31–40 of 67 posts
https://www.reddit.com/r/Drama/comments/6wocla/assassins_cre...
There's something about censorship that always makes it turn ridiculous in the end.
The really scary part of that article is the screenshot of Weibo with every message censored automatically with "content is illegal". If you think this sort of thing could never happen in the west, I think you're underestimating how quickly it could happen. The constitutions and bills of rights of any country are not laws of nature that can't be broken- they're words on paper that governments or populist movements ca…
Try sending a piratebay URL on Facebook Messenger... nope! "Malicious website! Please calm down while we protect you!" (I paraphrase...).
It is funny, just yesterday I read Victor Mair's reasoning why "n" might have been banned [1]: "This is probably out of fear on the part of the government that "N" = "n terms in office", where possibly n > 2; as in "liánrèn n jiè 连任n届" ("n successive terms in office"), which would be forbidden anyway because of the liánrèn 连任 ("continue in office") part." I don't know any Mandarin or Cantonese, but this seems like a…
Native speaker here. My guess is that the censor is not "directly" banning letter "N", but rather, this was a result of some machine learning algorithm that recognizes "N" as part of phrases or sentences that have a high probability of containing other banned words. It is like query expansion in NLP, but in this case it has accidentally banned a word that is widely used in other context. Edit: This looks like a more…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One advantage we have here is that the government is separated enough from the people who have actual executive power to ban content. A sudden ban is quite impossible but we should probably be beware of being a slowly cooked frog.
We could start with entirely well-intentioned self-censorship, e.g. with banning the word "gun" from shopping search :-\
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/02/apple-rep...
I jest, I realize it's not "banned".
The really scary part of that article is the screenshot of Weibo with every message censored automatically with "content is illegal". If you think this sort of thing could never happen in the west, I think you're underestimating how quickly it could happen. The constitutions and bills of rights of any country are not laws of nature that can't be broken- they're words on paper that governments or populist movements ca…
Anyone ambitious and competent enough to gain power would. That is the wisdom of the Constitution: balancing checks on power instead of relying on the “right” leader. Based on that, I would amend your question to: would they use the law against others in power who seek to silence dissidents?
It is funny, just yesterday I read Victor Mair's reasoning why "n" might have been banned [1]: "This is probably out of fear on the part of the government that "N" = "n terms in office", where possibly n > 2; as in "liánrèn n jiè 连任n届" ("n successive terms in office"), which would be forbidden anyway because of the liánrèn 连任 ("continue in office") part." I don't know any Mandarin or Cantonese, but this seems like a…
Weibo also has a history of doing stuff like this, Tiananmen Square is sometimes referred to as May 35th, so they like to play with numbers and their meanings.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> they're words on paper that governments or populist movements can easily ignore For example, China's constitution also contains "Article 35. Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration." However various words and phrases to even mention Article 35 itself are banned in some chat apps, etc... in China even though the…
They can do it without any cognitive dissonance by either classifying certain persons as non-citizens (hence not granted those rights) or by raising some unclear limit to these rights (so those who break national unity, "harmony" or some such aren't covered). An example outside of China: Venezuela's Maduro, paying attention to international sensibilities, now classifies opposition to him and his government as "hate s…
It is funny, just yesterday I read Victor Mair's reasoning why "n" might have been banned [1]: "This is probably out of fear on the part of the government that "N" = "n terms in office", where possibly n > 2; as in "liánrèn n jiè 连任n届" ("n successive terms in office"), which would be forbidden anyway because of the liánrèn 连任 ("continue in office") part." I don't know any Mandarin or Cantonese, but this seems like a…
This feels like satire. China censored a meme sufficiently obscure that people aren't even sure what it was?
The really scary part of that article is the screenshot of Weibo with every message censored automatically with "content is illegal". If you think this sort of thing could never happen in the west, I think you're underestimating how quickly it could happen. The constitutions and bills of rights of any country are not laws of nature that can't be broken- they're words on paper that governments or populist movements ca…
Some are also "shadow-banned" (the default DNS of the ISP return nothing), like the pirate bay (but I think it depends on your ISP).