I built ByteDance's censorship machine
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I built ByteDance's censorship machine
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Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine
#2While most of the post is what I would expect, the minority language censorship was unexpected. It’s another sign of China’s ethnocentrism/Han Supremacist culture play out. It’s a real shame to see this sort of enforced death of linguistic diversity.
Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine
#3The article doesn't name the engineer but is still heavy on personal details. If China wanted to persecute said engineer they could easily find out who is responsible.
Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine
#4While most of the post is what I would expect, the minority language censorship was unexpected. It’s another sign of China’s ethnocentrism/Han Supremacist culture play out. It’s a real shame to see this sort of enforced death of linguistic diversity.
How come you found it unexpected?
Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine
#5Reading this, it was hard not to think of the direction US Academia, and to a lesser degree the government in general, is headed. We’re having deeply uncomfortable dilemmas with free speech - and whether speech at scale is fundamentally different. Ten years ago I could never have imagined an apparatus such as described in this article existing in the US, but today it seems possible. Perhaps still unlikely, but possible.
Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine
#6While most of the post is what I would expect, the minority language censorship was unexpected. It’s another sign of China’s ethnocentrism/Han Supremacist culture play out. It’s a real shame to see this sort of enforced death of linguistic diversity.
We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people in power WANT society to look like.
My company recently moved away from animated characters back to using humans in their ads. Most of the people in our ads are mixed race, you can't really tell if they're asian, white, arab, or "tanned".
So it's the same promotion of a genetic look, just with a different group of people.
Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine
#7Reading this, it was hard not to think of the direction US Academia, and to a lesser degree the government in general, is headed. We’re having deeply uncomfortable dilemmas with free speech - and whether speech at scale is fundamentally different. Ten years ago I could never have imagined an apparatus such as described in this article existing in the US, but today it seems possible. Perhaps still unlikely, but possib…
I was recently blocked for 24 hours from Facebook for testing the phrase “fucking British” in the context of colonial history. Note that I was testing it after another poster asked if their own comment saying the same thing had been censored. After having my test comment removed, I confirmed that “okay, it seems automated” which was itself flagged as being hate speech somehow, and my ban instated immediately.
My contacts proceeded to discuss ways to get around the filter (use idioms, odd characters, Unicode) and I was immediately reminded of how people get around Chinese censorship.
Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine
#8While most of the post is what I would expect, the minority language censorship was unexpected. It’s another sign of China’s ethnocentrism/Han Supremacist culture play out. It’s a real shame to see this sort of enforced death of linguistic diversity.
Live streaming platforms literally detect and warn against "unauthorized foreigners" from appearing on the screen.
TV channels like BBC (for high-end hotels) are being monitored real-time to black-out sensitive parts, books mailed or imported from overseas get pages ripped out, even entries in dictionaries get painted black.
Don't underestimate the seriousness of the censorship, it's among the few things communists are actually good at.
Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine
#9While most of the post is what I would expect, the minority language censorship was unexpected. It’s another sign of China’s ethnocentrism/Han Supremacist culture play out. It’s a real shame to see this sort of enforced death of linguistic diversity.
We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people in power WANT society to look like. My company recently moved away from animated characters back to using humans in their ads. Most of the people in our ads are mixed race, you can't really tell if they're asian, white, arab, or "tanned". So it's the same promotion of a genetic look, just wi…
> We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people in power WANT society to look like.
The actual explanation is simpler and more crass: It's about what sells to the target audience. At least for large campaigns, these things are thoroughly vetted.
If you're uncomfortable with some aspect of an ad, you aren't the target audience.
Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine
#10While most of the post is what I would expect, the minority language censorship was unexpected. It’s another sign of China’s ethnocentrism/Han Supremacist culture play out. It’s a real shame to see this sort of enforced death of linguistic diversity.
We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people in power WANT society to look like. My company recently moved away from animated characters back to using humans in their ads. Most of the people in our ads are mixed race, you can't really tell if they're asian, white, arab, or "tanned". So it's the same promotion of a genetic look, just wi…
> We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people in power WANT society to look like.
What? It’s all about the money.
Ads, and tv (which is simply a honeypot to draw ad viewers) want to connect with as many viewers as possible in order to sell as much product (cars, cereal, or whatever) as possible.
In the 1950s US the only people with appreciable spending power were white parents, thus those were the ads. Magazines, which could be more finely targeted, were more diverse overall, though demographically siloed.
Society does not look like that (it never did, but the $$$ distribution did). Ads and TV are on the trailing edge, not the leading edge. And TV looks demographically more like the people I see, and more like my family, than it ever has before.
I have no idea what the phrase “people in power WANT society to look like” really means.