[HN Gopher] There are no results for tank man
___________________________________________________________________
There are no results for tank man
Author : rcoveson
Score : 1541 points
Date : 2021-06-04 16:51 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bing.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bing.com)
| slugiscool99 wrote:
| It doesn't really surprise me that bing does this - I'm more
| disappointed that HN censored the original post
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925). Feel like that's
| totally against our values.
| naikrovek wrote:
| users flag posts in almost all circumstances. too many users
| flagged it.
|
| HN isn't policed by its admins except in extremely rare cases.
| KirillPanov wrote:
| and santa claus exists
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I actually believe in dang a fair amount more than I
| believe in Santa Claus.
| Supermancho wrote:
| Unknown Protester and Unknown Rebel does show some Bing image
| results that are relevant.
| Grustaf wrote:
| If you search for "Unknown protester" you get a big fact box with
| Tank Man though.
|
| https://www.bing.com/search?q=Unknown+Protester&search=&form...
| sthnblllII wrote:
| The Tienamen square protest began because the Communist party as
| part of its dealings for African mineral rights allowed African
| students into Chinese universities and those African students
| were caught sexually assaulting Chinese women. The point of the
| "pro-democracy" activism was to replace the relatively socially
| liberal and pro-globalization Communist party with a more
| nationalist government that would protect the Chinese people and
| not sacrifice their safety for international power.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_anti-African_protests#...
|
| For obvious reasons, pro-liberal pro-globalisation factions in
| the West downplay the role of the nationalist anti-globalisation
| anti-liberal origins of the protests.
| belter wrote:
| Good evening Beijing, what time is it there now... 2 AM ?
| Working late for the social credit ?
| dang wrote:
| You can't break the site guidelines like this, regardless of
| how bad another comment is or you feel it is. Perhaps you
| don't owe the other commenter better, but you most certainly
| owe this community better if you're posting to it. No more of
| this, please.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| r_u_erect wrote:
| You can't be serious... nobody "owes" this "community"
| anything.
|
| Bro.
| dang wrote:
| I have no idea what to make of this, but since your account has
| been using HN primarily for ideological battle and you've
| ignored our requests to stop, I've banned it. We ban accounts
| that do that regardless of whatever is they're battling for,
| because it destroys the intended purpose of this site.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| retube wrote:
| That's just the image search. OK maybe a bit weird, but the
| normal search returns results, including of the famous pic /
| incident
| [deleted]
| ggggtez wrote:
| Yikes. Let's try others...
|
| Google: Plenty of results
|
| DuckDuckGo: No results
|
| Wait, I thought DuckDuckGo said they are the "No Censorship"
| search engine, or something like that?
| mda wrote:
| Duckduckgo mostly uses bing index.
| bencollier49 wrote:
| Looks to me like DDG have fixed this now.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Not for me presently.
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&ia=images&iax=images
|
| http://web.archive.org/web/20210604211040/https://duckduckgo.
| ..
| csmiller wrote:
| I believe DDG uses Bing for their results
| 1024core wrote:
| No results on DuckDuckGo, either:
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&t=hc&va=u&iax=images&ia=i...
|
| Plenty of results on Google:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=tank+man&tbm=isch
|
| Google: 1, Bing/DDG: 0
|
| So much for "privacy/simplicity", eh?
| donatj wrote:
| Searching "Tank Man Tiananmen" only provides marginally better
| results. I think it's clear there's active censorship here and
| not just a bug.
| ccsnags wrote:
| I don't understand how you could have zero results for any two
| known words in a search engine.
| jerry1979 wrote:
| Interestingly, they didn't just block the query string, it
| appears that they purged their image results based on some
| generalization of tank man. I noticed that "tiennamin square man"
| doesn't return any pictures of the scene. However, the purge
| didn't hit the "suggested image" thumbnails.
| ggggtez wrote:
| Yeah, there are two things going on here:
|
| 1) Some queries are blocked. This results in "Nothing found",
| even when there obviously are images...
|
| 2) Some images are blocked. If you use a query that bypasses
| the word-filter, some images are still removed from the result
| list anyway.
|
| It's very clear that what we're seeing is the Chinese results
| for Bing, but everywhere in the world...
| jerry1979 wrote:
| I like to pretend that the impetus for the stunt came not
| from a mentality that values civic minded free speech but
| rather from the CCC couple-whining (and getting its way) to
| bing about blocking tank man globally "just this once on the
| anniversary".
| dwt204 wrote:
| OK so just as a goof, I typed in "tank man man tank" and voila a
| few photos showed up in BING and DDG
| duckrandom wrote:
| There are no results for tank man on duckduckgo
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&t=ffnt&iar=images&iax=ima...
| GeekyBear wrote:
| China Tank Man worked.
| waltwalther wrote:
| There are no results for 'tank man' under images, videos, and
| maps, but searching Bing under everything shows a thumbnail of
| the tank man/unknown protester as the first result.
| varenc wrote:
| As discussed extensively in the Bing thread [0] comments, this is
| because DDG uses Bing's search index.
|
| Microsoft has acknowledged this is in error...[1] (though the
| error seems to be that censorship meant to just apply to China is
| being applied everywhere)
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395635
|
| [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8v9m/bing-censors-tank-man
| jakeva wrote:
| I didn't know DDG uses Bing's search index. What exactly is
| their value proposition over Bing then?
| rllearneratwork wrote:
| neither did I - not using DDG again. Back to Google :(
| ipnon wrote:
| It's a search proxy service. You can use a VPN to mask your
| traffic's origin behind your VPN provider's IP, you can use
| DDG image search to mask your queries behind DDG.
| sdeframond wrote:
| I believe DDG does not track you.
| thih9 wrote:
| No profiling.
|
| > DuckDuckGo distinguishes itself from other search engines
| by not profiling its users and by showing all users the same
| search results for a given search term.
|
| Also note that DDG doesn't just rely on Bing.
|
| > DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400"
| sources, including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Bing,
| Yandex, its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot) and others.
|
| Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo
| zwaps wrote:
| Well either it uses only Bing for images, or it also
| censors. Because I sure wasn't able to find the picture on
| DDG.
|
| So either way, as a user of DDG from day one - it's dead to
| me.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| A Microsoft spokesperson told Motherboard in an email that
| "This is due to an accidental human error and we are actively
| working to resolve this."
|
| ------
|
| There is no way this is due to an accidental human error. The
| lying on this point is infuriating.
| throwaway492338 wrote:
| Accidentally applied worldwide instead of just China sounds
| possible (or more possible than "my fingers slipped on the t,
| a, ... keys")
| ALittleLight wrote:
| It is _still_ not giving the correct results. Now Bing is
| pretending not to understand and giving innocuous pictures
| rather than the famous one. We can tell it 's not just
| because of Bing's poor quality because similar searches,
| but slightly reworded get the iconic picture.
|
| I don't see how it could've possibly been an accident when
| they "fix it" by slightly obscuring it. It's intentional
| deception and censorship by Microsoft. And it is
| particularly galling, because Microsoft, a massive and
| powerful international company without serious risk is
| cowering in fear of the same organization that one man,
| with everything to lose, stood against alone. Microsoft is
| trying to hide that he did so.
| kevincox wrote:
| Why not. A human was asked to fulfill a request to block the
| "tank man" search in China and forgot to add the country
| restriction.
|
| There is no way to know if it is true, but it is definitely
| possible. This is probably an interface that isn't used
| incredibly frequently and may not be as polished as one might
| hope.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| We certainly know that explantation isn't true because they
| are continuing to censor the results after "fixing it".
| Searching "tank man" now gets you images of tanks and men
| and not the iconic image. We know they could get it right
| if they wanted to because the non-image search for the
| phrase works.
| nickelpro wrote:
| The iconic image comes up for me, could just be rolling
| out to massive infrastructure takes a hot minute
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| The search shows images now, but none of them are related to
| Tienanmen. They're generic images of tanks.
|
| That seems worse, honestly, since before it was obvious to
| anyone something was being censored. Was the "error" that the
| search was completely blank instead of full of faux-result
| clutter?
