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I helped build ByteDance's censorship machine

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Re: I helped build ByteDance's censorship machine

#111

Post by themacguffinman »

chrischen wrote: post #38
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…

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…

Speech in the US is powerful enough to cause consequences, not really sure what you're talking about.

The US just changed administrations & congressional leadership twice in 4 years based on nothing more than ballot speech, which involved the humiliating defeat of one of the most well funded "establishment" politicians in favor of a non-politician that made a mockery of establishment practices for 4 years. Congress has representatives reviled by practically all of their colleagues and party management, yet they consistently get re-elected through ballot speech.

A series of news reports took down an entire presidency and the whole government couldn't do anything about it.

Allegations of sexual misconduct alone have sunk the careers of some of the most respected and powerful figures in multiple industries.

Protests & news reporting have directly led to historic civil rights legislation, and more recently: local council votes on police spending measures.

Sure, US politicians can be eager to censor but there are political & legal mechanisms that restrict and stop them. There is no such thing for the CCP. I've yet to see any checks on its power or speech about the CCP's atrocities & coverups affect the CCP's permanent leadership.

Re: I helped build ByteDance's censorship machine

#112

Post by int_19h »

throwaway8581 wrote: post #74
int_19h wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don’t agree. You are suggesting that liberalism was just a mirage for a different underlying ideology. But I don’t think that’s what was happening. People really believed in liberalism. Live and let live is not a very profound philosophy—nor a very self-preserving one, which is why it fell so quickly—but it was real.

I'm not suggesting that. I'm saying that the "golden age of liberalism" was not as golden as is often portrayed, especially in comparison with the current state of affairs. You could, and people were, effectively persecuted for stating their opinions - not in the court of law, but with very real consequences nonetheless.

That people believed it was more real than it actually was, is another matter. But this invites the question - was it really the social consensus? Or consensus among some subgroups of society that simply didn't run afoul of speech taboos?

(FWIW, I'm borderline free speech absolutist, so bear this in mind - I'm not arguing that extreme liberalism in these matters is a bad idea. Only that the past is not a good example of what it should be like, once you set the propaganda and cultural distortion aside.)

Re: I helped build ByteDance's censorship machine

#113

Post by xvector »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #56
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.

The ball is rolling downhill. If we continue to allow centralized social media companies beholden to a government, to be the public square, then we too will turn into this dystopian nightmare given time.

We must reclaim the public square if we wish to retain democracy.

Re: I helped build ByteDance's censorship machine

#114

Post by fakedang »

illuminati1911 wrote: post #37
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…

I've lived in China for few years. I haven't asked everyone I know, but based on my feeling most people don't like it. That being said, for most Chinese not liking the censorship is kind of like not liking a bad weather. You don't like it, but you accept it and move on. Also based on my experience, most white collars (or at least ones working for international companies) in China have either direct or indirect access…

It is the same pattern in most autocracies I've been to. As long as people are getting food, jobs, education and some form of the erstwhile American dream, nobody complains anywhere, or outwardly supports it. People don't care much for the big international news in any of those places, but rather the local tabloidy content. An article about a local food market taking place will get far more hits than an international piece on a COVID vaccine. Government workings are barely reported, unless it's for some "glorious" achievement. This is the model in China, Singapore, UAE, Saudi Arabia, etc.

Of course, for dictatorships that don't manage to achieve the dream for their citizens, you'll see a lot of cursing, name calling politicians, and even outright revolutions. People are essentially politically charged and actively involved with spreading news. This is seen in places such as Egypt and Venezuela, where the governments are only surviving because of being propped up by external agents, usually from the former type of autocracies. This mentality is also seen in quite a few flawed democracies.

And then there are the third type of autocracies, where people are simply desensitized to any news whatsoever. Places such as pseudo-democratic Afghanistan or autocratic Syria. People there only care about wanting to move away from that hell hole.

