YouTube is Deleting Comments With Two Phrases That Insult China's Communist Party (theverge.com) 109
YouTube is automatically deleting comments that contain certain Chinese-language phrases related to criticism of the country's ruling Communist Party (CCP). The company confirmed to The Verge this was happening in error and that it was looking into the issue. From a report: "This appears to be an error in our enforcement systems and we are investigating," said a YouTube spokesperson. The company did not elaborate on how or why this error came to be, but said it was not the result of any change in its moderation policy. But if the deletions are the result of a simple mistake, then it's one that's gone unnoticed for six months. The Verge found evidence that comments were being deleted as early as October 2019, when the issue was raised on YouTube's official help pages and multiple users confirmed that they had experienced the same problem. Comments left under videos or in live streams that contain the words that mean "communist bandit" or "50-cent party" are automatically deleted in around 15 seconds, though their English language translations and Romanized Pinyin equivalents are not.
Palmer Luckey tweeted about this issue first.
Palmer Luckey tweeted about this issue first.
Fuck Youtube and Fuck the ChiComs (Score:4, Insightful)
Fuck them all
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Right now they're fucking us all, as evidenced by the story. Not the other way around.
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Private company, first amendment doesn't apply herp derp.
That's the standard response to all Youtube censorship complaints to date.... Is that suddenly inoperative now that the echo chamber appears to be upset with this new bit of censorship?
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Private company, first amendment doesn't apply herp derp.
That's the standard response to all Youtube censorship complaints to date....
That is only a valid argument about whether what Google is doing is legal. Not about whether it is ethical or moral.
Since YouTube is already banned in China and has no hope of being unbanned, it isn't clear what Google would have gained by deleting the offending videos.
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it isn't clear what Google would have gained by deleting the offending videos.
It's only unclear if you're still indulging Google with the benefit of the doubt. If you aren't still deluding yourself then it's perfectly obvious; CCP doesn't tolerate disrespect regardless of whether their subjects can observe it and actively intervenes to prevent it wherever it has the power to do so. That sphere of power now includes all high profile US corporations, and so Google complies.
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YouTube's Censorship and Demonitization is old (Score:5, Informative)
I have a hard time believing this was an "accident" but who knows, maybe it is Hanlon's Razor:
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
Google has a history of intentionally demonitizing certain words [google.com] and numbers.
Re:YouTube's Censorship and Demonitization is old (Score:4, Insightful)
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Considering the well documented and publicly admitted to political leanings of the people working these jobs, how much monetary compensation would they actually ask for to do something that they would view as supporting their comrades across the pond against the evils of capitalist pigs and other far right ideologues attacking them?
Re: YouTube's Censorship and Demonitization is old (Score:1)
Pointing out that picking stupid fights you can't win isn't helping, isn't siding with China, it is siding with common sense.
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Yes, this is the view among the Western Far Left circles who have to twist themselves into pretzels to explain away the Soviet Union, PRC and other Communist hellholes. The typical excuse is one you are citing: "but if world worked as I imagine it rather than as it actually is, Communism would work really well!"
Nevermind that this is a hypothesis that is well tested with time, and has far more dead, enslaved and in extreme privation during real life testing than the second bloodiest ideology of the same tim
Go look up Viki1999 on YouTube (Score:1)
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We don't know the death rate, because Communists don't give a flying fuck about human life. That's one of the natural ideological conclusions of Communism, the utter irrelevance of individual.
Which is why they could condemn millions, tens of millions at a time to slow death of starvation, or direct death from executions with no pangs on their conscience. Communism utterly dehumanizes "class enemies" and makes them less relevant than rodents.
And mismanagement is a result of communism, not an outside factor.
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Nah. They're a far left totalitarian kleptocracy. Which isn't much different from a far right totalitarian kleptocracy. But China started hard left, and they didn't magically go right.
In a Kleptocracy there is no left or right (Score:1)
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Considering the well documented and publicly admitted to political leanings of the people working these jobs ...
China despises the Baizuo (White-Left) even more than pure capitalists.
And the contempt is reciprocated. American progressives want their country to be like Denmark, not China. They are just confused and think Denmark is "socialist" when it is actually a thoroughly capitalist country.