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| Fortunately Tiananmen Square Massacre works.
| [deleted]
| rllearneratwork wrote:
| Bing does show wiki link first but no image results. Duckduckgo
| does show wiki link first but no image results. Google shows wiki
| link and image results.
|
| I am in US. Could be just that Bing is still very subpar ...
| wdbbdw wrote:
| As others have mentioned, Bing now shows some results for 'tank
| man' with tanks and men but no Tiananmen square photo (DDG had
| the same image results, btw). 'Tank man China' had no results on
| Bing
| kerng wrote:
| What's Microsoft's response to this? Seems like they'll have some
| explaining to do who can insert denylisted terms so easily...
| sremani wrote:
| It is same as usual, Deny, Delay and talk about Inclusion and
| diversity and Microsoft's needs to comply with local laws and
| blame fat fingers by some intern who was to be disciplined.
|
| Then their General Counsel Brad Smith will write a blog post
| how half of America are deplorables and what we need to learn
| from China.
| [deleted]
| rcoveson wrote:
| Original HN post flagged:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925
| xenocratus wrote:
| Something else that I find curious is that this entry vanished
| from front page for a while, and now it's stuck at the bottom,
| even though it has twice the points in half the time compared
| with post number #5 (at the time of writing).
| dTal wrote:
| I don't think we need invoke any conspiracies for that; HN's
| algorithm is ever mysterious. Yesterday a submission of mine
| hit the front page in 3 seconds with no upvotes.
| falcolas wrote:
| Given the outsized effect of flags in comparison to upvotes,
| I'm of the opinion that Chinese national HN members, and some
| subset of "no politics evar" crowd is more than enough to flag
| these to _just shy_ of being dead.
| JPKab wrote:
| Legitimate criticism of the CCP results in rather intense
| flagging.
|
| I'm no angel and I've definitely made comments that deserved
| flagging on HN and I really try hard to play by the rules
| that dang sets, but it's a rather clear pattern that certain
| subjects solicit pretty intense flagging despite not really
| being "nationalistic flame bait".
|
| In case dang sees this I hope I'm not violating further rules
| of service I'm just simply trying to point something out,
| that is absolutely relevant to this discussion.
| jopsen wrote:
| Don't we all know that the CCP employs agents to flag
| critical content.
|
| Do we have any reason to think said agents aren't active
| here?
| wonnage wrote:
| I don't think this sort of baseless speculation is
| useful. God forbid a Chinese citizen support their own
| government without being an agent or brainwashed. Way to
| deny a billion people the agency to disagree with you.
|
| Flagged this comment; US citizen, btw
| int_19h wrote:
| OP didn't say that there aren't any Chinese citizens who
| genuinely support their own government - only that said
| government is _well-known_ for organized brigading by its
| agents. Including in China itself, I must add, so it
| affects plenty of Chinese citizens, too.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| When you see that happening, vouch for the post or the
| article.
| xvector wrote:
| You can't vouch until the post is dead, meaning that a
| small number of people can put a post into flagged
| purgatory and no one can do anything about it until
| enough people holler for the mods
| munk-a wrote:
| In addition to the potential for being vouched for - it's
| also important to remember that brigading on HN has a
| very limited effect on account karma overall. If you end
| up being on the sharp end of the stick at least you can
| take some comfort in only ever losing six points of
| karma... well unless your comment was atrocious enough to
| get you a ban from the mods.
| xenocratus wrote:
| Even then, mods can override those flags, which in this
| case seems to not be happening. Especially given the [dupe]
| designation on another post
| dang wrote:
| Please keep nationalistic attacks off this forum. You have no
| idea the sort of pressure that users with minority
| perspectives because of their national/ethnic backgrounds are
| under on this majority-Western forum. People have literally
| been hounded off this site after getting attacked for this.
| Is that the kind of community you, or any of us, want to be
| part of? Of course it is not. Therefore, don't include swipes
| like that in your comments here, and remember that other
| users are just as human as you are, even if they have
| different backgrounds than you do.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.
| ..
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.
| ..
| KirillPanov wrote:
| > Please keep nationalistic attacks off this forum.
|
| There is nothing wrong with criticizing the Communist Party
| of China.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > There is nothing wrong with criticizing the Communist
| Party of China.
|
| There is, OTOH, something very wrong with equating
| Chinese national HN users with the Communist Party of
| China, and your comment that dang responded to about
| nationalistic attacks was explictly directed at the
| former, not the latter, and defending it as the latter
| draws an inappropriate equivalence.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I didn't interpret the comment that way. I read it as a
| squares-are-rectangles comment, not a rectangles-are-
| squares comment. Normal people on HN who support the CCP
| are likely to be chinese nationals, even if the converse
| isn't true. There are probably enough normal people who
| support the CCP here to flag a post, which is how I read
| the comment.
| dang wrote:
| Of course not, but there's something wrong with using
| that as a fig leaf for garden-variety, ugly human shadow
| material, and if you don't think that's happening, I'm
| afraid you're far off the mark.
|
| By the way, I'm not saying this out of any political
| position on the underlying topics (nor is that any sort
| of claim to neutrality). I'm saying this because I'm
| close enough to the data to start to see how basic human
| decency is being violated by a lot of this stuff, and
| when you start to see that, you start to feel sick.
| drdavid wrote:
| You walk a fine tightrope (and do it well).
|
| I do not envy your role here in the slightest.
| falcolas wrote:
| Two demonstrably true observations:
|
| - China actively works to remove mentions about the
| Tiananmen Square Massacre.
|
| - There are CCP sympathetic posters on HN. I've had them
| reply to me before. They have identified themselves
| Chinese.
|
| Combining these two into the statement, "There are posters
| sympathetic to the CCP stance of censoring the Tiananmen
| Square Massacre who are flagging these posts," does require
| some information not available on my side of the screen,
| but it's not exactly a big jump.
|
| And on a completely personal observation, it wouldn't bug
| me much if HN did not tolerate such members' attempts to
| censor the Tiananmen Square Massacre - did not protect them
| as a group from criticism. Intolerance of intolerance being
| required for a tolerant society, and all that.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| With all due respect, I disagree. This conversation is
| specifically about a nation exerting censorship across the
| web. It is not unreasonable to think those censorship
| efforts would extend to other sites.
|
| Moreover, I did not mark the primary thrust of the comment
| as a nationalistic attack. I took it as an observation that
| a motivated minority (or a nation-state actor) could game
| the system to mute a conversation by way of flags.
|
| To be clear, I hope Chinese users feel welcome here. I also
| get it that this is a hot topic where speculation could
| easily spin out of control. I appreciate the tightrope you
| have to walk. I just respectfully disagree with your call
| on this one.
| dang wrote:
| If you hope Chinese users feel welcome here, you need to
| make some massive adjustments to the commenting style you
| exemplified above, because accusing "Chinese nationals"
| of being responsible for things you don't like on HN,
| based on (seriously) absolutely nothing, is the stuff
| that a lot of dark human history has been made of.
|
| I realize that's hard to swallow, because (a) none of us
| wants to see that in ourselves, and (b) internet forums
| are just so unbelievably innocuous and trivial, until
| they aren't, but I'm telling you it's fundamentally the
| same dynamic. Sometimes it shows up in trivial ways and
| sometimes in hideous ones. If we want to actually be the
| tolerant, decent people that we imagine we are, we all
| need to work on this on ourselves. I don't mean to pick
| on you personally; it's without a doubt universal.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| I'm a member of "no politics evar" crowd, but I feel like
| both deliberate digital censorship AND artificial tweaks to
| search results are valid topics.
|
| I hope this was the result of a rogue actor rather than a
| corporate decision.
| tpmx wrote:
| I just hope they don't say it was just a mistake ("glitch")
| that has now been fixed, like:
|
| _" Because of a mistake a configuration change meant for
| some only some regions was also applied to Bing US. This
| has now been fixed."_ (To be clear, I just made this up.)
|
| Edit: https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-bing-
| raises-con...
|
| Actual quote: _Microsoft said the issue was "due to an
| accidental human error and we are actively working to
| resolve this."_
| iso1631 wrote:
| A Microsoft spokesperson tells me that "accidental human
| error" is to blame for missing images of "tank man" on
| its Bing search results.
|
| "We are actively working to resolve this."
|
| The incident comes on the 32nd anniversary of the
| Tiananmen Square Massacre.
|
| https://twitter.com/MikaelThalen/status/14009060321766400
| 04?...
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > I'm a member of "no politics evar" crowd, but I feel like
| both deliberate digital censorship AND artificial tweaks to
| search results are valid topics.
|
| Ditto.
| iso1631 wrote:
| And another related post about the event errantly marked as a
| dupe, something I believe requires mod/admin ability
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395028
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Lots of results for 'tink man', 'tonk man' and 'tenk man': mainly
| tanks and men.
|
| Zero results for 'tank man'.
| notorandit wrote:
| In case it is not immediately obvious, Bing is not a search
| engine but an ad engine. Also google is. But hands more ads and
| results.
| trempisacent wrote:
| As DDG uses Bing for its image search, I wonder if this is
| related to a large proportion of the Bing product teams being
| based in China.
| t-writescode wrote:
| There are no _image_ results for Tank Man. Regular search results
| in pictures and articles.
| camel_Snake wrote:
| no video results either.
| seanalltogether wrote:
| Regular search results for me are just wikipedia articles only,
| with everything but the top 2 being completely unrelated. How
| odd
| castis wrote:
| The point here is that it seems extremely unlikely image search
| results is the actual result of a sift through the available
| indexed data. Meaning that some manual mechanism is responsible
| for the page being blank.
| t-writescode wrote:
| I agree, and this probably isn't good; but, I want accuracy
| in what's being said when it comes to censorship. We
| shouldn't win against censorship by hyperbole but by the
| unfiltered reality being so horrible that people wouldn't
| want it, anyway.
