here on HN. The most popular justification is "to fight cyber-bullying".

Yes, and those people in the USA that believe we should do the same are called net neutrality supporters.

What really bugs me is that this is the same direction a lot of policy makers and even tech companies seem to want to go, all the while decrying the Chinese for the same actions. I hope we don't allow it to progress that far in the US, but we really need to step up to the debate when people start droning on about cybersecurity, trolling, libel, and defamation on the Internet. Perhaps I'm just in the minority that thinks free speech should include the right to offend and we should not allow everyone to get offended at anything they want and get it banned.

Youtube co-founder jawed's first youtube comment: "why the fuck do i need a google+ account to comment on a video?"

Note that Google has reversed course and apologized for Real Names policy

It is funny how american media is eager to depict China as a North-Korea, and how americans opinions end being formed by their partial media in the same way it happens under dictatorships. Have spent a decade in China, I have yet to see a cop carrying a gun. Cops in China are way more friendly than in US, and for me, way more trustable. people think they keep the chinese people under fear and draconian control, but if you spend some time in China and listen to the people, you see thats not the whole truth. American media call Mugabe a dictator and call Cameroon's President a "chief of state", but both countries hold the same kind of elections. Anyone saw the news about the recent death of the Arabian king? I didn't read any mention about him being a dictator, indeed he is, but he is an ally.

I lived in China for 6 months and saw plenty of cops with guns and saw undercover cops roughly throw around a street vendor who had gotten too close to the forbidden city for their liking. Your view here seems to be willfully obscured.

Having your opinion formed by the media is a necessity of living in a world where you can't get first hand information for everything, i.e. a constraint imposed by reality. the difference is that in the west you can choose what media you want to pay attention to, and the media itself is free to report what it wants.

If media is free, then why is Glenn Greenwald in Brazil and Laura Poitras in Berlin?

[0] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2797916/filmmaker-di...

In China the citizenry is constantly fed lines how 'China is not bad, don't listen to the foreign critics, just look at all the awful things the West does'.

Pretty easy way to never look at yourself critically and fix problems. The west is bad sure, but why does that mean China can't be better? The self-maintained status quo by the citizens in China is incredibly strong. This is by design.

America is simply much more sophisticated in its methods of mass control. China deploys primitive ham-fisted stuff like web controls and their "great firewall," while America is much more skilled in the fine-grained use of soft power and propaganda to achieve the same effects. American oligarchs know better than to whack people indiscriminately with crude mallets or to show their hand too overtly. My guess would be that they learned this from the British elite, who are probably the undisputed global masters at weathering social and political storms through flexing and employing soft nuanced mechanisms to hold power. Britain still has a royal dynasty while most of the rest of Europe's royals lost their heads.

America excels at creating the illusion of freedom and at permitting enough freedom at lower levels of society to sustain that illusion, but at the top American corporations and the American national security state are almost indistinguishable. Ex-vice-presidents serve on the boards of major VC firms, and Google is basically the state department. That's not that different from China. When American financial elites get in real trouble, unlimited public funds suddenly materialize to bail them out. The same thing of course would happen in China. In both nations if you are sufficiently connected, neither laws nor the ordinary rules of economics apply to you... unless you are so crude and reckless that you overtly tip your hand in which case an example is made of you to preserve the illusion. This also happens regularly in China's "corruption crackdowns."

Americans value freedom of expression, and that's a good thing, but at the end of the day we have no real choice but to elect a Republican or a Democrat and our media is remarkably complacent and docile. I'd say the vast majority of our media are akin to BuzzFeed for government propaganda, and the rest are too chronically under-funded or intellectually out to lunch (e.g. conspiranoids) to make any difference. I highly doubt the condition of our media is an accident. The public is free to converse, but most of that talk is impotent.

I'm really not familiar with any large-scale society that is not an oligarchy. That being said, some are pragmatically better places to live than others. I'd rather live in the USA or another Western "democracy" than in most other places. Soft nuanced mechanisms of control generally don't kill you or send you to camps.

Great point. I'd go even further and say this is the natural outcome of representative democracy which naturally leads to a form of oligarchy. The 'representative' part is always given way too much credit as a means to fix problems, and is the means to placate the public, when the examples of it actually fixing the publics problems are limited but the only thing that matters is the perception.

The representatives more often reinforces existing power-structures over the interest of their voters. The effects of which is mostly unnoticeable - at first - and seems like it's an effective working model, but after a century or more the cracks in the model start to show. The power structures which were slowly reinforced over time start to become powerhouses and the wealth division becomes exponential.

It's like a slow moving wave which the public continues to lose more and more ability to do anything about.

Whereas China started with the tidal wave and is busy pretending everything is OK because America has reached a similar place.

Just wanted to say that this is spot on, in my opinion. After watching a documentary about North Korea recently, I couldn't help but feel like our Western governments are guilty of the exact same things that we openly mock North Korea for. The only difference is that we, over hundreds (perhaps thousands) of years, have mastered the art of disguising the mechanisms by which we control the population.

I think the comparison continues down the line -- the big difference is how crude or refined an oligarchy is at wielding power. North Korea is particularly crude and "lower class," simply offing people left and right and sending people to camps. American oligarchs are considerably classier.

Indeed, and I don't deny our ruling class has become an oligarchy, see for instance the recent writings of Angelo Codevilla starting with http://spectator.org/articles/39326/americas-ruling-class-an...