Baizuo [wikipedia.org]
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Denmark is a lot less capitalist than China. Until you have been there and seen how it works it's hard to understand your heavily capitalist China is. Literally millions of small businesses, and huge ones, giant malls, huge B2B markets, kilometer after kilometer of factories.
And none of the socialist trappings that Denmark has like healthcare, safety nets, workers' rights, consumer rights, accessible justice etc. Oh and no democracy of course, socialism is very much about the devolution of power.
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Denmark is a lot less capitalist than China.
No it isn't. Socialism means public ownership of the means of production. The Chinese state owns about 25% of productive capacity. The Danish state owns far less. In Denmark, even the post office is privatized.
Until you have been there and seen how it works it's hard to understand
I lived in China for years and speak conversational Mandarin. I understand everything but the jokes.
China is mostly Capitalist. But they still have a huge state-run sector, especially in heavy industry.
And none of the socialist trappings that Denmark has like healthcare, safety nets, workers' rights, consumer rights, accessible justice etc.
None of those things have anything to do with socialism. You are confusing "social democracy"
Re:YouTube's Censorship and Demonitization is old (Score:4, Informative)
If you want to get all purest then socialism is about workers owning the means of production, not the government. In that sense Denmark is a lot closer because workers have much more of a stake in the companies they work for than their Chinese counterparts.
Denmark is a social democracy, not pure socialism.
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??? workers owning the means or production... not saying your wrong , but first time I've ever heard that definition? can you site a source or 2?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I can see your definition in here if I stretch it a bit, but I've never herd of even a proposed system 'other then distributionalism' where the _WORKS_ are considered the 'society' that owns the means of production.
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Stretch? The very first sentence of your Wikipedia link says
"Socialism is a political, social, and economic philosophy encompassing a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership[1][2][3] of the means of production[4][5][6][7] and workers' self-management of enterprises."
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Maybe but communism is not the same thing as socialism. There are some similarities but they are different philosophies and socialists are not communists and vice-versa.
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It would be really nice if leftist fucks such as yourself would stop slandering Denmark. And rest of us Nordics while you're at it.
Some of us executed socialists as young as six years old just to get to be market economies that we are, rather than socialist hellholes.
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Chinese are also an extremely pragmatic culture. This is where "everything is fair in any competition" as opposed to Western "everything is fair in love and war" comes from.
That's why when you deal with Chinese you can trust them to be useful to you as long as they think it's in their interest to be useful to you, and not a moment longer. Something that anyone who who worked in China knows well.
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YouTube has shown a willingness to bow down and kiss China's ass
Google Has Ended Its Plans For A Censored Chinese Search Engine
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j... [forbes.com]
Confirmed: Google Terminated Project Dragonfly, Its Censored Chinese Search Engine
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j... [forbes.com]
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YouTube isn't accessible in China. The only reason the CCP is doing it is because YouTube is accessible everywhere else (especially say, Taiwan) and they want to control the messaging.
Normally they do it by the dollar method - it's how China bent the NBA and Blizzard. But since Google and other r
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The CCP might be gaming the Youtube censorship algorithm to block things they don't like. That wouldn't require the management of Youtube to have been bought off.
That is objectively not the case here. This is not about demonetization, or community strikes. Those systems are different than this.
This is comments being silently deleted if they contained these anti-China phrases. YouTube videos with the same characters in their title or description are not being deleted. This is different in kind from a YouTube video being auto-demonetized if the title contains "gay".
This is a different mechanism, one that's either entirely new, or new to the majority of YouTubers w
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maybe it is Hanlon's Razor
Ol' boy is wagging the dog [cia.gov]
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When ever I work with someone with SQL, and they have to use the Delete statement I tell them, to do a Select statement, until you got the where clause correct, then you change it to a delete statement.
I tell them that because from experience.
Heck it can be just as possible as Google was trying to delete Anti-Communist category but actually deleted all the data in that category.
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When ever I work with someone with SQL, and they have to use the Delete statement I tell them, to do a Select statement, until you got the where clause correct, then you change it to a delete statement.
So you live fast and die young, eh?