| fallingknife wrote:
| It must be. There is nothing in the words "tank man" that
| would trigger any sort of filter. My guess is that this was
| supposed to be limited to Chinese IP's and someone forgot to
| add that to the config.
| ccsnags wrote:
| I got thousands of images back by searching "
| dhshsjdjfjfjdj"
|
| Censorship is disgusting.
| [deleted]
| MikeDelta wrote:
| Image results on anything else than tank man, like tanks man or
| tank man image, does result in various results (muscular men in
| tanks).
|
| But zero images on these two generic words means it has to be
| censored. I would at least expect odd pictures of muscular men
| in tanks like in the other searches
| [deleted]
| bob33212 wrote:
| Works for me. https://www.bing.com/search?q=tank+man
| detaro wrote:
| ... which is not image search as in the submission.
| jackmoore wrote:
| Try the 'images' tab.
| viktorcode wrote:
| This is disgusting. Never held any fantasies about Microsoft, but
| this example of Chinese censorship taking over the world by means
| of an American corporation is the new low.
|
| Don't think I will be able to buy any Microsoft product ever
| again.
| thehoomanist wrote:
| Why is something connected to tech, and uncovering an important
| ethical bias and issue, being flagged? With no transparency about
| the reasons, nonetheless.
| joemi wrote:
| If you mean flagged on HN, there's great transparency about the
| reasons: users can flag whatever they want.
| partiallypro wrote:
| They should implement a system like Slashdot had in which
| you'd only get certain abilities if you had enough
| contribution points. That would prevent random accounts from
| flagging things when their account is only 5 points, etc.
| Also, the admins have the ability to remove the flag but
| haven't, which I find baffling/troubling. Everyone wants part
| of the Chinese cookie it seems.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| If you follow this link and get 'no image found', and hit reload
| a few times you do get results. Same if you click to web search
| and back to images.
|
| To me this seems like a bug and not some kind of censorship
| attempt that only works if you don't hit reload.
| ufmace wrote:
| The CCP seems to be quite good at practical censorship. They have
| a history of this - they know the Great Firewall isn't perfect,
| and don't seem to make a tremendous effort to plug every single
| hole or find and lock up everyone trying to circumvent it. They
| know that controlling what most people see most of the time is
| good enough. They also know that not making too much clear direct
| effort against those trying to bypass it denies the anti-
| censorship movement the energy of having martyrs, cause celebres,
| etc. It seems to work quite well.
|
| I think they're doing the same thing here. Just take an amount of
| money that's rather modest in the budget of a major government,
| throw it at 90% of the biggest companies with a few strings
| attached, and presto, you effectively control the narratives in
| the American News Media. Most of the companies involved lapped it
| right up.
| drak0n1c wrote:
| In related corporate censorship, the Top Gun remake altered the
| physical leather jacket worn by Tom Cruise to remove the flags
| of Taiwan and Japan.
|
| https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/top-gun-...
| TchoBeer wrote:
| Lol why Japan
| BadOakOx wrote:
| They are not really friends since
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Sino-Japanese_War
| throwaway20875 wrote:
| This hall of mirrors is only beginning. This is truly terrifying.
|
| The most disgusting aspect is the blatant lying and hypocrisy:
| https://news.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/topic/defending-dem...
| __fst__ wrote:
| Paradoxically, as long as all information regarding the Tiananmen
| massacre in 1989 is being censored, there are people whose job it
| is to not forget to forget it. This means they'll have to
| remember to hide this sensitive information. So in a way, by
| taking so much effort to hide this information, China (and all
| countries and companies sucking up to it) are keeping this
| information alive. And (hopefully) eventually, these people will
| ask themself why it is necessary to hide it.
| wait_a_minute wrote:
| This needs to be upvoted to the top so that we get some answers
| as to why this well-known history is not searchable via such a
| major tech company's search functionality. It's the top result
| via Google, why is Bing so bad at this?
| michaelmrose wrote:
| To be fair a search of tank man on bing does have results
| including pictures. For some reason the same imagines that
| appear on the main search results page don't show up on the
| image results tab.
| virtue3 wrote:
| I'm in the US searching for it and getting nothing for the
| image results. Why are the images specifically blocked?
|
| I don't think there's anything fair about this. I don't like
| the idea of a US company censoring information from me in
| this way. Because now I'm really curious as to what else is
| being censored/flagged out.
| jaynetics wrote:
| Trying this now from Germany, same here. 0 results in the
| image tab. "Keine Ergebnisse fur Tank man gefunden."
| michaelmrose wrote:
| If they were actually going to censor results wouldn't they
| censor the web results as well? What makes you think this
| isn't a technical issue.
| virtue3 wrote:
| You've got to be joking.
|
| Blanking out image results for a specific search string
| is a technical issue? This goes a little bit beyond
| assuming incompetence.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| I don't know, if they were trying to stop the spread of
| information on the massacre it would be weird to blank
| out images but not fudge search results.
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| It appears the avatar in the chip (using Material
| nomenclature here for the UI components) for suggested search
| result "Tank Man China" has the original image, but clicking
| on the chip takes you a page missing said image.
| ggggtez wrote:
| It's because the search query is blocked.
|
| I think the more surprising thing is that it only effects the
| Image search results, and not the web search results.
|
| I checked the Video results, and Videos also appear blocked.
|
| It's possible that Image and Video search utilize the same
| word-filter list, and for some reason web-searches use a
| different list.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Google doesn't have a search engine in China, and Bing does
| have a search engine in China.
| y04nn wrote:
| Should not Bing have a separate/dedicated search engine in
| China? Does Bing has to censure US/World results from a well
| know fact to be allowed to operate in China? Because I have
| some difficulties to understand why Bing is censuring such
| fact outside the Great Firewall of China.
| sounds wrote:
| In case you're wondering why this is news, there are numerous
| obvious, worldwide, relevant results:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man
|
| https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/watch/25-years-later-tank-man-st...
| (Note: Microsoft owns this page!)
|
| https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/remembering-the-t...
| Brendinooo wrote:
| >Note: Microsoft owns this page!
|
| Microsoft does not have a stake in MSNBC anymore.
| samspenc wrote:
| Wow I didn't realize this, but it appears to be true:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSNBC
|
| "Microsoft divested itself of its stakes in the MSNBC channel
| in 2005 and in msnbc.com in July 2012."
|
| I thought their Edge browser was still promoting links to
| MSNBC, but looking at Edge now, I see the links are to
| MSN.com which is a completely different thing and actually a
| Microsoft news portal.
|
| Interesting the news channel is still called MSNBC though
| even though Microsoft doesn't have any ownership in it
| anymore.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| When you've spent millions and years promoting a brand ID,
| you don't change it just because ownership changed.
| (Another example: If I understand correctly, General
| Electric doesn't have anything to do with GE-branded light
| bulbs. They sold the business. But the buyer wanted more
| than the factory and the distribution arrangements, they
| wanted the name that people recognized.)
| whafro wrote:
| And just to bring it all full-circle in this thread,
| albeit a slightly different direction:
|
| NBC's chime was developed when it was owned by GE in the
| 1930s (the notes are G-E-C - General Electric Company).
| When GE sold its interest, that chime continued to be
| used.
|
| GE later regained control of NBC, and once again sold the
| last of its interest to Comcast a few years ago. But the
| G-E-C jingle remains unchanged, the first audio trademark
| granted in the US.
| digbybk wrote:
| Even if one of the most famous photographs ever taken wasn't
| called "tank man", it'd still be pretty weird for there to zero
| results. Try misspelling "man" or "tank", you'll get many
| results. "tanke man" says "including results for 'tank man'".
| tankenmate wrote:
| tank man Beijing returns one result
| beached_whale wrote:
| Or "tank man Tiananmen square" results in results. Still kind
| of odd, this takes duck duck go with it too.
| 60secz wrote:
| "tank man Tiananmen" returns none. fishy
| makr17 wrote:
| Maybe it's changed over time since this was posted, but
| right now the top result for "tank man" on DDG is
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man
|
| and though the image searches do show a bunch of other
| things (all including "tank man" in the name at least),
| they _do_ also include the iconic photo at least once:
|
| http://www.maryscullyreports.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2017/06/...
|
| which I did not see in the bing results...
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| My favorite being : "Tank Man Meme" and you get more or less
| the expected search.
|
| https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Tank+Man+Meme
| jp57 wrote:
| In case it's not immediately obvious, today, June 4, is the
| anniversary of the event.
| belter wrote:
| Yes,the event...
