I helped build ByteDance's censorship machine

Chinese national here.

> Is there a fraction of people who agrees with it or is almost it universally disapproved of?

There is a fraction of people who agrees with it. Otherwise it wouldn't be there.

But most people dislike, or at least are annoyed by, the censorship.

There are several different kind of dislike. There are people who are opposed to censorship in principle. There are people who find certain rules or mechanisms too ridiculous. There are people who only complain when it inconvenience them.

There are several types of supports. There are a small fraction of people who think that whatever the government does is for the greater good of the country. There are people who are happy when the fist hammers down on contents that they don't like, e.g. porn, anti-patriotic speech.

I'd say, anecdotally, most people find the current state of censorship somewhat unreasonable, but at the same time, have accepted it as a trait of the Chinese society that isn't going away in the forseeable future.

I can comment as I grew up in China my entire life and came to the west just a few years ago, attending international school. People obviously know censorship exists and most believe is for the greater good, as China needs social stability above all. Most people just want to live their lives, have children receive a good education, make money, have safety, etc. There is no need to bad mouth the government after everything they do for the people. So many families are now wealthy, business is booming, people can afford nicer houses, and the economy is doing better than ever. Crime and danger pretty much does not exist, cities are walkable, life is safe. My family and friends families were low-middle class when I was a kid and are now in the upper class by western standards. Also, you have to understand that Chinese culture, especially Han culture, is very united and shares a lot of patriotism. Family values are very strong, cultural morals I think are very homogenous. This makes it very easy for everyone to agree with government decisions. Contrary to the west, we have very high faith the the government is always doing the most efficient and safe decisions for the general public, and people are happy about it because this has been shown to be true with how it has concretely affected hundreds of millions of people's lives. So many people taken out of poverty within a short span of time.

Social media censorship is not a big deal because we don't miss what we don't know. For example, people don't care they can't use google, facebook, instagram, because we have our own social networks. Also, people know not to talk about political subjects in these platforms because it is in bad taste and we know how to self-censor. Also, we Chinese see the chaos and mess from the news coming from the west regarding polarization, fighting between political parties, and social unrest and we don't want that. Contrary to the middle east, I would say most Chinese do not believe they are oppressed at all. They are happy with how the government handles things.

I'd say people are happy with the censorship because they believe it brings stronger national security, social stability, and reinforces shared cultural values most Chinese have with each other. Please keep in mind that we have different social values in the east than the west. Our perception of freedom and values that matter to society are quite different. Although this may seem extreme to you, your views sometimes seem extreme to us. Thank you for your time.

“When I was at ByteDance, we received multiple requests from the bases to develop an algorithm that could automatically detect when a Douyin user spoke Uyghur, and then cut off the livestream session...

...every audio clip would be automatically transcribed into text, allowing algorithms to compare the notes with a long and constantly-updated list of sensitive words, dates and names, as well as Natural Language Processing models. Algorithms would then analyze whether the content was risky enough to require individual monitoring.

If a user mentioned a sensitive term, a content moderator would receive the original video clip and the transcript showing where the term appeared. If the moderator deemed the speech sensitive or inappropriate, they would shut down the ongoing livestreaming session and even suspend or delete the account.”

If you speak freely, and it is not powerful enough to cause any consequences, then are you freely speaking at all?

Sounds like a great way to make us feel like we have political power and that our speech has power, when in reality the moment our speech can disrupt the establishment it gets clamped down. One big difference here vs China is that the establishment is a bit more distributed.

The people in power here are just as eager to censor as the people in power in China. The only difference is the people in power in China are mostly the people in control of the government. But the one bigger difference is that we only seem to think the government is capable of censorship, when really it's a matter of the people in power.

> Is there a fraction of people who agrees with it or is almost it universally disapproved of?

That seems like a loaded question. To be clear I don't live there and am not speaking for them, but from my perspective, as long as the country is getting more prosperous, people will overlook quite a lot. The same is true in the US, how well the economy does is what matters most in elections.

Considering the strong steady growth [0] they've had, I'm sure people are much more likely to overlook things like censorship if they think it will lead to better lives. And honestly, it may. I'm not promoting their censorship, but look how much better of a job they did handling COVID (after the initial cover up), while on the other hand look at the whole mess that the US had with the election and Capitol riot. The US makes it very easy for China to sell its way of government to its people.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/YRTBrlx.png