Live data from Hacker News

YouTube takes down Xinjiang videos, forcing rights group to seek alternative

reuters.com

171–180 of 269 posts

Re: YouTube takes down Xinjiang videos, forcing rights group to seek alternative

#171
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/china-new-inter...

Daniel Dunbrill's channel has some good videos where he actually visits Xinjiang and interviews the supposed victims. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p57qyMAySYc

> Daniel Dunbrill

This guy?

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3127611/chi...:

> Dumbrill’s YouTube channel has 140,000 subscribers while his videos, commentaries and interviews – on topics such as the Hong Kong protests – have previously appeared on CGTN. His long track record of providing fodder for Chinese state media to throw at the West has earned him special privileges not accorded to veteran foreign correspondents in the country.

> Last year, he partnered with CGTN to travel the length of the Tibet autonomous region, interviewing residents and visiting schools to highlight the successes of the Communist Party’s poverty alleviation campaign. In contrast, foreign journalists who gain permission to enter Tibet are accompanied by government minders and forced to strictly adhere to an imposed itinerary, with little time for independent reporting.

> While Chinese and foreign reporters do not need prior permission to enter the Xinjiang autonomous region, many journalists from Western media outlets have reported being tailed by security forces on arrival.

CGTN is China's version of Russia Today.

This is what real reporters encounter when they try to go there:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/insider/china-xinjiang-re...:

> Chinese authorities have made the [Xinjiang] story a huge challenge to cover. Their constant following makes true reporting almost impossible. In Kashgar, the best I could do was take photos and videos and hope police wouldn’t delete them.

> ...Another time, a police officer stopped us close to our hotel. Inspecting Chris’s photos, he deleted a shot of a camel. When Chris asked why that photo was deleted, the man turned to Chris and said, “In China, there are no whys.”

> It was good advice. As we pulled down another road in search of a re-education camp, a car sped in front of us, cut us off, and stopped. Men jumped out unfurling a spike strip directly in front of our car.

> “Road’s closed,” we were told. We didn’t ask why.

> Each evening as we returned to our hotel, we would pass a boarding school surrounded by tall fences topped with barbed wire. Socializing in clusters in the twilight, the adolescent students looked very much like prisoners.

> How they came to be there was impossible to discern and we couldn’t safely ask them. With the followers on our heels, any contact would be dangerous. Often we were left with the painful necessity of remaining remote, even when locals tried to be friendly.

This is worth a read: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/06/22/technology/xi...

Re: YouTube takes down Xinjiang videos, forcing rights group to seek alternative

#172

Honest question- what is Google's exposure here? Both Youtube and Google (Youtube's parent company) are blocked in China; those revenue streams were cut off a long time ago. What does Google have to lose by letting Youtube keep the videos up? I'm sure the exposure exists; I recognize that Googlers aren't stupid. I honestly am just curious what that risk is. Having lived in Shanghai for 5 years, I don't see China reve…

How about the -shocking- possibility that google thinks 'genocide' is US/Western rhetoric to stoke tensions and keep nations under western hegemony, and they feel it's their duty to not contribute to that?

Re: YouTube takes down Xinjiang videos, forcing rights group to seek alternative

#173
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you link some more sources about the gray zone? Being banned from Wikipedia just makes sense because they are a blog and not a primary source. I would like to see a writeup of what they get wrong because their podcast Moderate Rebels [1] is very informative and well-researched. [1] https://soundcloud.com/moderaterebels

> Can you link some more sources about the gray zone? Being banned from Wikipedia just makes sense because they are a blog and not a primary source. IIRC, it was mainly banned because "there is consensus that The Grayzone publishes false or fabricated information" (as the summary states). I believe this was one of the examples: https://www.thedailybeast.com/in-nicaragua-torture-is-used-t... (Grayzone presenting the f…

> There were questions about its editorial oversight, but those were secondary. Basically it's one of those sites, like RT, that has a political position and has little problem with pushing disinformation to support it.

I think any news agency is like this.

The strength of journalist freedom is that all such different news agencies can present their facts.

> disinformation

I am pretty sure everyone believed their information and don't want to verify them thoroughly. I mean, even US government does want to verify the so-called evidences of WMD in Iraq...

Re: YouTube takes down Xinjiang videos, forcing rights group to seek alternative

#174
post #164
post #134

I doubt this was YouTube policy, or that it was driven from the top. If it was, we'd have seen a few leaks. This is more likely mass reporting of such content (perhaps organized by State apparatus), exploiting the automated flagging algorithm. In any case, I hope Google takes a stand now.