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests
|
| HN looks like "A Quiet Place"
| jp57 wrote:
| Christ. I wasn't avoiding mentioning it out of fear, I just
| thought that the three links in the parent would be
| sufficient for people to resolve the anaphor.
| bonzini wrote:
| It's quite silly though that image search gives no results
| while web search gives lots of image results.
| arcticfox wrote:
| Surely this is some technical error with Chinese content settings
| leaking to the US search? Pretty big fail, regardless.
| Apofis wrote:
| This is an obvious one to catch for us, I wonder what other
| foreign censorship makes it's way into our web.
| [deleted]
| bb88 wrote:
| I prefer to read hacker news through the hckrnews.com interface.
| It doesn't removed flagged content, and tells you what was
| killed.
|
| Censoring articles on censorship by tech companies just ain't
| kosher.
| ggggtez wrote:
| I don't speak chinese, but "50 cent party" refers to paid online
| chinese trolls. I think it is written as 50Mei Fen Pai Dui [1]
|
| 50Mei Fen Pai Dui also finds no results on Bing, but plenty of
| results on Google.
|
| So it's not just tank man. The word filter is active for all
| search terms that are blocked in china.
|
| 50Mei Fen De Jun Dui I think is another way of writing it: it
| shows only 3 images on bing, which all look like ads for Coca
| Cola.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party
| alisonatwork wrote:
| I am not surprised you are not finding useful results, because
| you are using a bizarre translation. The term used in Chinese
| is Wu Mao Dang , literally "5 mao party" (1 mao = 10 fen = 10
| cents).
|
| Mei Fen means "American fen", so it would only be used to
| refer to American cents.
|
| Pai Dui is a neologism that sounds like the English word
| "party" and it is only used in the context of having a social
| gathering.
|
| If you search Wu Mao Dang you will find plenty of results.
|
| Personally I think most of what foreigners think are Wu Mao
| Dang are actually Xiao Fen Hong , which means "little pink".
| This is the term used to describe young nationalists who take
| part in internet pile-ons, similar to online "activists" we
| have in the west. It might be that some of them are paid, but I
| suspect most of them are just doing it because they enjoy
| feeling like they are part of an in-group.
| lukewrites wrote:
| Wu Mao or 5Mao - 5 _mao_ is half a yuan, so the equivalent of
| 50C/. "Fifty cent" is an Americanized translation.
|
| Edit: the wiki page you linked has it in simplified and
| traditional characters.
| yorwba wrote:
| > I think it is written as 50Mei Fen Pai Dui
|
| If you look closely at the Wikipedia article, you'd see that
| the text in the infobox is Wu Mao Dang (Wu _wu_ 5, Mao _mao_
| 0.1 piece, Dang _dang_ political group [No relation to Daniel
| G]).
|
| What you wrote is 50 Mei Fen ( _mei fen_ American cent) Pai
| Dui ( _pai dui_ fun get-together.)
|
| I get Bing results for both, but the "American cent" ones are
| all about the rapper.
| samcheng wrote:
| Just curious: are there any Chinese nationals (in China) here in
| this thread? I want to understand the scope of censorship. What
| do YOU think?
| TchoBeer wrote:
| I would also like to know. It's funny, because I feel like a
| lot of media and news I've consumed paints china as this
| hellish dystopia, so when I (very occasionally) talk with
| chinese nationals online I'm kinda underwhelmed by how it's
| just... a place? I don't know.
| ludamad wrote:
| I have to wonder here. The videos tab continues to show results,
| is this just leaking the fact that they have a unified image
| service globally?
| clusterfish wrote:
| Videos tab shows no results for me
| jasonhansel wrote:
| Looks like media outlets are starting to cover the story:
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8v9m/bing-censors-tank-man
| jasonhansel wrote:
| Also:
|
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-bing-raises-con...
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-bing-censors-china...
| _of wrote:
| Qwant also shows no results.
|
| https://www.qwant.com/?t=images&q=Tank+man
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Hm. Qwant seemed to advertise they do some degree of crawling
| of their own... Do they actually?
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| You'd expect this to AT LEAST return that goofy pick of Dukakis
| sticking his head out of a tank.
| ______- wrote:
| https://lite.qwant.com/?q=tank+man
| politician wrote:
| He shows up on Bing Image Search if you search for "Unknown
| Protester" instead.
|
| https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Unknown+Protester+&form...
| pomian wrote:
| Bravo. Thankyou HN and users for this post. It's a simple check,
| and search results are definitely tainted somehow, especially
| selecting results in images. It is a reminder of how frangible
| history is. What will remain in another 30 years m How much
| history have we lost?
| [deleted]
| TinkersW wrote:
| I've noticed wikipedia also seems to have censored the tiananmen
| square massacre to some degree.
|
| If you look it up it is now referred to as the "tiananmen square
| protests", and contains none of the famous photos you might
| expect to see such as tank man.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Lots of results for "Tank Girl", thankfully.
| CoolGuySteve wrote:
| Hmmm, DuckDuckGo image search shows some people standing next to
| tanks but not _the_ tank man photo.
|
| I guess it makes sense since DDG uses bing for their search tech
| but it's pretty disappointing that you can get uncensored
| searches or privacy but not both.
| thebigspacefuck wrote:
| I tried turning safe search off and got some images of Tank Man
| [deleted]
| ucosty wrote:
| I just get "Sorry, no results here." on DDG
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| Unless you have moderate safe search on, in which case it
| says that the results were blocked by safe search.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| For me, ddg shows the image in main search, but not in image
| search.
| toxik wrote:
| So disappointing that a search engine like DuckDuckGo would
| fall prey to this sort of censorship.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Doesn't DDG mostly rely on Bing for its results? So a result
| that's suspiciously missing from Bing would be likely to also
| be missing from DDG, unless their indexing and crawling is
| more comprehensive than I thought.
| [deleted]
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| DDG uses Bing for results I've heard? So they're falling prey
| to the censorship of their provider.
| toxik wrote:
| Right, which is an implementation detail to some extent
| KirillPanov wrote:
| It's not an "implementation detail". It's a problem with
| the fact that the Internet has only two functioning
| crawlers remaining.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| Don't forget Yandex.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Three, arguably--Yandex still exists and is generally
| pretty decent in addition to being the best at dealing
| with Russian morphology (although relying on it after
| Segalovich's death seems foolish).
| hn8788 wrote:
| I don't think they did. I searched for Tank Man, and the
| first result is the wikipedia article, followed by nothing
| but articles about him and the Tiananmen Square Massacre. The
| images section seems to be the only one that's acting weird,
| because if I search for "Tank Man China" it shows a bunch of
| pictures of him.
| frakkingcylons wrote:
| If you search for tank man on DDG, the very first result is the
| Wikipedia article about said individual and the Tiananmen
| Square massacre. If they were intentionally trying to censor
| the search results, why would they only censor images?
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| I don't think DDG is _trying_ to censor results (nor that the
| parent post is suggesting that), I think they 're inheriting
| censorship from their upstream sources, which aren't the same
| for different search types (web, images, news, etc.).
| Interestingly, it seems that even starting to type the "man"
| in "tank man" will result in no suggestions at all, even
| though the web results seem reasonable.
| kissgyorgy wrote:
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&t=hc&va=u&iar=images&iax=...
| fallingfrog wrote:
| Searching on the main page gives all kinds of results, this only
| happens on the image search. Why censor one and not the other?
|
| The alternative explanation is that bing's image search just
| sucks.
|
| https://www.bing.com/search?q=Tank+man&FORM=HDRSC1
| rvz wrote:
| Surprise! /s
|
| DDG is using Bing Search results!
| binarymax wrote:
| This confirms that, although not obvious when searching, Duck
| Duck Go is displaying image results from Bing.
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&atb=v228-1&iar=images&iax...
| binbag wrote:
| Wow, I didn't know this. Is this well known??
| toper-centage wrote:
| Virtually all alternate search engines are Bing.
| cyborgx7 wrote:
| DuckDuckGo has always been open about using the Bing Index
| https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
| pages/results/so...
| at_a_remove wrote:
| The kinds of mechanisms getting rid of Tank Man are being used
| just to hide this content here. It's fractal. It requires no
| complicity by the owners or maintainers of Bing or Hacker News,
| it just means that there are handles by which you can hide
| things.
|
| Outsourcing moderation at scale inevitably results in the ability
| of one or more parties to vanish content they do not like.
| kian wrote:
| @dang, I think we need an explanation for why Tank Man-related
| content on Hacker News has been disappearing all day. I usually
| trust HN to be a bastion of free speech, and if there isn't some
| kind of proportionate response here, I don't believe myself or
| many others here will be able to see it that way going forward.
|
| EDIT: Thank you for your response, dang. Hacker News is a special
| place, which is why we have responded so strongly to today's
| events - I apologize if the tone above came off as less-than-
| civil. I (and it seems, many others) look forward to hearing more
| about the 'dupe' article others have linked to below. It was only
| upon seeing the article marked as a dupe after seeing the
| previous flagged out of existence that it began to feel like more
| than just a user-initiated action, so I am sure further
| information on the mod-initiated actions will put these fears to
| rest.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| HN is not a bastion of free speech and it is not meant to be.
| Controversial topics are routinely flagged because they incite
| flame wars and downvoting because you disagree is considered
| acceptable.
|
| However, in this particular case, I don't think it should be
| flagged unless the comment sections becomes unmanageable. It
| may be a political topic but it is seen from a technical angle,
| and indeed, a lot of the comments are technical in nature: the
| effect of different options, different engines, alternative
| wording, etc...
|
| What I think is interesting is how artificial the censorship
| looks. If I see no results for such a simple phrase, I know
| something fishy is going on and that would encourage me to
| carry on.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| FWIW, 'right to speech' != 'right to be heard' and 'freedom
| of speech' != 'freedom from consequences.'
|
| Saying/posting something which quickly gets flagged into
| oblivion is freedom of speech working as intended. As is
| subsequent posts overcoming a flagging brigade...
| ethbr0 wrote:
| From someone with several years of moderate volume online
| community moderation, the issue with post-hoc censorship is
| radicalization.
|
| If something disappears, no one has bad feelings about it.
|
| If something two people are arguing over disappears, then two
| people carry simmering resentment about it (ironically,
| likely more than if their verbal spat had reached a cathartic
| conclusion), that eventually manifests in their next
| comments, and which ultimately leads to an erosion of common
| decency and civility.
|
| It's a fine line, but it's definitely a line rather than
| right vs wrong.
| zxzax wrote:
| Is that really an issue? If the user makes more uncivil
| comments then you flag them again until they get the
| picture. There are plenty of other places on the internet
| that seem to welcome and encourage flame wars -- they can
| go there to work out their resentment and then come back
| when they're ready.
