[HN Gopher] I built ByteDance's censorship machine
___________________________________________________________________
I built ByteDance's censorship machine
Author : jbegley
Score : 112 points
Date : 2021-02-19 13:38 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.protocol.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.protocol.com)
| throw373782 wrote:
| 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...
| fernandotakai wrote:
| >Unverifiable anecdotal evidence? Check.
|
| i didn't see any evidence in comment post that contradicts the
| post.
|
| the only link i see right now is for an article praising
| chinese kids, which is highly interesting given the contents of
| the original post.
| zepto wrote:
| > Somehow I'm not surprised that HN users _don't express_ the
| faintest bit of skepticism on topics that confirm their pre-
| existing biases.
|
| Could it be that you are drawing conclusions without evidence
| here?
|
| How do you know anything about the skepticism or biases of
| those who _don't express them_?
| Jonanin wrote:
| Uh huh... don't kid yourself that this is exclusively a problem
| with Americans. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-
| desk/the-post-trut...
| jryle70 wrote:
| > Anonymous source? Check.
|
| > Unverifiable anecdotal evidence? Check.
|
| Have you ever wondered why there is no Edward Snowden of China,
| despite the fact the Chinese equivalence of NSA is undoubtedly
| as much aggressive, if not more? Such a person would have been
| suicidal, not to mention no news organizations would be willing
| to publish their information. In such an environment anonymous
| source is the norm. It has to be.
|
| Unfortunately that also provides plausible deniability, as your
| post illustrates.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Isn't Chinese surveillance and censorship completely out in
| the open? Why would there need to be an Edward Snowden? There
| is already gobs of evidence of total surveillance, so why
| would someone risk their skin to expose what is already known
| and established fact?
| DevKoala wrote:
| > When I was at ByteDance, we received multiple requests from the
| bases to develop an algorithm that could automatically detect
| when a Douyin user spoke Uyghur, and then cut off the livestream
| session.
|
| Disgusting.
| DevKoala wrote:
| This comment is getting downvoted. How? At least make an
| argument for why this is not a disgusting practice.
| 3gg wrote:
| > At the time, I was a tech worker at ByteDance, where I helped
| develop tools and platforms for content moderation. In other
| words, I had helped build the system that censored accounts like
| mine.
|
| What do you mean "in other words"? Are there other words? How
| does one get into this situation without realizing what they are
| really doing? It looks obvious in retrospect, but what is not
| obvious back then?
| avianlyric wrote:
| 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.
| 3gg wrote:
| 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 30s now.
| burlesona wrote:
| Reading this, it was hard not to think of the direction US
| Academia, and to a lesser degree the government in general, is
| headed. We're having deeply uncomfortable dilemmas with free
| speech - and whether speech at scale is fundamentally different.
| Ten years ago I could never have imagined an apparatus such as
| described in this article existing in the US, but today it seems
| possible. Perhaps still unlikely, but possible.
| faitswulff wrote:
| I was recently blocked for 24 hours from Facebook for testing
| the phrase "fucking British" in the context of colonial
| history. Note that I was testing it after another poster asked
| if their own comment saying the same thing had been censored.
| After having my test comment removed, I confirmed that "okay,
| it seems automated" which was _itself_ flagged as being hate
| speech somehow, and my ban instated immediately.
|
| My contacts proceeded to discuss ways to get around the filter
| (use idioms, odd characters, Unicode) and I was immediately
| reminded of how people get around Chinese censorship.
| duxup wrote:
| That seems like an entirely different topic from what is
| described in the article.
| orange_joe wrote:
| While most of the post is what I would expect, the minority
| language censorship was unexpected. It's another sign of China's
| ethnocentrism/Han Supremacist culture play out. It's a real shame
| to see this sort of enforced death of linguistic diversity.
| exhaze wrote:
| How come you found it unexpected?
| nomay wrote:
| Live streaming platforms literally detect and warn against
| "unauthorized foreigners" from appearing on the screen.
|
| TV channels like BBC (for high-end hotels) are being monitored
| real-time to black-out sensitive parts, books mailed or
| imported from overseas get pages ripped out, even entries in
| dictionaries get painted black.
|
| Don't underestimate the seriousness of the censorship, it's
| among the few things communists are actually good at.