I tell them to do the select statement until it's right, duplicate it and throw a not in there, compare the two to see if that's what they expect, sacrifice a goat, then change it to a delete statement.
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When ever I work with someone with SQL, and they have to use the Delete statement I tell them, to do a Select statement, until you got the where clause correct, then you change it to a delete statement.
One of the completely daft things about SQL is that your advice does not work. You cannot, in general, turn a select statement into a delete statement. For really simple queries it works with a little syntax massage, but anything more complex does not -- and for the simple ones you are unlikely to get it wrong anyway.
SQL is an absolute abomination of a language. The only reason people tolerate it is that practically all programmers ignore all the query stuff and use SQL is a simple table storage. They do al
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Comments left under videos or in live streams that contain the words that mean "communist bandit" or "50-cent party" are automatically deleted in around 15 seconds, though their English language translations and Romanized Pinyin equivalents are not.
If that's not an accident, what is it? Why would they leave Pinyin?
Who'd guess that a massive set of algorithms that try to analyze and deal with vast armies of internet trolls might make mistakes? If there's a doubt, better to assume nefarious actions.
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They told The Virge it was a mistake and they will fix it.
That pretty much disproves that it's at the behest of the CCP because of it was they couldn't just stop it.
Well be interesting to see how it happened. Infiltration, hacking?
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They told The Virge it was a mistake and they will fix it.
Which in YouTube lawyer speak likely translates into: "It was a mistake that you found out about it. We'll make sure you don't find out about it next time. In completely unrelated news, we're proud to introduce our newest feature: double-secret blind ghostbanning--comments made by undesirable users will now only interact with a chatbot ai programmed with reCAPTCHA and Star Trek erotica fan-fiction--hope you like chimneys and fire hydrants!"
That pretty much disproves that it's at the behest of the CCP because of it was they couldn't just stop it.
That does no such thing.
Well be interesting to see how it happened.
It will be memory-holed by even those in th
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Youtube red china! (Score:3)
YouTube Red china!
we also use our AI to auto tag protestors.
And if china wants we can live stream Show trails as well.
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Doesn't make sense.
YouTube is blocked in China because they don't cooperate with the government. Deleting a few comments won't change that, there are huge numbers of videos they find unacceptable.
Also this isn't how Chinese censorship works. Look at Bing. Microsoft cooperate with China and the Chinese versions of services are censored, but they are under no obligation to remove content from the Western versions.
If this was cooperation it wouldn't look like this.
Don't do evil (Score:5, Insightful)
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Just think what they do for the Democrat party
Google news?
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Are they the highest bidder?
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region block it (Score:1)
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Which region did you have in mind?
Key phrase guess #1 (Score:2)
I guess the first one is "Hong Kong is not China"
interesting how intent is decided (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: interesting how intent is decided (Score:2)
How can we know for sure if it is an accident or not?
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How can we know for sure if it is an accident or not?
...In either case.
You don't see how your making the GP's point?
How it works (Score:4, Insightful)
Hopefully Slashdot will format this as an ordered list of the steps to create fully-automatic censorship:
It doesn't take much, and this is not an indication that Twitter is being controlled by China. It's just an indication that yet another massively-complex system is massively complex, and AI doesn't actually tame that beast as much as the public has been led to believe.
Re:How it works (Score:5, Insightful)
Stupid Juvenile Whiners are slowly having an impact.
For example, a black man was telling a personal story [themarysue.com] of how someone else was being racist and he got flagged by HR for using the n word.
When you have to censor history you are already fucked.
The problem with AI is that it has no context to understand if someone is simply retelling history or insulting someone else.
South Park even poked fun [youtube.com] of a similar event.
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AI should never be used to censor social media posts. People are very good at adapting if nothing else. 'OK'.
It would be better to uncensored and have those consequences the the consequences of AI censorship.
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And that 'someone who doesn't like' something is able to manipulate said system by either paying many people to complain or creating sufficiency complicated bots to complain for them.
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Hopefully Slashdot will format this as an ordered list of the steps to create fully-automatic censorship:
It doesn't take much, and this is not an indication that Twitter is being controlled by China. It's just an indication that yet another massively-complex system is massively complex, and AI doesn't actually tame that beast as much as the public has been led to believe.