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| This post is on the front page right now (edit: and now also
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396783) - that's the
| opposite of "disappearing". I'd have to see links to the other
| ones.
|
| Here's one tip for you guys, from years-long, world-weary
| experience: if you're coming up with sensational explanations
| in breathless excitement, it's almost certainly untrue.
|
| Edit: ok, here's what happened. Users flagged
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925. When you see
| [flagged] on a submission, you should assume users flagged it
| because with rare exceptions, that's always why.
|
| A moderator saw that, but didn't look very closely and thought
| "yeah that's probably garden-variety controversy/drama" and
| left the flags on. No moderator saw any of the other posts
| until I woke up, turned on HN, and--surprise!--saw the latest
| $outrage.
|
| Software marked https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395028 a
| dupe for the rather esoteric reasons explained here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397622. After that, the
| current post got upvoted to the front page, where it remains.
|
| In other words, nothing was co-ordinated and the dots weren't
| connected. This was just the usual stochastic churn that
| generates HN. Most days it generates the HN you're used to and
| some days (quite a few days actually) it generates the next
| outlier, but that's how stochastics work, yes? If you're a boat
| on a choppy sea, sometimes some waves slosh into the boat. If
| you're a wiggly graph, sometimes the graph goes above a line.
|
| If I put myself in suspicious shoes, I can come up with quite a
| few objections to the above, but I can also answer them pretty
| simply: this entire thing was a combo of two data points, one
| borderline human error [1] and one software false positive. We
| don't know how to make software that doesn't do false positives
| and we don't know how to make humans that don't do errors. And
| we don't know how to make those things not happen at the same
| time sometimes. This is what imperfect systems do, so it's not
| clear to me what needs changing. If you think something needs
| changing, I'm happy to hear it, but please make it obvious how
| you're not asking for a perfect system, because I'm afraid
| that's not an option.
|
| [1] I must stick up for my teammate and say that this point is
| arguable; I might well have made the same call myself and it's
| far from obvious that it was the wrong call at the time. But we
| don't need that for this particular answer, so I'll let that
| bit go.
| surround wrote:
| Many are wondering why this was marked as dupe:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395028
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Just speculation: maybe a dupe of a dead topic.
| dang wrote:
| No, we'd only mark a story a [dupe] if it got significant
| attention in a different thread. I haven't heard back
| yet, but the likeliest explanation is that a moderator
| (correctly) thought that one Tank Man story on the HN
| front page was enough.
|
| Edit: oh - I think that one was actually marked a [dupe]
| by software. I'd need to double check this, but if so,
| it's because it interpreted the link to the other thread
| as a signal of dupiness.
|
| Edit 2: yes, that's what happened. When a submission is
| heavily flagged _and_ there is a single comment pointing
| to a different HN thread, the software interprets that as
| a strong signal of dupiness and puts dupe on the
| submission. It actually works super well most of the
| time. In this case it backfired because the comment was
| arguing the opposite.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Aha, there really WAS something funny going on.
|
| Of course, do not attribute to conspiracy that which can
| be attributed to a bug! ;-)
| skywal_l wrote:
| So if someone wants to bury a story, now they know how to
| do it.
| dang wrote:
| That's not quite accurate, but even if it were, there are
| easy ways to improve that bit of software if people start
| abusing it.
|
| You're right that most such software tricks, especially
| anti-abuse measures, need to be secret in order to stay
| working.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| Serious question: does flagging it as dupe by software
| automatically remove it? Or does a mod need to click a
| button at this point?
| xeromal wrote:
| He posted elsewhere that a mod has to approve it but they
| may glance at it without tons of focus
| MindGods wrote:
| Here you go:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925 [Flagged]
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395028 [Marked as
| dupe]
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394943 [Currently on
| page 2]
| ilamont wrote:
| _dang 27 minutes ago [-]
|
| [flagged] on submissions nearly always means users flagged
| it. This is in the FAQ:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#flag_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397158
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Then un-flag it, dang.
|
| You explained to me (and HN) recently that posts which
| are critical of HN itself are moderated less, not more,
| than others.
|
| The same standard should apply to posts in which a
| greatly disadvantaged group are standing up to a vastly
| superior power, all else being equal (credibility,
| tactics, nature of grievance, etc.)
|
| As with content concerning the events of June 4, 1989, in
| Tiananmen Square, China.
|
| Dupes should be merged. Valid freestanding posts should
| be unflagged.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| Right. Why haven't those users been banned, and the
| article restored? Dang is actually quite effective as and
| administrator, but this seems pretty clear-cut abuse of
| the flagging system. I don't expect perfection, dang
| might have not been aware of it yet, but I do expect that
| some action will be taken on hot-button topics when
| surfaced.
| partiallypro wrote:
| The FAQs also say a mod can remove the flag if it's
| unfair...which it is. Yet it hasn't been removed.
| dang wrote:
| Ok, I've removed it. Now people will accuse us of
| rewriting history, but that's ok - one eventually makes
| peace with the fact that there's no way to win.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| Yeah, but at least you rewrote it to something I agree
| with
| SturgeonsLaw wrote:
| danged if you do, danged if you don't
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| They now would be tagged as [dupe] and still removed.
| jxramos wrote:
| ah I never knew about that distinction. Good to know.
| kian wrote:
| As it is too late to edit my comment, I wanted to write this
| here, rather than sending a private email, dang.
|
| I apologize if the questions of myself and other users on
| this site today has set you on edge - and I am sure that
| today, in public and in private, you have seen many ugly
| things that the majority of us do not, and you reasonably
| draw a trend-line. I believe that you should extend the same
| charity of trend-spotting in the other direction.
|
| We live in tumultuous times, and the speed at which the
| ratchet is moving seems to be ever-increasing. There are
| significant concerns, as I know you know, about censorship
| abroad, and also at home in various western countries. I
| believe the overwhelming outpouring you have seen today has
| been in response to one undeniable fact -- that even a
| genuine accident on the part of some engineer somewhere could
| apply CCP (or any country's ruling party) censorship globally
| is a line in the sand that many did not realize had been
| already been crossed.
|
| Whether accidental or intentional, this is a watershed moment
| in the debate over censorship and freedom. It seems likely
| there are many more such errors in configuration actively
| deployed right now. That we have no way of knowing what, or
| how many such incidents there are is an existential threat to
| non-authoritarian systems of governance across the globe.
|
| To see something that seemed unthinkable even a few months
| ago - that Tank Man could be censored in western countries on
| the anniversary in remembrance of the struggles he literally
| stood for - crossed a threshold for me in terms of what I
| believed could be possible more broadly. To see the extremely
| reasonable discussion around it disappear from hacker news,
| and stay dead for hours (I note that both the
| inappropriately-flagged article and the accidentally-marked-
| as-dupe article both still maintain those statuses at the
| time of this writing [EDIT: The flagged article's status was
| changed a few minutes after. Thank you, dang. Doing so does
| not mean you are re-writing history, and we appreciate it])
| made it feel like it had encroached even closer to home than
| I had suspected.
|
| It made it feel like perhaps I'd been even more naive than I
| had ever imagined. I'm sure you must feel the same way, after
| some of the more hateful things I'm sure you heard today.
|
| All of this is to say that I treasure the community that you
| have played the single largest role in shaping, and your
| explanations have completely satisfied me.
|
| I apologize for the way your day turned out, and any negative
| ways in which I have contributed towards that.
| dang wrote:
| That's very sweet of you and of course there's no need to
| apologize. The issues here are all systemic.
| nbardy wrote:
| We were told the same thing about the lab leak theory from:
| Social media companies, Mainstream media, and the government.
