21–30 of 107 posts
Funny how censorship which makes these platforms entirely untrustworthy as a view into the world is filed under "Trust" in the org chart.
It's sort of like how Facebook's faux grassroots "community standards" are just the rules Facebook dictates to its community.
NEXT!
The 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.
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…
The only metric that matters is click numbers, you can now out-do reporters with your perfect news stories that check every eye-grabbing boxes, coz you can type however you like and face no consequences, so why not to make it as juicy as possible.
The 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.
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…
The "official narrative" on major political events has definitely been glitching out. Weird stuff like Qanon is really symptomatic of how institutions who should be calling this out (this huge intellectual buffer society has: Cory Doctorow, sociology deparments, church leaders...) are pretending not to see the glitches.
But they're there. I could start five flame wars in a short comment citing a few, but the point is not to side with the "deplorable" side in each of these, but to note that there's some deep truth at the root of each of these five deplorable things that goes haywire because the intellectual element of society hasn't been paying mind to it.
Maybe intellectuals just want to watch the world burn?
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…
Me too, but i'm just as sceptical when it comes to "real" journalists. Journalists aren't domain experts in everything. Read some random news about tech stuff, it's often times filled with clear indications of them not really understanding the topic. Which isn't meant to bash journalists, they have limited time for research, need to write an article, and again are usually not domain experts.
The question is how do we fix this?
> 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…
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.
And if we were to talk about death of languages, maybe you need to realise that it's actually a much worse problem in Anglo-Saxon countries than anywhere else https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_time_of_e...