You just got done explaining "How it works" in half a dozen steps, so let's stop making excuses for a system that doesn't even deserve to have the letters A or I included in its name. The only thing artificial here, is assuming that kind of system has intelligence when in reality it's just a bunch of simple rules with an "gone viral" threshold limiter.
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I can explain how it works that easily. On the other hand, how to actually do it at a scale required by YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, or practically any other major social media site, is a much more complicated process that almost certainly needs an AI to keep up with the ever-growing number of connected people and the infinite variety of ways we find to antagonize each other.
It is interesting (Score:2)
Especially since YouTube isn't even allowed in China. Was the job of writing the filtering code outsourced to Chinese programmers?
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didn't need to be. China could manipulate the system from the outside but understanding how to manipulate the AI with false accounts or from the inside by hacking it. There are plenty of well paid people in China just as smart as the smartest google engineers.
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For the same reason that Twitter distorting the public conversation is bad, and for the same reason that Facebook creating echo chambers is bad, and for the same reason that censorship anywhere is bad.
Yes, they're a company in private ownership. Yes, they can block whatever they want on their platform. But yes, it is censorship.
That's why it's bad.
Communism (Score:5, Insightful)
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What would you expect from a four bit dictatorship?
The response is a lie (Score:2)
This appears to be an error in our enforcement systems and we are investigating
Anyone with basic understanding of how programming works will know this is a blatant lie.
Detecting and deleting words that are specific to a subject of censorship are two distinct and deliberate algorithms that need to be written by a human. There's no way a bug can do this. This is the same type of lie that Lenovo used when they were caught stealing passwords and browsing history.
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You need to refresh your understanding of "programming". We're in 2020, where all the comment moderation is done by neural networks which are trained using various factors. These are black boxes. They evolve over time and we try to push them in the right direction but we don't write every rule they come up with. We give them scores. They come up with rules. Sometimes the rule they come up with are racist, biased, unfair, wrong, ... and after a not-so-easy study we figure out why and adjust.
So no, they don'
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content moderation should never be done by AI because it will never work 'correctly' It would be much better to have no moderation the AI moderated content.
Censorship of anything they don't agree with. (Score:3)
1st off it should be noted that youtube is a public corporation so as such their servers and services are closer to private property and do not fall under constitutional freedom of speech,
You tube pulls anything that
1) might cost them money
2) has a political bias that is 'too extreme' and they don't agree with.
An example I personally witenessed:
I was sent a video of 2 doctors ( aka professionally trained as scientists in their field).
They after looking at the data they had collected were advocation that it was time to have a 'conversation' about when and how it was appropriate to start reopening the state. They were careful to avoid political topics and focused primary on their interpretation of the data and the science.
A few minutes after I watched the video it was removed from youtube for 'violation of policy'.
So apparently a qualified scientist offering an 'offending' position based on science on a controversial subject violates you tubes policy.
This , I hope , should strike anyone as wrong regardless of political bias or disagreement about interpretation of the science.
For the records it was these guys I personally think they are kind of nuts:
https://www.foxnews.com/media/... [foxnews.com]
but given that youtube is one of the primary ways people share information we as a society need to start considering if allowing corporation to police our news and shape or politics based off of profit and bias is good for the society and what if anything should be done about it. The free market is unlikely to fix it because sometimes freedom and morality are not profitable.
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You tube pulls anything that
So they are acting as the de facto publisher by exercising editorial control. So, no more safe harbor [wikipedia.org] for them. Let the lawsuits begin.
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That's not how safe harbor works. Safe harbor was designed explicitly to allow firms to moderate discussions in any way they wanted without being liable for the third-party content or the moderation decisions. The only thing they have to do to have safe harbor is not have editorial control over the content itself. That is, they can't tell the authors what to write, order changes to the finished product, or tell them how to write it. They ARE explicitly allowed to have editorial control over the curation of
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...but given that youtube is one of the primary ways people share information we as a society need to start considering if allowing corporation to police our news and shape or politics based off of profit and bias is good for the society and what if anything should be done about it. The free market is unlikely to fix it because sometimes freedom and morality are not profitable.