|
| The reason for distrust is valid. We live in an age of
| rapidly increasing censorship and the CCPs growing reach of
| control in American discourse. Skepticism is becoming the
| default for very real reasons.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| "They're Not After Me, They're After You. I'm Just In the
| Way." Social Media Exile
| dude187 wrote:
| Exactly. Discourse has become censored almost compltely on
| a large number of non "fact checker approved" views over
| the last year. Reddit bans permanently over it all over,
| now Twitter. Facebook gets a lot of the blame but sadly it
| seems like my the only place my conservative friends have a
| voice.
|
| This trend of "stop Asian hate" is also not organic. It's
| designed to use the "your racist" Trump card to shut down
| any talk of the lab leak or China's response
| ccsnags wrote:
| Anyone can do this stuff. Cut a good promo that feeds
| into the internalized mythology of the target audience
| and you can get them to believe in it without a hint of
| skepticism.
|
| As far as organic or not, it doesn't really matter.
| People need to have an immune system for nonsense,
| especially it feels right. Most people can spot nonsense
| that goes against their own worldview. The trick is to be
| able to spot nonsense that is aligned with your worldview
| or you could directly benefit from if true.
| unholythree wrote:
| That's super nutty. How would the alleged uptick in
| racist violence against Asian-Americans provide cover for
| misdeeds of the Chinese Communist Party? Over the past
| couple weeks many mainstream news sources are reporting
| the possibility of the lab as a source. In fact the lack
| of transparency of Chinese authorities has been a pretty
| universal complaint (minus WHO dithering) since jump.
|
| I do think it's entirely possible the Asian hate fears
| are the sort of alarmist panic that the American media
| loves to trade in. I'd like to see statistics regarding
| violent crime reported by Asian and Pacific Islanders,
| rather than mostly anecdotal reporting or the dozen or so
| high profile attacks. I don't see this sort of breathless
| but shallow reporting as a conspiracy but just run of the
| mill bandwagoning.
| dang wrote:
| I can tell you personally with high confidence that neither
| the Communist Party of China nor any other Communist Party
| has influence on how we operate Hacker News. I can't say
| anything about any other site or company or media or
| government, because I'm not involved with any of that. But
| unless the communists are zapping me with behavior-control
| rays or Angela Lansbury had me brainwashed decades ago,
| precisely zero such influence is happening here.
|
| You don't have to believe me, of course, but if you decide
| not to, consider these two simple observations.
|
| First, if I were lying to the community, I would be an
| idiot, because the good faith of the community is literally
| the only thing that makes this site valuable. So, sheer
| self-interest plus not-being-an-idiot should be enough to
| tip your priors. Sure I'm an idiot about most things, but I
| hope I'm not completely incompetent at the most important
| part of my job. The value of a place like HN can easily
| disappear in one false step. Therefore the only policy
| which has ever made any sense to us is (1) tell the truth;
| (2) try never to do anything that isn't defensible to the
| community; and (3) acknowledge when we fuck up and fix it.
|
| Second, if you're going to draw dramatic conclusions about
| sinister operations, it's good for mental health to have at
| least one really solid piece of information you can check
| them against. Otherwise you end up in the wilderness of
| mirrors. What you see on internet forums--or rather, what
| you _think_ you see on internet forums, which then somehow
| _becomes_ what you see because that 's how the brain does
| it--is simply not solid information. Remember what von
| Neumann said about fitting an elephant? (https://hn.algolia
| .com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) He merely
| asked for five degrees of freedom. These nebulous internet
| spaces give you hundreds at least. That's way beyond enough
| to justify anything--even dipping in a ladle and getting
| one ladle's worth is enough to justify anything.
|
| [editing...]
| JBlue42 wrote:
| >Angela Lansbury had me brainwashed decades ago
|
| Bedknobs and Broomsticks got you too... ;-)
| nbardy wrote:
| > neither the Communist Party of China nor any other
| Communist Party has influence on how we operate Hacker
| News
|
| > Second, if you're going to draw dramatic conclusions
| about sinister operations
|
| This isn't about drawing dramatic conclusions. I have no
| delusion that Hacker News is colluding with the CCP. This
| is simply a question about a trend of disappearing posts.
|
| My original statement about
|
| > growing reach of control in American discourse
|
| is purposefully broad because the mechanisms of control
| are broad themselves. There is plenty of valid concerns
| around different types of cyber warfare or the growing
| self-censorship and desire among individuals to avoid
| challenging topics related to China. Hacker News is a
| collection of individuals and doesn't need to be a part
| of grand conspiracy to be susceptible to pressures that
| have exerted control over other media organizations.
|
| Explaining the process of hacker news moderation and how
| you mitigate real threats to free speech would be a
| better approach than claiming your critics are
| sensationalizing.
|
| To be clear I fall on the side of HN generally handling
| things well, my post was squarely at your dismissive
| response to valid criticism.
| kragen wrote:
| Aren't a substantial number of HN users, who vote on
| posts and comments and flag them, Chinese or Chinese-
| American? Isn't the government of China fairly popular in
| China? If the answer to both of these questions is "yes"
| I don't see how it can be true that "neither the
| Communist Party of China nor any other Communist Party
| has influence on how we operate Hacker News", even
| without any behavior-control rays.
| dang wrote:
| I appreciate your many positive contributions to HN, I
| trust your good intentions, and I definitely don't think
| you were making the kind of argument that this sounds
| like. It does still sound like it, though, which is no
| doubt why you got strong responses below.
|
| If you highlight the first use of the pronoun "we" in my
| comment, it should be clear that you're responding to a
| different argument than I was making. (superjan already
| made this point.)
|
| As for the "sounds like" problem, this string of previous
| explanations may (or may not) be useful: https://hn.algol
| ia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
| kragen wrote:
| Agreed, and I of course agree with the argument you
| actually _were_ making, rather than my misreading of it.
| Still, it 's profoundly disappointing to get responses
| including the kind of vicious attacks that you see in the
| thread.
|
| By the way, when you're not in the middle of trying to
| keep HN users from coming to blows with one another, you
| might be interested in this comment of mine from
| yesterday, which gives some context for why I abandoned
| the site previously, a decision which I recall puzzled
| you at the time:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27389993
| tptacek wrote:
| This is gross.
| kragen wrote:
| There is nothing gross in my comment, tptacek. Your
| comment, by contrast, amounts to a slanderous innuendo.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > There is nothing gross in my comment, tptacek
|
| "Gross" is subjective, so that's a legitimate viewpoint.
|
| Your comment is overtly, expressly, racist though. For
| those who find racism gross, its also gross. Obviously,
| YMMV.
|
| > Your comment, by contrast, amounts to a slanderous
| innuendo.
|
| I don't think you understand either slander or innuendo
| if you believe that.
| kragen wrote:
| My comment is not racist, either overtly, expressly,
| subtly, or implicitly. Acknowledging diversity of opinion
| and the existence of factions does not imply
| discriminating against any of those factions.
|
| You can find an extensive list of recent comments I've
| made that are complimentary to China and Chinese people
| _in the last three months_ in
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398213.
|
| I said that many HN users are Chinese and Chinese-
| American [immigrants]. There is nothing racist about
| that. The Chinese Communist Party, which is the
| government of [Mainland] China, is very popular among
| people from China. There is nothing racist about either
| of these ideas, nor about drawing the conclusion that if
| you publicly attack the Chinese Communist Party, you are
| going to offend a lot of Chinese people, including many
| HN users.
|
| It's not a logically entailed consequence of the premises
| --it is theoretically possible that only Chinese people
| who are opposed to CCP rule, such as many of the students
| who died in Tiananmen Square, many Taiwanese people, and
| Falun Dafa members, are HN users--but it is
| overwhelmingly likely that this is not the case.
|
| Pointing this out is not gross. Falsely accusing people
| of racism is gross.
| tptacek wrote:
| The whole sentiment here is gross, but it is particularly
| fucked up how you keep going out of your way to pull
| Chinese-American people into it. Why not call me a Papist
| while you're at it?
| kragen wrote:
| If you post a story on HN with a list of historical
| atrocities attributable to the Roman Catholic Church or
| to Spanish colonialism, you can definitely expect a
| significant fraction of Latin American and Spanish people
| to take exception to it, and I've seen that happen on HN
| several times in the past. Recognizing and understanding
| that there are hot-button issues for particular
| political, national, and ethnic groups is not racism;
| it's a fundamental part of understanding human diversity,
| which is necessary in order to achieve peaceful
| coexistence.
|
| Moreover, it is not necessary to claim that every member
| of a particular group belongs to a popular factions
| within that group to do this; it is sufficient to
| acknowledge a general tendency. For example, there are
| Latin Americans who are not Catholic, and there are Roman
| Catholics who deplore the Spanish Inquisition as
| fervently as any Anglican; nevertheless, if you go around
| denouncing the Spanish Inquisition as one of the worst
| things ever to have happened in history in front of a
| large number of Latin American people, a significant
| fraction of them are reliably going to object. On HN,
| they may flag your comment.
|
| Me saying this is not the same as me calling you a
| "Papist".