| jaflo wrote:
| Could you elaborate on the first point? Do they run live race
| detection on streams and cut off access?
| hkmaxpro wrote:
| The stream was cutoff after a white guy appeared for a
| minute. If it's not race detection, I don't know what it
| is.
|
| https://twitter.com/JoshuaDummer/status/1280877750245453828
|
| https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3963271
| nomay wrote:
| I counldn't find that tweet from a female streaming on Doyu
| that got a warning for featuring her white boyfriend, but
| found another news.
|
| https://en.pingwest.com/a/6595
| jbob2000 wrote:
| We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in
| ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people
| in power WANT society to look like.
|
| My company recently moved away from animated characters back to
| using humans in their ads. Most of the people in our ads are
| mixed race, you can't really tell if they're asian, white,
| arab, or "tanned".
|
| So it's the same promotion of a genetic look, just with a
| different group of people.
| gumby wrote:
| > We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you
| see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what
| the people in power WANT society to look like.
|
| What? It's all about the money.
|
| Ads, and tv (which is simply a honeypot to draw ad viewers)
| want to connect with as many viewers as possible in order to
| sell as much product (cars, cereal, or whatever) as possible.
|
| In the 1950s US the only people with appreciable spending
| power were white parents, thus those were the ads. Magazines,
| which could be more finely targeted, were more diverse
| overall, though demographically siloed.
|
| Society does not look like that (it never did, but the $$$
| distribution did). Ads and TV are on the trailing edge, not
| the leading edge. And TV looks demographically more like the
| people I see, and more like my family, than it ever has
| before.
|
| I have no idea what the phrase "people in power WANT society
| to look like" really means.
| rchaud wrote:
| > I have no idea what the phrase "people in power WANT
| society to look like" really means.
|
| OP wasn't exactly ambiguous. Only thing that was missing
| from "people in power" was maybe three sets of parantheses
| enclosing it.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| This seems like a ridiculously uncharitable explanation
| to the point of bad faith. A better interpretation that
| is also accurate would be that the people in power are
| people with money and influence.
| thisiszilff wrote:
| It's true, in a way, society looks like what the people in
| power want society to look like because the people in power
| are those with money and people who figure out how to make
| more money get power. It's like you say, that TV and ads
| are on the trailing edge as people figure out how to keep
| up with the distribution of money in society.
| nemothekid wrote:
| I think it's strange that you equate "using racially
| ambiguous people" to promotion of said group. The fictional
| marketing company and the CCP have very different goals and I
| think you are projecting your own personal biases onto modern
| television marketing.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you
| see in ads and on TV, it 's always an idealized look at what
| the people in power WANT society to look like._
|
| The actual explanation is simpler and more crass: It's about
| what sells to the target audience. At least for large
| campaigns, these things are thoroughly vetted.
|
| If you're uncomfortable with some aspect of an ad, you aren't
| the target audience.
| jbob2000 wrote:
| And you don't think the CCP's promotion of Han is the same
| thing?
| duxup wrote:
| Promotion?
|
| They described simply cutting off a stream because of the
| language spoken.
| jbob2000 wrote:
| Ok, and if my company's marketing team proposed an ad
| with a bunch of white people in it, they would also be
| cut off.
|
| Same shit, different process.
| duxup wrote:
| I can't comment on what your marketing team is up to but
| I don't know of any state level limitation on the
| demographics of ads. I see plenty of ads with white only
| folks in it...
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| It is definitively not. CCP has zero interest in sales.
| It is interested in preserving the party by controlling
| the populace, with special emphasis on ideology.
|
| The activist Left in the West is grass-roots censorship,
| which is a completely different problem from a top-down,
| military-backed authoritarian regime. Granted, the former
| seems hard at work trying to produce the latter.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| Absolute not.
|
| Even disregarding your false promotion comparison, what
| about the other side?
|
| CCP 'promotes' (actually carries out) the brutal
| persecution of non-Han and specifically Uighurs in part
| facilitated propaganda ('ads')
|
| US corporations are not forced by the government to
| include for instance only one community or exclude
| another in their communications.
|
| Us corporations are not de facto owned by the government
| and do not have the same goal of consolidating power to
| maintain the CCP's (and increasingly just one man at the
| top's) grip over its own citizens.
