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Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube

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

#471

Post by type0 »

foldr wrote: post #369
manigandham wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by not "actually working"? What is a "conflict-free environment"? What does hate speech have to do with minority populations? Do people within those populations never say hateful things, even to each other? How do you know they never participated in any forums? This sounds like an awful lot of assumptions.

>What does hate speech have to do with minority populations? Come on. There's a debate to be had about hate speech and free speech, but it can't even get started on a reasonable footing if some of the participants don't know enough history to be able to answer this question.

There's a debate to be had about undesirable and uncomfortable speech as well

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

#472

Post by subsubzero »

koheripbal wrote: post #112

I think a more fundamental problem is a single private company having a near-monopoly on various public communication channels, and having financial interests in various global dictatorships. The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this. Google's "We're a private company" get-out-jail-free card cannot continue to apply.

Here are some numbers to keep you up at night, they are very scary:

Google controls 91.89% of the search market [1]

G controls 68% of the browser market [2]

G's android is on 84% of phones operating systems [3]

G has 73% of the search advertising market [4]

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/544400/market-share-of-i... [3] https://beta.trimread.com/articles/16433 [4] https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-gaining-google-search-a...

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

#473

Post by londons_explore »

humaid wrote: post #59

Similar happens with the name "Eric Ciaramella", which YouTube instantly deletes. This is a name of a CIA whistle blower. It would be interesting to know what other words are in the YouTube censor list.

Anyone at Google, you can see the complete list here: http://cs/Eric+Ciaramella

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

#474

Post by [deleted] »

Lewton wrote: post #309
missosoup wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The submission I linked is not flagged (at least as far as I can see from my account?). Either there's some non-intuitive stuff going on with the way submissions stay on the front page, or HN soft-nuked it. Either way I think we deserve an explanation and a clear understanding of the underlying rules.

It takes some amount of people flagging it before it shows up as [flagged] but flagging submissions affect rankings before it reaches that point. On top of that "Ask HN" posts also have some modifier on them that makes them drop quicker, these two effects seem to be cumulative, explaining why it dropped so quickly

[deleted]

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

#475

Post by sangnoir »

cryptonector wrote: post #388
willis936 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. It's almost like the missions of popular websites fall in line with protecting individuals against government-sponsored attacks on whistleblowers. Witness protection isn't some flashy thing in movies. It's real and society benefits from it.

What are you talking about? The impeachment is over. Everyone knows the whistleblower's identity -- it can't be protected. Horse, barn, door.

I actively didn't want to know the identity of this whistle-blower. I wish parent had put the name at the end of the comment so I could skip it entirely.

I will not take part in some chilling-effect and/or stochastic terrorism effort (see Ping Pong Pizza incident); I understand why Google, wikipedia and Facebook wouldn't want to be party to that either.

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

#476

Post by the8472 »

philwelch wrote: post #383
the8472 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Using such an approach on the global channels like YT comments isn't an option (unless they choose to Balkanize them, and let only Chinese commenters talk to Chinese people). That doesn't seem unreasonable. They could hide filtered comments from chinese users. This would allow the rest of the world to be unaffected by chinese regulation and "allowed" speech between chinese and foreigners.

But this is a case of Chinese speech in the Chinese language. If I used the English phrase “communist bandits”, YT presumably wouldn’t care. YT is applying Chinese regulations to Chinese comments written in Chinese.

People outside china might be writing in chinese. Should the CCP be able to regulate speech of all chinese-speaking people globally? Should the UK be able to regulate all english speech globally?

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

#477

Post by shadowgovt »

davesque wrote: post #451
shadowgovt wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you speaking as a Google employee or just from personal opinion? The distinction is irrelevant; were I speaking as a Google employee I would still be speaking from personal opinion, not on behalf of my employer. > Also, this viewpoint is naive. Simply more information isn't better. What if all that information was about the flat earth theory and nothing else? It's not though; it's "all" the world's information…

> The distinction is irrelevant; were I speaking as a Google employee I would still be speaking from personal opinion, not in behalf of my employer. Seems like word splitting and I disagree. If you're working at Google, then your opinion is an answer to OP's question. If you're not, then your opinion doesn't count as a Google employee's justification for continuing to work at Google.

My opinion is my own and OP can take that as they will (because the opinion they'd get from a Google employee will be of the same weight relative to the "company's opinion" unless their thoughts have been cleared by legal).

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

#478

Post by JumpCrisscross »

nine_k wrote: post #405
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, the idea that profit driven management is a better juror of freedom than our democratic society. Whatever they decide, they owe you no explanation or recourse. After all, these people are 'accountable' to wall street. To them 2008 and Boeing 737 were an unforceable turn of fortune, and they should bear no harm from it.

Please remember that democracy is a way to control a shared resource by the opinion of the majority, and it makes the minority submit to the decision of the majority. A democracy is more free than a tyranny, but it's not freedom incarnate. If 1.5B Chinese people totally democratically voted to ban particular words from usage worldwide, and were very serious at enforcing their decision, would you conform? I'd very muc…

Suffice it to say, the line between majoritarian rule and “true” democracy has been debated since Sophocles. Elections per se do not a democracy make.

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

#479

Post by fennecfoxen »

op03 wrote: post #400
shadowgovt wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is it replaced with "I'm an American company?" There's a deep rabbit-hole of hyper-nationalism right next to the deep rabbit-hole of hyper-corporatism. Does a YouTube beholden to the US government get banned from being used in China at all? And if it does, what happens when China creates a competing product that is more successful than YouTube, and YouTube gets displaced globally by a product that is beholden to…

Wikipedia is the way to go. Why have the hypercorporatists and hypernationalists not replaced it??? Because fuckers in both those camps think it has to make money as a condition to exist. It's their weakness. Requires imagination to exploit.

Comments like these have limited meaning in the context of a conversation about Google and YouTube. Wikipedia does not aspire to be YouTube. Wikipedia does not aspire to be Gmail. Wikipedia does not aspire to be a general-purpose search engine.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.

You may be thinking of the various wiki brands run by the Wikimedia Foundation, which doesn't aspire to be any of these things, either, but at least entertains the aspiration of being a better Google News with WikiNews. (But do not confuse WikiNews with WikiTribune, the latter of which is a non-WMF project of Jimmy Wales, originally aspiring to be news, now aspiring to be a social network).

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