|
| What fraction of current Chinese-American immigrants grew
| up in China in families that were lifted out of poverty
| by Deng Xiaoping's economic policies? I'm guessing over
| 10%. How would you expect these people to react to
| demonization of Deng Xiaoping? Many of them will be
| offended, either because they regard Deng as a hero or
| because they see that demonization as being directly
| motivated by anti-Chinese racism, which in many cases it
| is: people _do_ sometimes criticize the Chinese
| government because they hate Chinese people. In other
| cases, it 's a more subtle form of racism, which doesn't
| directly consider Chinese people _bad_ but considers
| their feelings _unimportant_.
|
| And that racism is what I'm standing against, as
| consistently today as I have for years, as evidenced by
| my comment history linked above. I don't think a person
| _either_ has to be racist _or_ have to regard Deng or the
| CPC as above criticism in order to understand that many
| Chinese people will be offended by such criticism. Yes,
| including many Chinese-American people.
|
| Withdraw your baseless attack and apologize.
|
| Addendum: tptacek responded to this with a now-deleted
| comment saying something to the effect of "I apologize to
| any Chinese HN users who have to read comments like
| this."
| mssundaram wrote:
| For what it's worth Kragen, if you ever see this, I
| understand what you mean and I don't think that you're
| being racist. We can't even talk about the diversity of
| humans and what influences their intentions anymore
| without being called racist.
|
| -Signed a Hindu American living in Asia
| kragen wrote:
| I deeply appreciate that. I've been profoundly
| disappointed in most of this conversation, and your
| comment is a bright spot.
| tptacek wrote:
| I stand by what I wrote, including what I deleted, but I
| don't want to feed this any further.
| [deleted]
| joemi wrote:
| The implications of what you said sound kind of racist to
| me. I suspect that's why you seem to have been downvoted.
| kragen wrote:
| I definitely do not support excluding or discriminating
| against Chinese users, a practice which is a big problem
| on HN. I'm just saying that, just as a significant subset
| of USA users are likely to flag posts that encourage
| people to burn American flags or claim that the USA is a
| "white-supremacist state", and a significant subset of
| Muslim users are likely to flag posts that criticize
| Muhammad, there's a significant subset of Chinese users
| who are likely to flag posts that criticize the Chinese
| Communist Party, even if it's implicit criticism by way
| of calling attention to particular historical events that
| its opponents commonly use as rallying points.
|
| My recent comments on China include:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27162262 and
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27162354 criticizing
| another user for an essentialist oversimplified view of
| Chinese history.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27161925 criticizing
| the US for "aggressively escalating the TSMC conflict
| with targeted attacks on the PRC's nuclear and
| supercomputing capabilities".
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26937581 criticizing
| coverage of China in the UK press for systematically
| discounting the sizes of urbanizations in China.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26930408 tracing the
| history of Wuxi through three millennia and criticizing
| its frankly racist dismissal in the UK press.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26931665 arguing
| that Chinese contributions to photovoltaic energy
| development are huge.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26676997 pointing
| out that China's vaccination efforts against covid have
| been head and shoulders above those in the US and Europe.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26598814 correcting
| someone who argued that China was merely the source of
| key _materials_ for photovoltaic energy.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26542286 pointing
| out that the UK's covid-testing regime has been
| pathetically poor compared to China's.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Last time I looked, about 40% of Americans were of German
| ancestry.
|
| I don't think Angela Merkel is controlling Hacker News.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| "we" doesn't include the users. The users don't operate
| hacker news. They have an effect on it but it's not top-
| down censorship which is what's being implied here.
| kragen wrote:
| The users certainly have influence over how dang operates
| the site!
| intro-b wrote:
| yeah true - we really need an ethnicity/nationality test
| for new accounts before they post to really make sure HN
| has no foreign CCP influence
| superjan wrote:
| I think you are misreading him. He says that there is no
| pressure or indirect influence from china on how HN is
| run. This is a popular internet forum, of course there's
| people trying to push their narrative.
| no-s wrote:
| " _Angela Lansbury had me brainwashed decades ago_ "
|
| Why would you mention that? It's very suspicious!
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| I feel like this is one of the first times I've seen
| @dang fucking _go in_. Love it, love you and keep up the
| great work.
| tw04 wrote:
| I'll start with: no I don't think you or "HN" are in on
| some conspiracy.
|
| My question is: does HN actively attempt to counteract
| government actors from influencing the site? I think it's
| been proven that China among other countries employs
| folks to try to influence social media sites. Not
| necessarily by influencing staff, but by creating user
| accounts who do things like downvote unfavorable comments
| or flag stories they don't like.
|
| This seems like it would be a prime target for that
| behavior.
| dang wrote:
| Of course we do, and as belter pointed out, not only
| government actors. Counteracting abuse of this site is
| the #1 thing we do behind the scenes to try to prevent
| the value of HN from eroding. That's actually what I
| spent the first hour of my morning doing, before I
| realized that there was $BigDrama happening. (Thank you,
| bat-signaling emailers.) It's what we put the bulk of our
| design thinking and technical work into. If you ever see
| me commenting on how "large HN threads are paged for
| performance reasons, so click the More link at the
| bottom, and we'll eventually remove these comments once
| we turn off pagination", well, the reason that's not done
| yet is because moderation takes 90% of my time, answering
| emails takes the other 90% of my time, and counteracting
| abuse takes the other 90% of my time.
|
| The better HN gets, the more people want to suck its
| juices for their own purposes. Most haven't figured out
| that the above-board way to do that is simply to make
| _interesting_ contributions, so they do other things, and
| there 's probably a power law of how sinister those
| things are. The vast majority are relatively innocuous,
| but lame. (Think startups getting their friends to upvote
| their blog post, or posting booster comments in their
| thread.)
|
| Users are very good at spotting the innocuous/lame forms
| of abuse, but when it comes to $BigCo manipulation (or
| possible manipulation), user perceptions get wildly
| inaccurate--far beyond 99.9%--and when it comes to
| $NationState manipulation (or possible manipulation),
| user perceptions get so inaccurate that...even trying to
| measure how inaccurate they are is not possible with
| classical physics. I've been trying to explain this for
| such a long time, and I don't know how better to do it.
| Almost everything that people think they're seeing about
| this is pure imagination and projection, entirely
| determined by the strong feelings that dominate high
| politics.
|
| How do I know that? Because when we dig into the data of
| the actual cases, we find is that it's basically all
| garden-variety internet user behavior. It's like this:
| imagine you were digging in your garden for underground
| surveillance devices. Why? Well, a lot of people are
| worried about them. So you dig and what do you find?
| Dirt, roots, and worms. The next time you dig, you find
| more dirt and more roots and more worms. And so for the
| next thousand places you dig. Now someone comes along and
| insists that you dig in this-other-place-over-here
| because they've convinced themselves--I mean absolutely
| convinced themselves, to the point that they send emails
| saying "my continued use of HN depends on how you answer
| this email"--that _here_ is where the underground
| surveillance device surely must be. You 've learned how
| important it is to be willing to dig; even just somebody-
| being-worried is a valid reason to dig. So you pick up
| your shovel and dig in _that_ spot, and you find dirt,
| roots, and worms.
|
| Still with me? Ok. Now: what are the odds that this thing
| that _looks_ like a root or a worm is actually a
| surveillance device? Here my analogy breaks down a bit
| because we can 't actually cut them open to see what's
| inside--we don't have that data. We do, however, have
| lots of history about what the "worms" have been doing
| over the years. And when you look at that, what do you
| find that they've been up to? They've been commenting
| about (say) the latest Julia release, or parser
| combinators in Elixir, and they've been on HN for years
| and some old comment talks about, say, some diner in
| Wisconsin that used to make the best burgers. And in 2020
| they maybe got mad on one side or the other of a flamewar
| about BLM. (Don't be mad that I'm using worms to
| represent HN users. It's just a silly analogy, and I like
| worms.)
|
| Or, maybe the history shows that the person gets involved
| in arguments about China a lot. Aha! Now we have our
| Chinese spy! How much are they paying you? Is it still 50
| cents? I guess the CCP says inflation doesn't exist in
| China--is that it, shill? If @dang doesn't ban you, that
| proves he's a CCP agent too!
|
| But then you look and you see that they've been other
| threads too, and a previous comment talks about being a
| grad student in ML, or about having married someone of
| Chinese background--obviously human stuff which fully
| explains why they're commenting the way they are and why
| they get triggered by what they get triggered by.
|
| This kind of thing--dirt, roots, and worms--is what
| essentially all of the data reduces to. And here's the
| thing: you, or anyone, can check most of this yourself,
| simply by following the public history of the HN accounts
| you encounter in the threads. The people jumping to
| sinister conclusions and angrily accusing others don't
| tend to do that, because the state one's in when one's in
| such a state doesn't _want_ to look for countervailing
| information. But if you actually look, what you 're going
| to find in most cases is enough countervailing
| information to make the accusations appear absurd...and
| then you'd feel pretty sheepish about making them.