|
| In the US many spend lots of money lobbying to keep the
| government out of their business!
| noobface1337 wrote:
| Where is this idea of Han supremacy coming from? I've known
| many Han who, when they had the option, they chose to be
| classified as a minority on their ID cards, since you know,
| minorities in China get far better treatment.
|
| And if we were to talk about death of languages, maybe you need
| to realise that it's actually a much worse problem in Anglo-
| Saxon countries than anywhere else
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_time_of_e...
| yorwba wrote:
| Most speakers of minority languages in China are Han Chinese.
| The censors who interrupted live streams when a non-Mandarin
| language was spoken were most likely speakers of a minority
| language, just a different one, which is why they didn't
| understand anything. So I don't think describing it as "Han
| Supremacism" is accurate. Presumably they didn't interrupt the
| streams because they felt ethnically superior to the speaker,
| but because they're liable if something illegal gets said and
| they don't censor it.
|
| And note their reason for not automatically blocking Uyghur
| content: "We eventually decided not to do it: We didn't have
| enough Uyghur language data points in our system, and the most
| popular livestream rooms were already closely monitored." Which
| I guess means they have a dedicated group of Uyghur speakers on
| staff to censor those streams.
| hkmaxpro wrote:
| Douyin even banned speakers of Cantonese [0][1], a language
| spoken by 80M+ speakers and a top-20 language in the world [2].
|
| Cantonese was widely spoken in Guangdong until the CCP actively
| wiped it out [3]. Among the 204 members of the CCP Central
| Committee, only 2 are from Guangdong [4]. Guangdong generated
| the highest GDP among all 31 administrative divisions [5], and
| doesn't get its fair share of high ranking officials.
|
| It's not Han supremacy. It's Mandarin-Han supremacy.
|
| [0]
| https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200402/03110144220/tikto...
|
| [1]
| https://www.scmp.com/abacus/culture/article/3078365/chinas-v...
| (paywalled)
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...
|
| [3] https://www.businessinsider.com/china-is-forcing-its-
| biggest...
|
| [4] https://www.sohu.com/a/429814378_469134 (in Chinese)
|
| [5]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_administrative...
| nomay wrote:
| 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
| fact-checking has been rendered futile.
|
| It now has democratized censorship,indoctrination and
| misinformation, as the self-media care only about their ads
| income.
|
| My advice? Vehemently reject any info/news platforms, as they
| care only about clicks.
|
| >The "Post-Truth" Publication Where Chinese Students in America
| Get Their News"
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-post-trut...
| duxup wrote:
| We have similar situations elsewhere.
|
| Folks rage about 'the media' (a term now so amorphous I can't
| tell what it means anymore, or if the person even reads /
| watches what they think of as the media), so we get lots of
| self research / internet sleuth type discovery on platforms
| like reddit.
|
| We had one on HN recently too
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26186645. I applaud the
| person for putting in the effort, but I'm highly skeptical of
| internet sleuths and their ability to string a few searches and
| documents together into an accurate narrative / provide context
| to complex systems simply because they found what they thought
| of as similar things to recent events.
| prionassembly wrote:
| "Internet sleuthing" can mean "reporting the glitch" without
| meaning "giving a causal account of the glitch".
|
| The "official narrative" on major political events has
| definitely been glitching out. Weird stuff like Qanon is
| really symptomatic of how institutions who should be calling
| this out (this huge intellectual buffer society has: Cory
| Doctorow, sociology deparments, church leaders...) are
| pretending not to see the glitches.
|
| But they're there. I could start five flame wars in a short
| comment citing a few, but the point is not to side with the
| "deplorable" side in each of these, but to note that there's
| some deep truth at the root of each of these five deplorable
| things that goes haywire because the intellectual element of
| society hasn't been paying mind to it.
|
| Maybe intellectuals just want to watch the world burn?
| lawl wrote:
| > but I'm highly skeptical of internet sleuths and their
| ability to string a few searches and documents together into
| an accurate narrative / provide context to complex systems
|
| Me too, but i'm just as sceptical when it comes to "real"
| journalists. Journalists aren't domain experts in everything.
