231–240 of 1001 posts
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I have a bunch of friends at Google; it's a mix of "not my department," "the pay is good," and a few "true believers."
Don't say that he's hypocritical Rather say that he's apolitical "Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down?" "That's not my department!" says Werner von Braun
Youtube is in a tough spot. They will be blamed: - if they don't take down speech some consider hateful - if they take down speech some do not consider hateful 共匪 is seen as an insult by a group, but others do not. If Youtube bans nothing, then hate speech thrives and they get bad PR. If Youtube bans anything anyone flags as hate speech, then they become de facto as censorship agents for foreign powers. Anything crit…
Fundamentally, this is the issue with international corporations in the speech realm. People will believe and argue they shouldn't be subject to a given country's laws or have to apply that law globally, but in a real world sense, they must follow all of the laws of any country they want to operate in, no matter how ridiculous or unfair they might feel. Because if you aren't obeying a country's laws, they'll shut you…
Using such an approach on the global channels like YT comments isn't an option (unless they choose to Balkanize them, and let only Chinese commenters talk to Chinese people).
Google isn't the only firm that does this; Twitter will selectively filter some tweets based on whether it's legal to show that content in countries that have outlawed fascist agitation (which makes for an interesting side-effect; doing a request for a tweet stream against a US proxy server and a German proxy server and delta-ing the results can give you a clear signal on "Twitter thinks this person is a Nazi propagandist." I'm wondering when someone will put an API in front of that and make it a service... "DoesTwitterThinkThatGuyIsANazi.com" anyone? ;) ).
Google & YouTube employees on HN: how do you justify still working at this company? Enough of the cognitive dissonance. Face your choices and tell me how you square yourself with them. For shame.
Not a Google Employee , but in 99% of the case it's money + experience/situation.
This is similar to what others tech company are doing ( Reddit , Adobe etc.. ) in terms of arbitrage when they decide to enter Chinese Market , Partner with Chinese VC or with ideas that challenge their values.
Regardless of where you'll go in tech you'll end up in Amoral corporations like Google/Amazon/Microsoft which are driven solely by Money and Growth , regardless of the consequences. ( Remember Gillette and Child Labour ? Nestlé ? )
Also , the last people who tried to Unionize at Google , which could have enable them to do something about it , got laid off instantly[0] , same pattern happened in all others tech companies...
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/25/20983053/google-fires-fo...
I think a more fundamental problem is a single private company having a near-monopoly on various public communication channels, and having financial interests in various global dictatorships. The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this. Google's "We're a private company" get-out-jail-free card cannot continue to apply.
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If this is true, follow the money. HN is run by a Venture Capital firm. What are their incentives? Who does the business have to keep happy?
> If this is true, follow the money Isn't it more likely it was flagged off the front page by overly-enthusiastic users? I'll also admit that this link, to a support thread, is more compelling than the Ask HN, where half the comments were questioning whether the phenomenon was actually happening.
Well, by now they are probably Liangkuaidangs or something :D
edit: looking at the downvotes, I may have triggered a few of them
Similar happens with the name "Eric Ciaramella", which YouTube instantly deletes. This is a name of a CIA whistle blower. It would be interesting to know what other words are in the YouTube censor list.
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Wow. No Wikipedia articles on him either, and reports of people getting permanently banned from Wikipedia for trying to create that article, or even mentioning him in another.
Wow. It's almost like the missions of popular websites fall in line with protecting individuals against government-sponsored attacks on whistleblowers. Witness protection isn't some flashy thing in movies. It's real and society benefits from it.
As a software engineer I understand these sort of bugs. A product manager in China asks: can we find a way to prevent people commenting on these videos with comments that contain the word 共匪. Engineer goes away and comes up with a plan to train an AI model to detect these comments. He present's this solution to his manager who informs him that the solution needs to be in place next week, there is no time to gather th…
There was a previous unrelated discussion about this just a few hours ago which was climbing to the top of the front page when I saw it. And then just vanished: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221264 It's not flagged, it just went from #13 on the front page to invisible. In a single refresh. How does that work? Looking at the votes and age, it should be in the top 5 of both Ask and the front page. What's the m…
Some users tend to flag stories about China and censorship because they generate a lot of nationalistic and hot headed comments and very little actual intelligent discussion. Just look at the comments attached to this submission.