Live data from Hacker News

Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube

support.google.com

131–140 of 1001 posts

Re: Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube

#131
post #99

The US government should do something about Google, the sooner the better.

This may not be the Federal Government you want to legislate over Google...

Dude, I am from Europe. I don't care what government does it just that somebody does something. In fact, I think the Trump administration is probably perfectly suited to do this.

Re: Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube

#132
As a software engineer I understand these sort of bugs.

A product manager in China asks: can we find a way to prevent people commenting on these videos with comments that contain the word 共匪. Engineer goes away and comes up with a plan to train an AI model to detect these comments. He present's this solution to his manager who informs him that the solution needs to be in place next week, there is no time to gather the required training data and annotate it. There is also no budget for this project.

So the engineer goes off to find a new plan and finds that Google already has a basic spam comment detector which uses simple heuristics to delete comments. He adds a new rule to the detector. Mark as spam if it contains the "共匪" sub-string.

His boss is now happy, it gets sent to a test team in China who confirm that commenting with the word 共匪 on one of the videos results in the comment being deleted. Test passed job done, ticket closed. At no point does this get escalated or reviewed by anyone properly.

And if you don't believe this can happen anywhere, see the Scunthorpe problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

Re: Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube

#134

Google & YouTube employees on HN: how do you justify still working at this company? Enough of the cognitive dissonance. Face your choices and tell me how you square yourself with them. For shame.

It might be easy to say this, but I believe I would quit if I was asked to implement something like that. But perhaps I'd be different if I were paid $300k a year. (I sure hope not, though)

It’s good that you would refuse to do the work. Sadly they can easily find someone who badly needs the money, doesn’t understand the problems the feature creates, or doesn’t care about doing the right thing. If all the workers organized it would make a bigger difference, but the company actively discourages worker organization.

Re: Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube

#136
post #111

Google & YouTube employees on HN: how do you justify still working at this company? Enough of the cognitive dissonance. Face your choices and tell me how you square yourself with them. For shame.

How do you buy hardware? I’m genuinely asking because where I live it’s impossible to buy stuff that wasn’t made in China. It’s almost impossible to lead en ethical life in this day and age if you do anything related to tech.

> I’m genuinely asking because where I live it’s impossible to buy stuff that wasn’t made in China.

So wait, now buying something that was made in China means condoning the CCP? That's a pretty big jump in logic.

Re: Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube

#137

In other news, Youtube will soon be coming to China. Pick your adventure, which do you want? Youtube in CN or write whatever you like? You'll also get videos deleted if you include in them info against WHO advice.

Actually, this is more like: “In other news, you are in China now.”

I don’t care that much about how Chinese citizens let their 共肥 party censor them, but it’s not ok when I am being censored for speech that could be considered offensive to the communist party of China.

Re: Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube

#138
post #50

How far does this go? How far could it go? Can one take out an ad with "共匪" in the text? Adwords against it? Is this censored on Orkut? Would Google consider censoring Gmail? Or Google Voice? Would they consider bleeping Google Meets? Google will need to be very public about who signed off on this and under what framework.

What if "共匪" is presented graphically? Do the sniffers have the image recognition to flag those too?

Generic corporate spam filters can OCR for spam text in pictures and have been able to do that for many years, I would assume Google can too.

Re: Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube

#139

There was a previous unrelated discussion about this just a few hours ago which was climbing to the top of the front page when I saw it. And then just vanished: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221264 It's not flagged, it just went from #13 on the front page to invisible. In a single refresh. How does that work? Looking at the votes and age, it should be in the top 5 of both Ask and the front page. What's the m…

Some users tend to flag stories about China and censorship because they generate a lot of nationalistic and hot headed comments and very little actual intelligent discussion. Just look at the comments attached to this submission.

Re: Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube

#140

Hopefully something like DTube ( https://d.tube/ ) is able to disrupt the Youtube market soon. This google censorship stuff is getting ridiculous.

Got excited for a moment, then I read the "About" section and closed my browser tab at "crypto decentralized".
Post reply on HN