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I helped build ByteDance's censorship machine

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Re: I helped build ByteDance's censorship machine

#51

Post by CobrastanJorji »

jsnk wrote: post #41
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some ways, you're right, but Americans feel most strongly about the freedom of speech when it comes to specifically political speech, and I think the biggest difference is that I, as an American, can choose to say "I think our President of the United States is a fascist and a criminal and he should be arrested for his crimes" and I am in no way worried that the government will track me down and punish me in any ma…

I'm not as sure if China or US is worse about political speech anymore. In US, the government may not come for you like China. But in US, there are multi-national corporations, NGOs, think tanks, activist groups, social media mob who can just as effectively and "humanely" strip your power, influence and livelihood just as well as Chinese government can. Also at least with China, rules are pretty black and white. Don'…

Yes, the US is actually better about freedom of speech than China in practice.

To give you a negative example, a significant number of people organized a literal coup attempt, largely in the open, via social media, and nothing happened to them until they actually stormed the US Capitol building, after which some of them were arrested.

Large media companies with massive audiences broadcast divisive lies accusing the current President of being illegitimate due a fraudulent election. It is completely legal, and the government has taken no action to stop them.

Meanwhile, Jack Ma issued mild criticism of the Chinese government's financial regulation policies and promptly disappeared. And you're comparing that to "cancel culture?"

Yes, the US is actually better about freedom of speech than China.

Re: I helped build ByteDance's censorship machine

#52

Post by deviation »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #46
legerdemain wrote: post #45

Sure, and I helped build Palantir's license-plate-reading, immigrant-processing, and drone-targeting machines. Everyone in the Bay Area is fine with that. No one cares. To an average affluent Bay Area engineer, illegal immigrants and people getting blown up half a world away are extremely abstract concerns. The real sources of pain in a Bay Area engineer's life are their inability to sip lattes through a mask and Pla…

Can you expand on that? I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

Seems like indirect sarcasm. I have been seeing more of it here on HN. Unfortunately it lowers the quality of conversations that we are capable of having on here..

Re: I helped build ByteDance's censorship machine

#53

Post by lambda_obrien »

throwaway_ruok wrote: post #32
kypro wrote: post #4

It would be interesting if someone from China could comment on censorship in China. Is there a fraction of people who agrees with it or is almost it universally disapproved of? Some of these arguments for censorship made in this article sound eerily similar to how we justify censorship in the West. > Our role was to make sure that low-level content moderators could find "harmful and dangerous content" as soon as poss…

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 me…

Sounds a lot like everywhere else, like America. I bet if Americans and Chinese looked, we have more in common with each other than we have with our politicians.

Re: I helped build ByteDance's censorship machine

#54

Post by chrischen »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #51
jsnk wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not as sure if China or US is worse about political speech anymore. In US, the government may not come for you like China. But in US, there are multi-national corporations, NGOs, think tanks, activist groups, social media mob who can just as effectively and "humanely" strip your power, influence and livelihood just as well as Chinese government can. Also at least with China, rules are pretty black and white. Don'…

Yes, the US is actually better about freedom of speech than China in practice. To give you a negative example, a significant number of people organized a literal coup attempt, largely in the open, via social media, and nothing happened to them until they actually stormed the US Capitol building, after which some of them were arrested. Large media companies with massive audiences broadcast divisive lies accusing the c…

That coup attempted happened because the powers at hand missed it. In the aftermath Parlor is shut down, and the powers at hand would never allow such a thing to happen again. So at best you can say the censorship apparatus in the US is less effective, but still present.

And yes, the US government didn't do the censorship, but rather the private platforms that wield the power did so.