| Read some random news about tech stuff, it's often times
| filled with clear indications of them not really
| understanding the topic. Which isn't meant to bash
| journalists, they have limited time for research, need to
| write an article, and again are usually not domain experts.
|
| The question is how do we fix this?
| philg_jr wrote:
| Follow journalists who have domain expertise in technology?
|
| You can use a shitty news article about a particular
| relevant topic that contains some questionable issues, and
| then search around for people that actually know what they
| are talking about.
|
| Exert some of your own effort to find good sources. Don't
| trust the first thing you read. This is ultimately the
| problem imo.
| [deleted]
| lawl wrote:
| Yep, thats one solution. But then do you _really_ need
| journalists? Ultimately this ends in you having a some
| people you trust in certain areas. Quite how it works in
| real life. E.g. real life friends asked me what i think
| of covid tracking apps because they trust me on topics
| like this.
|
| It's also not without failure modes. Lets say you just
| follow certain journalists/sleuths on certain topics
| that's basically filter bubbling by design.
|
| Doing your own research to finding sources is imo the
| best thing, but it just doesn't scale. If i personally
| checked every single thing i've read today, that would be
| a full time job (aaand we've just invented journalists
| again to solve THAT problem)
| duxup wrote:
| I feel like you asked the question and demonstrated how
| the answer is yes.
| lawl wrote:
| 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.
| duxup wrote:
| 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 what you want to
| find...
| redwall_hp wrote:
| It was a sudden and dramatic shift. I spent years being
| critical of news establishments, due to things such as the
| "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect," poor science reporting, conflicts
| of interest or a distaste with the progressively shorter
| articles and lower quality writing. However, as of the last
| few years, I don't feel comfortable talking about that with
| most people anymore. Terms like "mainstream media" or vocal
| distrust of news establishments have become conservative
| political dogwhistles, and imply that the speaker has a
| tenuous grasp on the concept of "reality."
|
| Essentially, the Overton Window has shifted from questioning
| journalistic ethics and quality to a binary "do you support
| actual news of events that really happened...or delusional
| fancies of YouTube personalities and stuff like QAnon?"
|
| Honestly, it's disturbing.
| nomay wrote:
| The difference is incentive, you probably have heard that
| ByteDance already makes big money, it pays these self-media
| to concoct what-ever eye-grabbing "content", and lend
| credibility to these "writers" by putting them in the same
| arena with traditional news and reporters: their news
| aggregation app and say this is today's "news" for you.
|
| The only metric that matters is click numbers, you can now
| out-do reporters with your perfect news stories that check
| every eye-grabbing boxes, coz you can type however you like
| and face no consequences, so why not to make it as juicy as
| possible.
| svieira wrote:
| > 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 tells themselves that they "have to" build the
| tools because they don't have the "power" to push back or because
| "it really is that bad this time". But some things don't have to
| be built (or built in the centralized, controllable way that they
| are). And when centralization is required or "it really is that
| bad this time", censorship should be widely publicized and
| discussed both in real time and with regular retrospectives on
| decisions to censor that are _public_.
|
| For those in dictatorships: All is not lost, regardless. [2][3]
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_power_grows_out_of_t...
|
| [2]:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20120107141633/http://www.vaclav...
|
| [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless
| andreilys wrote:
| If the ruling government controls all elements of public
| discourse, how exactly do you "widely publicize and discuss
| censorship in real time"?
| xwolfi wrote:
| 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 depend on how much
| you care and how corrupt the people in charge are, totally
| independent of the system. A dictatorship in Singapore works
| better than a democracy in Mexico for most metrics except
| anything that will make the power feel it's not in perfect
| control. The only difference in a dictatorship is the complete
| insecurity of the leaders who can't fathom that... we'd
| frigging vote for them would they ask nicely :D And you can
| completely ignore the party(ies), and live an entirely
| fulfilling and useful life, in both systems. I wouldn't argue
| for doing this but I see it all the time from both side and I
| envy it sometimes.