But they, or we, are singularly peculiar. Outside of NYC and DC, all of us with non-felony or domestic violence records can buy serious handguns and rifles, the very same stuff (or better :-) than our police and military are issued. (Machine guns are under a weird regime, but given their very limited utility until you get to the weights of light machine guns or GPMGs, 15-30 pounds, that's not much of an issue, and in most states we can still buy them.)

Historically unique, not counting regimes where it was decided that the reliable subjects should be strongly encouraged to be proficient in the weapons of the day (I'm thinking particularly of the English and long bows, and after Henry the VIII, "reliable" generally meant non-Roman Catholic; I've also heard much less reliably that in old times one or more of the kingdoms in Korea could in extremis muster just about everyone including the women and have a good chance of saving the situation).

> American media call Mugabe a dictator and call Cameroon's President a "chief of state", but both countries hold the same kind of elections.

"Chief of state" and "dictator" are orthogonal descriptions. "Chief of state" describes the ceremonial head of any state, whether or not they are actually the head of government, and whether or not they are elected, and whether or not they exercise dictatorial power.

"Dictator" refers to anyone exercising dictatorial power, whether or not they are also the chief of state (its possible, particularly, for a dictator to be head of government in a system with a separate head of government and chief of state, as might happen in a military junta in a state with a ceremonial monarch.)

I know that very well. The same goes for the term "President". I didn't say the terms are mutually exclusive, the point is the way they choose the terms to describe those considered allies and those considered enemies.

> the point is the way they choose the terms to describe those considered allies and those considered enemies.

Well, you said that they were described differently despite being subject to the same kind of elections -- but the kind of election is only distantly relevant to whether someone is a "dictator", and not at all relevant to whether they are a "chief of state". It would be more relevant if you described a similarity that was relevant to the applicability of those descriptions, rather than one with limited relevance to either description.

Of course, the idea that the US media describes Paul Biya of Cameroon as a "chief of state" and not a "dictator" is also false; see, e.g., http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-worlds-enduring-dictators-pa...

I think the strong negative opinions by many when issues like this come up is tied to how highly, in general, Americans value freedom of expression. The rationale for this is that no matter what injustices may be present in society at least if we can discuss them in open forums, there's reason to hope that the injustices can be corrected. China, with its track record of stifling expression and even attempting to write unfortunate events out of history (e.g. Tienanmen Square) has consistently trampled over what many Americans consider to be the most critical safeguard protecting people from a government that acts badly.

Go to Xinjiang. Many of the police there carried automatic weapons. It was basically an occupied country AFAICT. This was back in 2006. I don't know how things are today. I reckon that the policy of "ethnic cleansing by dilution" might have changed things, at least in Urumqi. Kashgar I reckon has the same occupied country vibe.

Not Entirely True.

Possibly, mainland China is the second last countries in the world, next only to North Korea, where hacker news audience wants to live.

NO INTERNET. End of story.

Disclaimer: Chinese.

I fail to see how this is different from Facebook (and formerly Google+)'s real names policy which will flag unusual names and force you to give a valid Government ID to reactivate your account.

Facebook (along with Twitter) is often the gateway to commenting on a lot of popular sites in the US. Very few people stop and make the alternate account required.

References:

1. https://www.facebook.com/help/159096464162185

2. http://boingboing.net/2011/08/27/eric-schmidt-if-you-cant-us...

One is a decision by a private company (which you can get around by using a different service) and one is a mandate from the government.

This is exactly what he fails to see.

Given both Googles and Facebooks origin funding, I think a debate could be had about this point.

Explain what you mean. Where did their funding come from?

There is no US government law or rule to enforce real names (see Twitter, etc).

Even if they're funded by the government, the government doesn't stop you from posting anywhere else.

If you don't like Facebook forcing you to use your real name, Hacker News will let you use a name like freehunter (most certainly not my real name).

In case anyone hasn't previously encountered Poe's law, this post is a great example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law.

South Korea tried that several years ago. The outcome was (well, apart from gross restriction of freedom of expression) that every small and large websites were legally required to ask for people's personal identifying information and store it somewhere. There were several popular incidents where millions of people's information were hacked, and who knows how many incidents were there that wasn't publicized.

These days it's safe to assume that the name and Residential Registration Number of pretty much every South Korean is floating somewhere in China. (Well, at least the law is gone now...)

Glad that China is following our lead.</sarcasm>

Does this apply to Chinese commenters on overseas blogs and forums?

If so, they've just solved a huge chunk of the comment spam problem.

If the Chinese government wants to help unmask people?

I don't think it will affect much, most of the sites are using qq/weibo/renren openids, and they have long been "real named" behind. And actually I don't care how the gov track my activities, just care about the leaks of personal information, which were kept safe most of the times for big names.

I wonder if this regulation will also apply to government sock puppets.

It may be hard to persecute you if we cannot easily identify you.

This isn't the craziest idea in the world. Trolls can be distracting and a ton of garbage to discussions. This isn't one of those "evil Chinese laws" in my opinion.

But I guess I'm posting this as someone using their legal name so there's that.

Someone trolling an Internet discussion board shouldn't result in a federal law removing all privacy from everyone. The trolls might stop, but what about government critics who are now being silenced because they will be killed if they reveal their real name?

You might not have to worry about your government breaking down your door if you post something negative about your politicians. Some people in other countries do.

While that's a good point I'm just playing devil's advocate here. It's probably among the least crazy things China has done.

By the way thanks people who disagree with me for the downvotes. Cause that's what they're designed for.

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