Re: I helped build ByteDance's censorship machine

#115

Post by fakedang »

bsder wrote: post #89
illuminati1911 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've lived in China for few years. I haven't asked everyone I know, but based on my feeling most people don't like it. That being said, for most Chinese not liking the censorship is kind of like not liking a bad weather. You don't like it, but you accept it and move on. Also based on my experience, most white collars (or at least ones working for international companies) in China have either direct or indirect access…

> Despite having the unblocked access, I've noticed that only very few Chinese are interested in reading foreign news sources or using foreign social media/video platforms. To be fair, I assume language is also a barrier. I'm sure not going out of my way to learn Chinese to access Chinese language information sources. I would hardly expect the inverse.

A significant number of Chinese can understand English if not speak it. 1% of China is still 20% of the UK.

Re: I helped build ByteDance's censorship machine

#116

Post by dstick »

choppaface wrote: post #23
the_only_law wrote: post #18

Has this article been discussed here before? I could have sworn I recall seeing this article maybe a week or two ago on the front page but I can’t find a past thread with any activity.

Yeah I don't get it. I submitted it last week but it got no attention. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26190172 ) It's a really eye-opening article because everybody does Trust & Safety differently and in ByteDance's case there appears to be a huge divide between how US and Chinese users are treated.

This is HN - you need frontpage or it’s dead. So someone that incidentally shares your interest needs to spot it in the stream of “new” posts, a bunch of friends upvote you, or it’s manually boosted by the staff. Just keep posting and don’t feel bad if it doesn’t get traction :)

Re: I helped build ByteDance's censorship machine

#117

Post by chrischen »

themacguffinman wrote: post #110
dfadsadsf wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Russian meets up with an American. "We have freedom of speech," the Russian says. "I can post that Russian elections are falsified on social media." "What's the big deal?" asks the American. "I too can write that Russian elections are falsified on social media." Original: https://youtu.be/gNXpa0M-UdY

Since when was it not possible or legal to write that American elections were falsified on social media? This joke itself seems to be based on the recent wave of loud & public accusations that the American elections are falsified. I guess Twitter/Facebook independently banned some of it, are those companies now considered to be the whole of social media?

That’s like asking if the Republican and Democratic parties now considered to be the whole of US government? The answer is in practice yes, and neither of those two private organizations operate democratically (they operate based on seniority, and can create arbitrary rules like super delegate voting).

Re: I helped build ByteDance's censorship machine

#118

Post by chrischen »

orisho wrote: post #72
chrischen wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But why did they miss it? I believe they did so because this kind of speech is not unusual. So even though it was out in the open, likely reported many times as people do on social platforms - it was missed because it was regarded as people saying extreme thngs but not going to act on them. In other words, there's a lot of this kind of speech in modern times, but it doesn't get censored and so actually dangerous spee…

Well the guy in charge of monitoring security and being ahead of this stuff was fired. So I’d assume if we had been tolerant before we won’t be so tolerant of this speech in the future.

Re: I helped build ByteDance's censorship machine

#119

Post by chrischen »

frogcoder wrote: post #96
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'…

I am seeing this all the time. America is doing this too, why just blame China. Yes, governments around the world have one thing in common, they are full of ASSHOLES. Actually, in general people are assholes. Bad things tend to happen. You can have CNN and Fox broadcast different views somethings extreme, and many other media outlets expressing views somewhere between them. Try that in China, you would think twice if…

You should worry about your own oppression too, not just the imagined ones of others.

Re: I helped build ByteDance's censorship machine

#120

Post by yorwba »

anigbrowl wrote: post #49
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…

Someone signed up to make this pro-CCP comment, which was then flagged within minutes - rather ironic given the context in which it was posted. Although I disagreed with several of the premises and the logic of the comment, I vouched for it as an interesting and valid contribution. However, the lack of transparency around flags and vouching on HN makes this meaningless, and I have never seen a flagged comment vouched…

> Someone signed up to make this pro-CCP comment, which was then flagged within minutes - rather ironic given the context in which it was posted.

First of all, it's not a pro-CCP comment: it doesn't mention the CCP even once. Secondly, it was [dead] but not [flagged]. Many new accounts start out [dead] as a result of HN's automatic anti-spam measures, no human flagging involved.

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