|
| So this whole debate about censorship, it's really just a
| debate about insecurity. They don't censor the truth here, they
| don't censor debate or discussion, they only censor what nobody
| cares about: critics of the party. So it's a lot less
| "terrible" or "inhuman" than I thought it would be coming from
| a democracy. And I think the way to make it change isn't to
| whine and yell at it as much as you can, but to embrace the
| competent leaders when they come and give confidence to them
| we'll give them 10x more power by voting directly for them. And
| lay the final trap. At least my origin democracy became a
| democracy when it started doing just that after 2 centuries of
| massacres and revolts followed by authoritarian counter
| reactions in a seemingly endless cycle of aggressive
| "activism". It simply ended when we went to war in mass without
| being forced and convinced the rulers we'd vote for them anyway
| as a result, sheeples we are, which we did the first election.
| Trapped.
| vmception wrote:
| Correct, its not binary.
|
| Its best case, average case and worst case, just like with
| algorithms on different data sets.
|
| We already know that a _benevolent_ dictatorship is the most
| efficient form of government, the best case in stewarding
| resources, it just lacks a secession path to maintain its
| efficiency, as dictatorships most frequently create worst
| case scenarios: worst stewarding of resources and no ability
| to dissent to correct it. No respect from the rest of the
| people on how the correction takes place, one coup just leads
| to another coup.
|
| Inclusive democracies most frequently create average case
| scenarios of efficiency. They aren't inherently better just
| because they're inclusive. They can create best case and
| worst case scenarios too.
| yters wrote:
| My main problem with dictatorships is mass concentration
| camps, mass executions, torture, human experimentation, etc.
|
| Granted, democracies have done all the above, but diligent
| activists corrected the system, and the scale never reached
| that in dictatorships.
|
| But yes, for your average citizen, dictatorship is probably
| not too bad.
| areoform wrote:
| That's discounting the forced sterilization, imprisonment,
| and extermination of the target du jour,
|
| > One is an authoritative report documenting the systematic
| sterilization of Uighur women. The other was the seizure by
| U.S. Customs and Border Protection of 13 tons of products
| made from human hair suspected of being forcibly removed from
| Uighurs imprisoned in concentration camps.
|
| - https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/15/uighur-genocide-
| xinjian...
|
| > they only censor what nobody cares about: critics of the
| party
|
| Saying that they only censor their critics and adding that
| they are only censoring "what no one cares about, critics of
| the party" is disturbing.
|
| When one person can impose their will on you, it's all
| rainbows and kitties until you disagree or step out of line.
| As I am guessing that the people who oppose forced
| sterilization and the other Nazi concentration camp policies
| (forced shaving of hair at camps for use as a product is a
| fairly distinct one) will end up censored and at those camps
| too?
|
| These problems and issues might be out of sound and out of
| mind for now, but sooner or later, as the previous enemy
| starts to thin out, they will find new ones. And eventually,
| they'll come for you too.
|
| Often people who live in autocracies by choice do not believe
| such warnings. They are the intellectual equivalent of
| exercise and vitamins.
|
| To make it clearer, here's what happens at the end of such
| regimes. Even for their supporters,
|
| Towards the end of the war, the Nazis who were occupying the
| Netherlands blew up a town hall _after_ inviting 134 people
| and their children to take shelter there. These people were
| of the right race. Most of them had done nothing against
| them. Some of them might have supported them.
|
| They were the in-group until they weren't. They died because
| they weren't members of the party.
|
| https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadhuisramp_Heusden
|
| Being ambitiously evil, the Nazis also killed erstwhile
| embraced citizens at scale with the Dutch famine by blocking
| the transport of food from farms to citizens in their
| occupied territories. They did it because they could.
|
| Perhaps this is still distant. Here's a shorter example.
| Almost all of the people Stalin directly ordered to be killed
| were his supporters.
|
| They were the in-group until they weren't.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| I don't disagree with you but...
|
| > They were the in-group until they weren't. They died
| because they weren't members of the party.
|
| So were they the in-group or not? Most people in occupied
| Europe did not approve at all of nazi germany. Sure, there
| were some collaborationist but most europeans did totally
| disapprove nazi germany.
|
| It's not the same as people who voted for communism then
| got was they asked for: in my opinion, when you vote for a
| totalitarian society, it's just fair game that in return
| you get what you asked for (I know, I know, the ultra-left
| leaning are going to say that "this wasn't true communism
| and next time, believe us, we're going to make it work").