Re: I helped build ByteDance's censorship machine

#55

Post by m3at »

kypro wrote: post #4

It would be interesting if someone from China could comment on censorship in China. Is there a fraction of people who agrees with it or is almost it universally disapproved of? Some of these arguments for censorship made in this article sound eerily similar to how we justify censorship in the West. > Our role was to make sure that low-level content moderators could find "harmful and dangerous content" as soon as poss…

If you're interested in a long read, I found this article informative (though it's not focused only censorship): "Why do Chinese people like their government" https://supchina.com/2019/07/22/why-do-chinese-people-like-t...

Re: I helped build ByteDance's censorship machine

#56

Post by EdwardDiego »

thedudeabides5 wrote: post #36

“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 Proce…

And where people speaking dialects were warned to switch to Mandarin for better monitoring... that chills me. So damn privileged to live in the West.

Re: I helped build ByteDance's censorship machine

#57

Post by int_19h »

throwaway8581 wrote: post #39
int_19h wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What point would you define as the beginning of that period that we're supposedly exiting?

The 50s and 60s. It was in full swing by the 70s. If I had to point to one iconic development, it would be the Warren court, and in particular its free speech cases. Those marked the decisive defeat of traditional conservatism, which never again was a powerful force in national politics (unless you count some elements of the Trump coalition) despite occasional lip service and token concessions by Reagan and Bush 43.…

I feel like this overemphasizes the legal angle, while ignoring other aspects of censorship. It's true that the Warren court significantly liberalized things by setting very narrow constitutional boundaries in Brandenburg v. Ohio etc. But there's censorship by law, and then there's censorship by public opinion. When you complain about "wokeism", it's mostly the latter - but there was plenty of that in the 70s as well, only with different opinions considered unacceptable to the point where people could get fired for them, or have trouble finding a platform to address large audiences.

Re: I helped build ByteDance's censorship machine

#58

Post by chrischen »

mhh__ wrote: post #42
chrischen wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would characterize the biggest difference is that Chinese people are actually aware they are being massively censored, while Americans think they have no censorship.

If you are trying to say they are the same in magnitude then the phrase "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" comes to mind.

Magnitudes will always be different, but also irrelevant. If a system allows censorship to happen magnitudes of censorship will shift depending on the threat to established power. If powers are threatened you bet they will leverage more or less censorship to preserve their power as the situation demands.

So a more stable society will enjoy more censorship, and a less stable one may employ more, but that is constantly shifting and pointless to compare.

What is important to compare is the awareness of the participants that the system isn't fundamentally different (both systems allow for censorship, and actively employ it to control and preserve power). The problem isn't where this is more or less censorship, it's that in America we're taught that censorship, propaganda, and such dystopian tools are something unique to the Soviet Union, communists, China, etc, when really it's a universal tool employed by everyone from Donald Trump's office to Kellog's cereal commercials, and yes, the Communist Party of China. Yea sure, we have a million news outlets and China maybe has one, but if these tools are employed by those in power to preserve their power then you can be the people here in power employ them too. At the end of the day our million news outlets don't matter if 99% of the power is concentrated in 1%. It creates an illusion that there is independence when really the only thing matter is who has power and is in control, because they can rally these "independent" players when needed.

Re: I helped build ByteDance's censorship machine

#59

Post by bordercases »

themacguffinman wrote: post #48
ehmmmmmmmm wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would be interesting if someone from China could comment on censorship in China. Is there a fraction of people who agrees with it or is almost it universally disapproved of? In general people don't agree with it. However, for a lot of people, it's not actually on their radar. The reality is most people in China are so engrossed in their work and day-to-day life that censorship isn't really actually an issue for…

Sure, it's the peace of submission, the peace of silence, the worst kind of peace that hardly reflects any level of "happiness". It's quite disingenuous to compare Shenzhen to Hong Kong's molotovs. What's left unspoken, of course, is the fear of thinking, saying, and doing anything that disagrees with or simply embarrasses the state (like the Chinese doctor who alerted his community about this new virus that was spre…

Does happiness mean harmony or does happiness mean expression?

Therein lies the philosophical difference between the US and China.

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