Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube • Hacker News Board

Re: Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube

#521

Post by TechBro8615 » Mon, May 18, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #473

humaid wrote: post #59

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.

Anyone at Google, you can see the complete list here: http://cs/Eric+Ciaramella

Am I reading this right? There is a list of censored words that applies across all google products, but only google employees can access it?

Anyone at google want to be a whistleblower and share this list?

Re: Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube

#522

Post by UnpossibleJim » Mon, May 18, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

streb-lo wrote: post #496

koheripbal wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was that the Constitution does not handle the current situation - not specifically that the authors thought of it or not.

OK, but why is there so much Constitution/Founding Father worship in America? It's a flawed document that has lead to a flawed nation. It does not have Messiah-like abilities to deal with current problems so why be surprised it doesn't have modern solutions to modern problems.

But they did have the foresight to make it a document that could be edited. That part did take forethought and was revolutionary by men who were very much ahead of their time. I understand that judgement of figures of the past by modern ethics is the newest trend, but history has to be given a bit of context and what is a given now was blasphemous at the time. Some of the things, like a constitution that could evolve, was not the norm.

Re: Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube

#523

Post by proc0 » Mon, May 18, 2020, 5:25 PM UTC

humaid wrote: post #59

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.

Someone create a worm/virus that just spams this name across the web.

Re: Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube

#524

Post by LudwigNagasena » Mon, May 18, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

AlexMax wrote: post #305

manigandham wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is to realize "hate speech" is mostly subjective and revert back to the clear rules that we had last decade before the current political climate of gratuitous outrage.

Those rules applied today would result in indecipherable cesspools of memes at best or a community of authoritarian sympathizers at worst, who would be oh-so-happy to start conditioning their like-minded members to force undesirables away, either explicitly through bans or implicitly through non-stop hatred and coordinated harassment. Neither one is the type of community I have any interest in participating in, and i…

>Those rules applied today would result in indecipherable cesspools of memes at best or a community of authoritarian sympathizers at worst, who would be oh-so-happy to start conditioning their like-minded members to force undesirables away, either explicitly through bans or implicitly through non-stop hatred and coordinated harassment.

It seems like the only point of disagreement between you and "them" is who should be targeted.

Re: Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube

#525

Post by komali2 » Mon, May 18, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

chipperyman573 wrote: post #344

AlexMax wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those rules applied today would result in indecipherable cesspools of memes at best or a community of authoritarian sympathizers at worst, who would be oh-so-happy to start conditioning their like-minded members to force undesirables away, either explicitly through bans or implicitly through non-stop hatred and coordinated harassment. Neither one is the type of community I have any interest in participating in, and i…

Your first paragraph describes subs like r/esist, r/againsthatesubreddits, r/fragilewhiteredditor, etc. They just don't do what many people would consider hate speech so they don't get banned. I think this highlights that while your goal many occur in parallel with banning hate speech in some cases, on its own it will not accomplish much because the same thing will just happen on whatever side nobody thinks is "spewi…

I've not seen any evidence of authoritarian trends in fragilewhiteredditor. I have seen many "but both sides" types try to fruitlessly argue that pointing out white racists are fragile is somehow in and of itself racist, but that is of course absurd.

Re: Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube

#526

Post by rbanffy » Mon, May 18, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

As someone who's regularly on the receiving end of far-right anti-communist rhetoric that, in places I have lived, includes death threats and a reasonably credible suspicion government may soon want to arrest and disappear some people, I welcome some measure of hate speech suppression.

Before I hit submit, let me add a mandatory "burn, karma, burn" because I know what I'm stepping into.

Re: Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube

#527

Post by giancarlostoro » Mon, May 18, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

subsubzero wrote: post #472

koheripbal wrote: post #112

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.

Here are some numbers to keep you up at night, they are very scary: Google controls 91.89% of the search market [1] G controls 68% of the browser market [2] G's android is on 84% of phones operating systems [3] G has 73% of the search advertising market [4] [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/544400/market-share-of-i... [3] https://beta.trimread.com/articl…

Honestly about a year ago I decided to switch to an iPhone once the "contract" is up. I have used iOS and I didnt find it anymore special, but it isn't really that much different to me to be bothered by using either one. I will also take that moment to ungooglify my life including email and such.

Re: Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube

#528

Post by dang » Mon, May 18, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

missosoup wrote: post #41

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…

It was flagged by users and set off the flamewar detector. We review those, but not while asleep.

The site guidelines specifically ask you not to post like this, but to send such questions to hn@ycombinator.com instead. Would you please review them (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)? The reason we ask that is that such comments routinely spark completely speculative subthreads that range from completely off topic (at the high end!) to outrage mobs. They're extremely repetitive and they basically act like a drug and not a nice one.

We're always happy to answer questions—it just takes time to deal with the firehose. Yes, you have to wait for an email reply, but you've had to wait for a reply to this comment too, and if you'd sent an email you wouldn't have damaged HN. This digression (I'll use a nice word) was the #1 subthread on the #1 story of HN when I saw it.

You can't compute a post's rank from its timestamp and score. The software is more complicated than that, plus user flags affect things, plus moderator action. The "why is this post at rank N when given the score X and the timestamp Y my mental algorithm tells me it should be at rank Z?" question is an HN classic, but people grossly overweight moderator action, or rather sinister-moderator-misdeeds in the answers they give themselves.

I mean, think about it you guys. Do you really think we're suppressing discussion of the suppression of the phrase "communist bandits" from YouTube? I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a.

Re: Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube

#529

Post by TechBro8615 » Mon, May 18, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #191

ddevault wrote: post #38

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.

I don't work there anymore, but this is a confused argument born of zealotry. Taking Google's money to work on open source is totally fine. More money spent on good things might even mean less spent on bad things. For example, nothing good would come from the Go team quitting over unrelated political stuff.

> nothing good would come from the Go team quitting over unrelated political stuff.

Are you sure about that? It might actually harm google enough that they respond by giving into some demands.

Re: Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube

#530

Post by smooth_remmy » Mon, May 18, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

pm90 wrote: post #86

MangoCoffee wrote: post #56

its really sad to see Google kowtow to China. i guess money trump everything. a free, open and democratic China is Taiwan. you can see it by Taiwan's handling of covid 19. they are open about their cases, allowed press to ask unlimited questions and show everything to Taiwanese and not conceal any info. its sad that Western companies love money more than the Western values that they always talk about. "Don't be evil"

Western companies don’t talk about values, Western governments do. The past few decades have seen an aggressive destruction in the power of Western governments to subdue them to Corporate power. The US is a prime example where the Republican party’s only policy platform (not even exaggerating) is “tax cuts are the solution to every problem”. The US government specifically has been declawed and dismembered by the curr…

You naively think that western governments are immune from being influenced by China.

You're wrong. Governmental institutions like the WHO have been influenced by China. The German government has been influenced: they have been reluctant to criticize China.

There is no magical governmental institution that is immune from this. If the president was a Democrat we'd be in this same situation.