|
| You cannot compare occupied Europe who didn't ask to live
| under a totalitarian society to those who supported
| communism.
| buran77 wrote:
| Moving between democracy and dictatorship several times in my
| life I can say this: it mainly boils down to how well your
| interests align with the interests of the one(s) in power.
| The main difference is that if your interests don't align
| you'll have a _much_ harder life in a dictatorship than in a
| democracy, special cases (like Singapore) notwithstanding.
| For every Singapore there 's more than one Myanmar.
| draw_down wrote:
| You don't have to contribute, but if you don't, they'll find
| someone who will. We like to put the moral responsibility of
| such things on people who were trying to make a living. I think
| the power of the powerful is more relevant.
|
| To be honest, I think focusing away from that is an ideological
| operation. It sounds very inspiring: "you don't have to do
| this!" Yeah, well, tell that to the people requiring the
| censorship.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| The question is what should we, western nations, do about this?
|
| Should we keep hiring, sponsoring and giving away residency to
| engineers who made the decision to help building these
| platforms? Or collectively decide not to reward these
| behaviors?
| gnarbarian wrote:
| Build distributed systems that can't be taken down. Social
| media could be built on IPFS and file coin and lib P2P.
| Protocols that have no ownership or entity to attack via
| political means. Email already works this way in a sense.
| viklove wrote:
| "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.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| 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.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| That's simply not profitable. We're a society driven by the
| profit motive. There is a vanishingly small amount of
| profit to be made there.
| ah69 wrote:
| Excellent comment. Thank you.
| sneak wrote:
| > _I was on a central technology team that supports the Trust and
| Safety team, which sits within ByteDance 's core data
| department._
|
| Funny how censorship which makes these platforms entirely
| untrustworthy as a view into the world is filed under "Trust" in
| the org chart.
|
| It's sort of like how Facebook's faux grassroots "community
| standards" are just the rules Facebook dictates to its community.
| IceWreck wrote:
| The article doesn't name the engineer but is still heavy on
| personal details. If China wanted to persecute said engineer they
| could easily find out who is responsible.
| AntiImperialist wrote:
| Except if it's a fictional propaganda piece. Most of these
| "anonymous sources" reports are.
| chinathrowaway wrote:
| dont worry he is probably getting paid by the ccp to spread
| this message. keep on lockin down. the wuhan videos were real,
| but we manged to censor everything else.
| halfjoking wrote:
| 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...
| reducesuffering wrote:
| 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 with US
| right media and policies.
|
| It's like siding with Putin because RT will find some sort of
| dirt on the opposition.
| halfjoking wrote:
| I agree Glenn should hate both sides equally. It's also
| hurting his credibility being used as a mouthpiece by right-
| wing media.
|
| He's just given time on Fox so they could say "See - the
| swamp is real, even this leftist says so! That's why you
| should never trust those liberals."
|
| But please give Glenn some slack. If it wasn't for him Edward
| Snowden may be in Guantanamo, instead of regularly giving
| interviews over livestreams.
|
| Calling the last 6 weeks "reporting mistakes" is way too
| generous. These are planted stories to shape public opinion.
| Glenn recognizes this and clearly explains using these events
| as a basis to censor the entire internet is unbelievably
| dangerous. Not since the Patriot Act has there been a danger
| to democracy so egregious. I hope people see realize it
| before it's too late.
| AntiImperialist wrote:
| Countries have to protect themselves. Influential media companies
| of every country do the same thing.
|
| NEXT!
| Firebrand wrote:
| I never really paid attention to just how massive Bytedance
| actually is until the article mentioned some of their products.
|
| Makes sense how they had the resources to brute force TikTok into
| the American consciousness so quickly.
| quantummkv wrote:
| The more that I read about what the social media giants are doing
| everywhere, including the recent drama around wsb discord ban and
| the Facebook-Australia thing, I feel that what's happening in
| China is chillingly close to happening to the rest of the world.
| Or maybe it is already happening slowly and we don't realise it
| yet.
| chinathrowaway wrote:
| so, somehow we are supposed to believe china has all the
| censorship capabilities in the world, but was not able to stem
| the flood of shaky smartphone videos flowing out of wuhan? this
| seems like a big ccp psyop. (this article and its source
| included)
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