So, for-profit cable news channels should also be dismantled? That's what you're advocating for.
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meh... I didn't say that. I said there needs to be a broader conversation. It used to be that news channels were required to give 'equal time' to opposing views ... the history of that whole mess is a bit too much to go into here. I do think somehow causing the news channels to be distributed between more companies might be a good start. I think right now over 90% of them are owned by less then 5 companies which means they are controlled by a very small and elite group. Political bias is rife. If you
Google Has Chosen Sides. (Score:2, Informative)
We knew this already, but Google has made it a little more obvious; they've chosen to side with Red China, and not with the United States.
The next time Google bitches about unfair treatment from the government, just remember that they are NOT on our side.
YouTube has been pwned by Chinese hackers (Score:2)
At least Winnie-the-Pooh is still OK (Score:2)
Phew!
Screw youtube! Iâ(TM)ll build my own YouTube! (Score:1)
Screw youtube! Iâ(TM)ll build my own YouTube! With blackjack, and hookers...! In fact, forget about youtube!
I think not (Score:2)
Ever notice how these "accidents" and "errors" always go in one direction, that being the direction that best serves the CCP's goals?
The censors got caught, plain and simple. From YouTube/Google to the the NBA to the World Health Organization, big corps and orgs everywhere are either terrified of China or kissing up to them for those sweet, sweet revenue streams.
I wonder what the world will do when China gets around to completely crushing Hong Kong and Taiwan? It's coming. The CCP tolerates no dissent an
Comment removed (Score:3)
Capitalism betrays democracy. (Score:2)
Curtis James Jackson III will be so annoyed. (Score:1)
So much harder to get hoes in the club.
Qustion: How hard would it be. (Score:1)
Taibazi (Score:1)
"Taibazi" (slashdot doesn't support Chinese characters) also been delete. That word is offending to Taiwanese (Why CCP want to delete this? Unreasonable). So I think Youtube just took the insulting words and auto delete them.
"Taibazi" is in the insulting words list (https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh/%E6%AD%A7%E8%A7%86%E8%AF%AD), same as that 2 phrases.
Jennifer Zeng is a Falun Gong member. (Score:1)
No wonder she will say such words. Normal discuss shouldn't tell this word because of insult.
There's no agenda for communist takeover (Score:2)
It is entirely accidental that praise for Donald Trump AND bashing of Communist China is equally frowned upon by Big Tech.
If CCP would have bought Big Tech, it would look exactly like that.
It's not an error. They have not fixed it. (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] (See if you can see comments here)
Google is in bed with the Chinese government (Score:1)
Not only that... (Score:1)
Fixing the inconsistency (Score:1)
The company confirmed to The Verge this was happening in error and that it was looking into the issue.
And to fix it, they'll start also deleting comments containing those phrases when they appear in other languages and Chinese language representations?
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> What right do US corporations have to allowing the insult of the duly elected Government of foreign countries?
Corporations are for legal purposes "persons" [wikipedia.org] due to the shenanigans of Co. v. Riggs (203 U.S. 243 (1906)). Also,
Re: Good (Score:1)
The Supreme Court made a horr
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You most definitely have to choice to not work for any corporation of ANY size. Most people work for privately held small businesses. A significant percentage of the population work for their own businesses. A large number of people don't work at all.
Your shrill claim that of being forced to work for anyone is just whiny victim hood. All the adults are laughing at our childishness right now.
Re: Good (Score:1)
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no , the made a very good decision. The people who own property ( especially small businesses and closely held private corporations) do not loose their right to freedom of speech/ religion etc not even as it involves what they do with their private property regardless of the fact they are selling things they currently own ( goods or services they pay people to provide). So in a very real way the 'rights' of the persons who own things transfers to the businesses they own.
Think about it, if you decide to se
Re: Good (Score:2)
The rulings are horrible because they don't say a corporation is personal property. Or an extension of a person as their personal property.
The rulings say "a corporation IS A PERSON".
That's fucked up and such a twist of what the Founders were all about, which was PERSONAL FREEDOM and RIGHTS for NATURAL BORN PEOPLE. Not corporations. The rulings somehow magically turn corporations into people! They're all turning in thei