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I built ByteDance's censorship machine

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Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#81

Post by nomay »

3gg wrote: post #64
avianlyric wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think the original source was in anyway unaware of what they were doing. They’re not making any attempt to excuse their behaviour, just describe and explain what it’s like to work at a Chinese tech company. We shouldn’t admonish those failing to stand-up for our ideals, when they live in a world where those ideals get you at best censored, and at worst disappeared.

You are right, but I was legitimately curious. At the very least, they have the choice of not working in that particular role/company. Further down the article they mention their colleagues had studied journalism and raised some eyebrows, and that he/she wanted to change things from the inside, if only by a little, then realized they were just a powerless cog. I'm going to guess they must be in their late 20s / early…

Tech jobs are the most well-paid in China, sometimes better than gov jobs that require connections, since tech companies have access to the global excess money flow； if you want to buy a condo and get married in big cities, tech jobs are one of the few chances that plebs can get to have a shot, even then, the typical condo prices is like 20 to 40 times their annual income.

People are paying tens of thousands to get employee referral to get into these big tech companies, and I'd say that the majority of their employee are deeply patriotic and believe what they are doing is necessary and right since they are the winners of the social system.

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#82

Post by lawl »

duxup wrote: post #68
lawl wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well i also said i don't think journalism works in the post before. So my position on this is still that i don't think we have a solution.

That seems fair, at least in the context you describe (not sure i'm there but that's not important). I think the 'pay attention to the media source and journalist and decide if you think they're good' is a viable route in the meantime even in the context you provided. The look stuff up yourself kinda thing always reminds me of the conspiracy theories that people develop after they 'research'.... it's so easy to find…

> I think the 'pay attention to the media source and journalist and decide if you think they're good' is a viable route in the meantime even in the context you provided.

I don't like this, again because of filter bubbles. It's very easy to fall into a 'i don't agree with this person, they must be wrong' trap.

> The look stuff up yourself kinda thing always reminds me of the conspiracy theories that people develop after they 'research'.... it's so easy to find what you want to find...

I would argue that this is what we're doing on HN though. HN has a policy of preferring the primary source.

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#83

Post by ksec »

svieira wrote: post #20

> As a young unicorn, ByteDance does not have strong government relationships like other tech giants do, so it's walking a tightrope every second. For those in free countries: when you build moderation tools and use them to silence political dissent "because you have to / to play the game" the game plays you. There is no one "too big" to be crushed by those with the material source of political power [1] and everyone…

>> As a young unicorn, ByteDance does not have strong government relationships like other tech giants do, so it's walking a tightrope every second.

And just to use the same quote. This sentence is just a spin to say the least. Before TikTok, ByteDance's main product was Jinri Toutiao, which translate as Today's Headlines. It was Number one "news" Apps in China.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toutiao

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#84

Post by aabbcc1241 »

908B64B197 wrote: post #72
viklove wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"So how do we do it?" "Just do it." It's easy to say that, but it's obviously not working in the real world. You have to create incentive structures that reward the desired behavior.

Not only that but such a network would be pretty hard to moderate. And by moderate I'm not even talking about the content. I mean completely abused by folks who will turn it into a spam/hosting operation.

What about shareable and forkable blacklist and whitelist for each user to explicitly opt-in?

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#85

Post by inshadows »

throw373782 wrote: post #34

Anonymous source? Check. Unverifiable anecdotal evidence? Check. Somehow I’m not surprised that HN users don’t express the faintest bit of skepticism on topics that confirm their pre-existing biases. “Alarmingly, only 14 percent of American students were able to reliably distinguish fact from opinion in reading tests.” [0] [0] https://bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/pisa-test-chin...

Exactly. Confirmation bias at its best. It plays into views of HN readership so no one here questions the validity, even though there's no way to verify validity. And then you get down votes for critical thinking.

