Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I built ByteDance's censorship machine

protocol.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 107 posts

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#11

Post by jbob2000 »

CharlesW wrote: post #9
jbob2000 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And you don't think the CCP's promotion of Han is the same thing?

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#12

Post by nomay »

Censorship is imo Bytedance's lesser evil.

The way this company destroys journalism is its biggest crime. Algorithm-driven "self-media" that ByteDance popularised (with Toutiao) has essentially wiped out news in China, anyone can write sensationalized and fabricated news-style stories on its platforms and compete with "mundane and boring" serious news，AND GET PAID, these self-media are so prevalent and low-brow that fact-checking has been rendered futile.

It now has democratized censorship，indoctrination and misinformation, as the self-media care only about their ads income.

My advice? Vehemently reject any info/news platforms, as they care only about clicks.

>The “Post-Truth” Publication Where Chinese Students in America Get Their News"

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-post-trut...

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#13

Post by jaflo »

nomay wrote: post #8
orange_joe wrote: post #2

While 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 a…

Could you elaborate on the first point? Do they run live race detection on streams and cut off access?

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#14

Post by duxup »

burlesona wrote: post #5

Reading 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…

That seems like an entirely different topic from what is described in the article.

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#15

Post by duxup »

jbob2000 wrote: post #11
CharlesW wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And you don't think the CCP's promotion of Han is the same thing?

Promotion?

They described simply cutting off a stream because of the language spoken.

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#16

Post by jbob2000 »

duxup wrote: post #15
jbob2000 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you don't think the CCP's promotion of Han is the same thing?

Promotion? They described simply cutting off a stream because of the language spoken.

Ok, and if my company's marketing team proposed an ad with a bunch of white people in it, they would also be cut off.

Same shit, different process.

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#17

Post by nomay »

jaflo wrote: post #13
nomay wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Could you elaborate on the first point? Do they run live race detection on streams and cut off access?

I counldn't find that tweet from a female streaming on Doyu that got a warning for featuring her white boyfriend, but found another news.

https://en.pingwest.com/a/6595

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#18

Post by duxup »

nomay wrote: post #12

Censorship is imo Bytedance's lesser evil. The way this company destroys journalism is its biggest crime. Algorithm-driven "self-media" that ByteDance popularised (with Toutiao) has essentially wiped out news in China, anyone can write sensationalized and fabricated news-style stories on its platforms and compete with "mundane and boring" serious news，AND GET PAID, these self-media are so prevalent and low-brow that…

We have similar situations elsewhere.

Folks rage about 'the media' (a term now so amorphous I can't tell what it means anymore, or if the person even reads / watches what they think of as the media), so we get lots of self research / internet sleuth type discovery on platforms like reddit.

We had one on HN recently too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26186645. I applaud the person for putting in the effort, but I'm highly skeptical of internet sleuths and their ability to string a few searches and documents together into an accurate narrative / provide context to complex systems simply because they found what they thought of as similar things to recent events.

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#19

Post by duxup »

jbob2000 wrote: post #16
duxup wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Promotion? They described simply cutting off a stream because of the language spoken.

Ok, and if my company's marketing team proposed an ad with a bunch of white people in it, they would also be cut off. Same shit, different process.

I can't comment on what your marketing team is up to but I don't know of any state level limitation on the demographics of ads. I see plenty of ads with white only folks in it...

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#20

Post by svieira »

> As a young unicorn, ByteDance does not have strong government relationships like other tech giants do, so it's walking a tightrope every second.

For those in free countries: when you build moderation tools and use them to silence political dissent "because you have to / to play the game" the game plays you. There is no one "too big" to be crushed by those with the material source of political power [1] and everyone tells themselves that they "have to" build the tools because they don't have the "power" to push back or because "it really is that bad this time". But some things don't have to be built (or built in the centralized, controllable way that they are). And when centralization is required or "it really is that bad this time", censorship should be widely publicized and discussed both in real time and with regular retrospectives on decisions to censor that are _public_.

For those in dictatorships: All is not lost, regardless. [2][3]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_power_grows_out_of_t...

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20120107141633/http://www.vaclav...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless

Post reply on HN