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Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

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Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#561

Post by leshow »

clucas wrote: post #490
quotemstr wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give me a break. When companies censor speech HN likes , it's all about how we have to boycott companies to preserve our society. When it's speech HN doesn't like , it's all about how censorship is actually good and that companies are just "showing people the door" via their freedom of association. People around here need to make up their minds. If you want to object to censorship, great. But if you do, you need to d…

> If you want to object to censorship, great. But if you do, you need to do it as a general principle Why? I think it's perfectly reasonable to say "Blizzard, you should ban people who make racist statements from your tournaments, but you should allow people whose who voice support for pro-democracy protestors to compete. And if you decide not to do that, I won't watch your tourneys or buy your games." Are you saying…

> Are you saying that I am a hypocrite for liking the contents of some speech but not others

Not OP, but I believe they are talking about objecting to censorship ostensibly because of freedom of speech, and then not objecting to other censorship.

If you don't believe in freedom of speech then there is no issue, if you do, you can object to the content of someone's speech, but not their right to express it. That is, if you care about not being a hypocrite.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#562

Post by ehsankia »

Timpy wrote: post #491
a_c wrote: post #477

Interesting how an incidence in gaming garner more eye balls on the topic of Hong Kong politics than whole month combined. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... Good for the people of Hong Kong. The topic of Hong Kong didn't struck me as sensational/desperate as it deserves until a Hong Kong friend send me this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yXTHODE24Q Am moved by the clip, especial…

The Taiwan Flag Emoji topic got a lot of attention too. I think that's a fair spread. Censorship, Unicode standards, and Blizzard is kind of the expected overlap of interest topics for Hacker News.

Right, general politics is not really in the wheelhouse for HN, but these two specific cases encroached on tech, which is why they got much more attention. Other acts of technological censorship from China also often reach the front page. I don't think there's anything nefarious, it's that those other topics aren't really relevant to HN.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#563

Post by gowld »

mcny wrote: post #265
squarefoot wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a game publisher can (whether directly or not) nuke the job of a journalist for a review and get away with it, I'm not surprised at all when a government does something along these lines. https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/03/21/gaming-the-...

It happened with a journalist on a gun magazine as well. Lifelong second amendment supporter blacklisted for not spewing exactly the party line. This makes me wonder whether the whole right to bear arms things is AstroTurf at this point.

The NRA has clearly converted to an arm Republican Party.

The GOA competes with the NRA because they find the NRA more pro-Republican than pro-gun

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

I'm not sure if there is a gun organization that promotes more nuanced theory of partially-limited gun rights but not just shilling for a party.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#565

Post by mistermann »

marcosdumay wrote: post #476
echelon wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're going to repeat the same cycle with Vietnam and India, we'd do well to encourage democracy this go-around. If we elevate authoritarian countries to our level, democracy may be in for a rough future. We should be learning a lot from the China situation. Modern China proves that authoritarian capitalism works and that you don't need freedom or liberty for your citizens. And that's incredibly scary. Imagine if…

> Modern China proves that authoritarian capitalism works For some definition of "works". China has recently (2017) became richer than Brazil, what is a feat, but well, Brazil isn't a liberal democratic paradise and whatever democracy we have is very recent. All the stable democratic countries are much richer than China.

> All the stable democratic countries are much richer than China.

They had a substantial headstart, China is really only about two decades into this, and they're just getting warmed up. If things continue more or less along the same path, and I see little to expect otherwise (China only gets stronger, it's citizens more allegiant) Let's see where they are 10, 20 years from now. Especially now that they are actively exploiting one of the West's biggest Achilles heels: our unique combination of greed + the sense of individual freedom + corporate control of the economy. China is demonstrating how easily they can control Western corporations, and in turn individual people. What percentage of the American public works for a corporation with interests in China? This control may not be that sophisticated yet, but give them some time.

And what plausible recourse do we have?

- Government sanctions? The trade abuses were far more obvious than this, and look what a shitstorm of half-informed but hyper-emotional arguing that turned into.

- Corporations recognizing they are strategically putting themselves into a situation that threatens their long term existence, or, thinking beyond a 5 year window? It seems unlikely.

- Western society collectively recognizing there is a genuine existential threat and banding together to do something about it? We can't even get people on forums to even remotely agree, so seems unlikely.

It's going to take time, but my hunch is this capability will be a big part of China's eventual checkmate on the West. And all executed within a timeframe of < 50 years. History in the making.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#566

Post by alkonaut »

scoutt wrote: post #238

With the risk of being flagged I may say that Blizzard did the right thing BUT ONLY if the interview was a an official post-match interview. Otherwise they did wrong, since they cannot force people into not telling whatever they want by any other mean. I think it is the right thing to do in order to avoid future sociopolitical references in official post-match interviews: imagine someone saying 'power to the whites'…

Sort of agree, but I’ll add that the constraints need to be clearer too. I’m sure pro athletes have contracts that mention what they can and cannot say in the league TV interviews when it comes to political or commercial messages for example. This just had a vague catch all formulation.

Also: Blizzard should stand up for liberal democracy. It’s as simple as that. One can’t treat all political messages the same.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#568

Post by shadowgovt »

umvi wrote: post #339
ekianjo wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's really hard to tell the difference between what is genuinely offensive and what is not. You can't have both "Free Speech" and "You Can't Say Anything Offensive" at the same time, because there is too much overlap. So you have to choose. The US constitution is pretty clear that "Free Speech" is the higher principle.

"Free Speech only protects you from the government, not private companies who don't want to tolerate your hate on their platform" I don't agree with this stance, but it is an oft-heard one defending companies who stifle speech (as long as the stifled speech was a far right Nazi website or anti-LGBT comments). As we see, that stance is dangerous and extends to companies stifling politically inconvenient speech like "I…

The reason we constrain the government the way we do is that Blitzchung is still perfectly free to go on his own blog, or out in the street, or to any media network willing to broadcast him and share his view, and the FBI won't lock him up.

It's a key distinction, and yes, the media still has the liberty to not broadcast is views (because the same liberty that lets them refrain from repeating "I support Hong Kong protesters" lets them refrain from repeating all manner of "Death to all X").

Is that gameable in a multinational world where some media companies are cross-oceanic superpowers? Sure. There are other media outlets that aren't that.

It's possible the solution to these speech issues is to aggressively enforce antitrust.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#569

Post by michannne »

bbdksl wrote: post #507
grecy wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Playing the devils advocate, maybe they are using an alt account because they don’t want people like you finding them in real life.

You're making the argument that pro-China activists have more to fear in their online presence than Hong Kong activists? Could you point to some data that backs this up, because it overwhelmingly appears to be the opposite.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#570

Post by rblatz »

Aarostotle wrote: post #520
ndury wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These studio's should not stop publishing their games in China. The issue lies that these studio's happily comply with whatever restrictions a govt is willing to oblige due to possibly playerbase loss. Think lootboxes, forbidden skins in regions, exc... exc.. Companies as big as Blizzard should be prepared to lose 5/10/15% of their playerbase to defend free speech, the thing is they do not care about free speech. All…

This one is tricky. I always thought they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, so they have to tread that line as well. Does anyone know how that fits into the picture?

That is a commonly overstated and misunderstood term.
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