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#86

Post by gnarbarian »

aabbcc1241 wrote: post #84
908B64B197 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that but such a network would be pretty hard to moderate. And by moderate I'm not even talking about the content. I mean completely abused by folks who will turn it into a spam/hosting operation.

What about shareable and forkable blacklist and whitelist for each user to explicitly opt-in?

That's how I see it. moderation should be a service on top of the protocol that users can choose themselves. Perhaps even unique for each person built out by input from the user.

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#87

Post by cwkoss »

sudosysgen wrote: post #77
gnarbarian wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email itself isn't profitable either, but we pay for things that help us with it like spam blocking and outlook

Sure, but email didn't have to compete with anything before it. And even then today email has turned into a surveillance nightmare, not the ideal of the comment above.

Email competed with mail and fax and effectively won.

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#88

Post by cwkoss »

nomay wrote: post #12

Censorship is imo Bytedance's lesser evil. The way this company destroys journalism is its biggest crime. Algorithm-driven "self-media" that ByteDance popularised (with Toutiao) has essentially wiped out news in China, anyone can write sensationalized and fabricated news-style stories on its platforms and compete with "mundane and boring" serious news，AND GET PAID, these self-media are so prevalent and low-brow that…

Is Fox News or MSNBC significantly better?

I think people should be skeptical of any news platform which can easily be centrally controlled and manipulated. However, there is likely journalistic value to be found in some portion of those user-created news stories.

"Vehemently reject"ing user-created news seems to overly discount the flaws of mass media journalism: filter bubbles and misinformation are not new problems, and large organizations tend to have greater bias towards state interests. For example, I don't believe the national outrage over George Floyd would have occurred if everyone still got their news from mass media.

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#89

Post by cwkoss »

reducesuffering wrote: post #67
halfjoking wrote: post #61

This is what corporate media wants in America. The same people behind the Iraq war are now outrage machines trying to drum up support for censorship in the name of stopping a new threat... "homegrown Al Qaeda" wearing a MAGA hat. I know this will be divisive, but the NYT needs to formally retract their reporting of the attacks on the capitol: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-false-and-exaggerated-c...

What happened to Glen? He's clearly angry at media like NYT for narrative spinning and reporting mistakes. This entire article is about how they hastily reported Officer Sisnick was killed by the mob, but as of now we don't definitively know how he died yet. That's basically it. Almost all of his reporting is taking a microscope to US left media and policies, while blatantly failing to report on any egregious errors…

> Almost all of his reporting is taking a microscope to US left media and policies, while blatantly failing to report on any egregious errors with US right media and policies.

There is significant liberal discourse around errors in right media already: its a crowded beat already (and it often devolves into fruitless filter bubble circle jerks).

Non-partisan criticism of liberal discourse is a fairly empty beat in modern discourse, which is why I value his reporting.

Personally, I think the idea that journalists should try to balance both sides of every issue is without basis unless you're specifically trying to make an institution like NYT that tries to cover essentially everything.

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#90

Post by jariel »

xwolfi wrote: post #35
svieira wrote: post #20

> As a young unicorn, ByteDance does not have strong government relationships like other tech giants do, so it's walking a tightrope every second. For those in free countries: when you build moderation tools and use them to silence political dissent "because you have to / to play the game" the game plays you. There is no one "too big" to be crushed by those with the material source of political power [1] and everyone…

Having been raised in a democracy and raising my kids in a dictatorship, I think there's a lot of misunderstanding from both side. People in democracies cannot comprehend how anyone in a dictatorship could live anything else than miserable, and people in dictatorship mostly see people in democracies as hypocrite imperialists who lie to themselves about who truly rules. The funny thing is that, well, it mostly all dep…

" dictatorship mostly see people in democracies as hypocrite imperialists who lie to themselves about who truly rules."

Han China is the most Imperial place on earth, and possibly has been since antiquity. 100x more ethnocentric and classically Imperial that America ever remotely was for example.

Isn't it interesting that someone could contemplate even writing such a thing?

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