> If it was, we'd have seen a few leaks. What would there be to leak? Google has taken a very activist stance on moderating their content (probably driven in part by global pressure from a large range of governments). They are actively enforcing their views of what is and isn't true as has been a hot-button political topic through the Coronavirus pandemic. There wouldn't be anything to leak even if they took a more i…

> It is reasonable to treat the Chinese government as a source of authoritative truth, even if the average American doesn't trust them.

Mistrust of the CCP isn't strictly limited to "average Americans". Why should anyone trust them, given that they don't have anything close to a free press or opposition?

Re: YouTube takes down Xinjiang videos, forcing rights group to seek alternative

#175

>Following inquiries from Reuters as to why the channel was removed, YouTube restored it on June 18, explaining that it had received multiple so-called 'strikes' for videos which contained people holding up ID cards to prove they were related to the missing, violating a YouTube policy which prohibits personally identifiable information from appearing in its content >YouTube asked Atajurt to blur the IDs. But Atajurt…

Yeah but what's the issue of posting your own PII? I mean I understand that probably you shouldn't, for various reasons. And posting someone else's PII should absolutely be banned. But if I want to post my ID online, what harm can I make to anyone else?

Not their own, but that of their missing relatives and friends.

Re: YouTube takes down Xinjiang videos, forcing rights group to seek alternative

#176

Remarkable that they're migrating to a decentralized video host: > "Fearing further blocking by YouTube, they decided to back up content to Odysee, a website built on a blockchain protocol called LBRY, designed to give creators more control. About 975 videos have been moved so far." I think this is them? I can't readily verify this (and also everything's written in Kazakh). https://odysee.com/@ATAJURT [late edit] Rel…

There isn't much info about LBRY outside of LBRY itself, though the few links i could find didn't paint a good idea. The most concerning is this: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/50tyub/were_the_nerds... I wonder why they didn't just go with some Peertube instance.

>"why they didn't just"

From the article, I got the impression they're a marginal group of activists doing social media stuff in between jail sentences (they're based in Kazakhstan). They don't exactly have a CTO. I'd imagine tech information asymmetry is an overwhelming factor when FAANG is no longer helping you.

"Serikzhan Bilash, a Xinjiang-born Kazakh activist who co-founded the channel and has been arrested multiple times for his activism..."

Re: YouTube takes down Xinjiang videos, forcing rights group to seek alternative

#177

Honest question- what is Google's exposure here? Both Youtube and Google (Youtube's parent company) are blocked in China; those revenue streams were cut off a long time ago. What does Google have to lose by letting Youtube keep the videos up? I'm sure the exposure exists; I recognize that Googlers aren't stupid. I honestly am just curious what that risk is. Having lived in Shanghai for 5 years, I don't see China reve…

Google still has the Hong Kong version (https://www.google.com.hk/). The CCP can kick them out if they want to. Baidu will be very happy for this to happen..

Re: YouTube takes down Xinjiang videos, forcing rights group to seek alternative

#178
post #97

Honest question- what is Google's exposure here? Both Youtube and Google (Youtube's parent company) are blocked in China; those revenue streams were cut off a long time ago. What does Google have to lose by letting Youtube keep the videos up? I'm sure the exposure exists; I recognize that Googlers aren't stupid. I honestly am just curious what that risk is. Having lived in Shanghai for 5 years, I don't see China reve…

The answer you are looking for is: 1.5 billion people and a GDP with a hockey stick curve

"The Industry feeds on biomass"

Re: YouTube takes down Xinjiang videos, forcing rights group to seek alternative

#179

Honest question- what is Google's exposure here? Both Youtube and Google (Youtube's parent company) are blocked in China; those revenue streams were cut off a long time ago. What does Google have to lose by letting Youtube keep the videos up? I'm sure the exposure exists; I recognize that Googlers aren't stupid. I honestly am just curious what that risk is. Having lived in Shanghai for 5 years, I don't see China reve…

Manufacturing capacity for Pixel phones?

Pixel production has moved at least partially to Vietnam according to some sources.

https://www.techradar.com/news/google-pixel-4a-manufacturing...

Re: YouTube takes down Xinjiang videos, forcing rights group to seek alternative

#180

Honest question- what is Google's exposure here? Both Youtube and Google (Youtube's parent company) are blocked in China; those revenue streams were cut off a long time ago. What does Google have to lose by letting Youtube keep the videos up? I'm sure the exposure exists; I recognize that Googlers aren't stupid. I honestly am just curious what that risk is. Having lived in Shanghai for 5 years, I don't see China reve…

Chinese companies buy ads outside of China you know. Chinese companies are known to pull ads at the stroke of a pen from the United Front Work Department.

They should just go ahead and pull their ads, then, and see what happens. Call their bluff.
Post reply on HN