|
| I'm not saying the public record is the entire record; of
| course it isn't. We can look at voting histories,
| flagging histories, site access patterns, and plenty of
| other things that aren't public. What I'm saying is that,
| with rare exceptions [1], what we find after countless
| hours of extensive investigation of the private data
| is...dirt, roots, and worms. It looks exactly like the
| public data.
|
| Moreover, the _accusations_ about spying, brigading,
| shilling, astroturfing, bots, troll farms, and everything
| else, are all exactly the same in the cases where the
| public data refutes them and the cases where the public
| data is inconclusive. I realize this is a subtle point,
| but if you stop and think about it, it may actually be
| the strongest evidence of all. It shows that whatever
| mechanism is generating these accusations doesn 't vary
| at all with the actual data.
|
| [editing...]
|
| [1] so rare that it's misleading to even mention them,
| and which also don't look anything like what people
| imagine
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "What I'm saying is that, with rare exceptions [1], what
| we find after countless hours of extensive investigation
| of the private data is...dirt, roots, and worms. It looks
| exactly like the public data."
|
| Ah, but this is just proof, that the communist sleeper
| agents are entrenched even deeper among us, than we
| expected!
| dang wrote:
| You're right. That is the wilderness of mirrors.
|
| Unfortunately, it seems that we all do this. It's just
| easier to notice when other people are doing it!
| [deleted]
| jturpin wrote:
| Is there any valuable connection between the users that
| flagged the original post that might be interesting? Not
| looking for specifics, since I imagine that's secret, but
| wondering how much of it really was standard behavior
| versus something else.
| dang wrote:
| The flagging history of all the users who flagged that
| post was very consistent. There was no connection to any
| specific topic (nor between the accounts, that I'm aware
| of). Rather, they have previously flagged stories about
| things like cryptocurrency, ransomware, covid lockdowns,
| $BigCo flamewars, and lots and lots of scandals involving
| such subjects as Florida, Katie Hill, and the Chicago
| Police Department. Also, most if not all were avid HNers,
| people who comment and upvote and in a few cases email us
| a lot.
|
| The pattern seems clear that these users are flagging the
| more sensational kinds of submissions that tend to lead
| to predictable discussions and flamewars. There's room
| for competing opinions about which of those are/aren't
| on-topic for HN, given the site guidelines; if you or
| anyone want to understand how the mods look at it, I
| recommend the explanations at the links below. But
| clearly the flagging behavior in this case was in good
| faith.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false
| &so...
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false
| &so...
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false
| &so...
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&
| sor...
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&
| sor...
| xeromal wrote:
| Sounds like you're saying it was flagged because veteran
| users knew it would be a shit show which it is. lol
| dang wrote:
| I think veteran is a fair term to apply to those users.
| jedberg wrote:
| Man this comment give me PTSD from the early reddit days.
| If you read nothing else in this comment: You're doing a
| great job solving a hard problem, keep it up!
|
| > well, the reason that's not done yet is because
| moderation takes 90% of my time, answering emails takes
| the other 90% of my time, and counteracting abuse takes
| the other 90% of my time.
|
| So much this. There just isn't enough time with a small
| staff.
|
| > Most haven't figured out that the above-board way to do
| that is simply to make interesting contributions
|
| So much this too. This is what we always told people on
| reddit -- brands would ask us "how do I get more popular
| on reddit" and we tell them, "make interesting content".
|
| > Almost everything that people think they're seeing
| about this is pure imagination and projection, entirely
| determined by the strong feelings that dominate high
| politics.
|
| Same with all social media. People assume governments
| have heavy handed control of all content on social media,
| when in most cases the government couldn't care less.
| They focus on using propaganda to control _individuals_
| and then let _those people_ make a mess of social media.
|
| Your whole post resonates with my experience on the
| inside of moderating a big social media site and meeting
| with moderators of other big sites.
|
| I'll be honest, at first I wasn't too keen on you
| moderation style, as I found it too heavy handed. But I
| take that back. HN doesn't cover everything I want to
| talk about (I go to reddit for the rest), but what it
| does cover, it covers better than reddit does.
|
| So thank you, and I hope you get some more help with one
| of those 90% jobs!
| splithalf wrote:
| Great response. At the same time, absence of evidence is
| not the same as evidence of absence. It seems improbable
| that nation states aren't keenly interested in social
| media influence. It seems much more likely such efforts
| are undetectable.
| dang wrote:
| I was getting to that - hence the [editing...] :)
| dgb23 wrote:
| That rant was both informative and entertaining! Thank
| you!
| gus_massa wrote:
| From some old comments, I remember that there is a
| "voting ring" detector. (The details are obscure, because
| it's part of the secret sauce or something.)
|
| I guess there is also a "flagging brigade" detector. [If
| not, I upgrade this comment to a feature request.]
| loceng wrote:
| Let's say you have 5,000 to 10,000 accounts who semi-
| regularly post as "normal looking" accounts with other
| activity, how many of those have to downvote/flag a post
| to knock it out of front page? Not many I gather.
| actuator wrote:
| Considering the upvote count even the hot rising posts on
| front page have. I would assume the flag threshold to be
| quite small. I don't know if each flag vote counts the
| same or does it depend on karma/account age, but at least
| from upvotes I would assume you would need less than 50
| flags to pull even a hot story. So, paid influence ops
| should easily succeed in HN; whether they have even
| bothered with HN because of small audience size, that I
| don't know.
|
| In most cases it is the politics aspect or the unfair
| coverage aspect that leads users to flag a story, like
| say on lab leaks; but this story being flagged so easily
| was interesting. It is about a tech platform
| intentionally/mistakenly censoring things we will count
| as free speech.
| belter wrote:
| Not only government actors. It looks like Microsoft has a
| whole team working this site:
| https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-corp-
| msft-q1-201...
|
| Quote from Satya Nadella Q1 2019 Earnings Conference Call
| "...In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article
| in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been
| working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in
| popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we
| have made a lot of progress in some sense that at least
| basically said that we are neck to neck with Amazon when
| it comes to even lead developers as represented in that
| community..."
|
| Mentioned here before:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27293480
| tolbish wrote:
| Very interesting. I would love to see if @dang has
| addressed this before.
| dang wrote:
| No, I only found out about it from the comment belter
| linked to. FWIW I think (god help us) fshbbdssbbgdd's
| explanation sounds plausible. I had a similar instinctive
| response but not as well thought through.
|
| We have banned people in a few cases for serious $BigCo
| astroturfing but there's always a grey area in the Venn
| diagram around "PR operation" and "overzealous fan". You
| can't tell those apart without a smoking gun and those
| are hard to come by. Fortunately, from a moderation point
| of view it's a distinction without a difference because
| the effects on the site are the same. Also FWIW, my sense
| (and we do have some evidence for this) is that even when
| these things are PR, they're somehow haywire (e.g. a
| contractor gone rogue), not official strategy, and if
| high-enough execs found out about it they'd probably shut
| it down. That's just speculation though; informed
| speculation, but not highly informed.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| The charitable interpretation of this comment is that
| Microsoft uses Hacker News comments as a barometer for
| developer sentiment about Azure. It's just Microsoft
| trying to do the "developers developer developers!"
| thing. They want to make Azure into the kind of thing
| that people on Hacker News would like. I think this is
| the most reasonable interpretation, because why on earth
| would Satya confess to astroturfing on an earnings call?
|
| However, if any executive is getting graded against this
| metric, Goodhart's law applies, and there's a good chance
| astroturfing would happen. Satya probably wouldn't know
| about it.
|
| If a Hollywood CEO says that they are trying to raise the
| audience Cinemascore ratings of their movies, we'd
| interpret that to mean that they are trying to make
| audience-friendly movies, not that they are trying to
| astroturf Cinemascore. And similarly, if someone at the
| studio were astroturfing Cinemascore, the CEO wouldn't
| talk about it on the earnings call.
| Nursie wrote:
| I'm not sure about why anyone would confess, but I'm
| fairly certain MS used to pull this sort of stuff, and
| not in that sophisticated a fashion - back in the days of
| Windows Phone 7 and then 8, there were people all over
| slashdot talking about how _amazing_ the platform was and
| how the developer experience was just the best... before
| developer builds were available.
|
| Maybe I was misreading it, but to me at the time it
| seemed like a flood of unreasonably positive people
| gushing about something they couldn't really have had any
| experience with.
| ufmace wrote:
| Social media manipulation is a tricky problem. I'm sure
| HN has plenty of active measures against various types of
| abuse and manipulation, and I'm sure they can't tell us
| about them, because the people doing that read HN too.
|
| Plenty of orgs are surely trying to do that actively for
| all sorts of reasons. No idea how successful they are,
| probably tough to tell.
|
| The spookiest thing of all is that most of the effect
| might be genuine grassroots action. Picture a Chinese
| Nationalist poster here, genuinely independent tech
| enthusiast and happens to know enough English to
| participate in an English forum. Perhaps they are
| genuinely annoyed by what they see as westerners meddling
| in their internal politics, which there is a long history
| of. Perhaps they flag what they see as clickbaity stories
| likely to lead to a bunch of China-bashing out of genuine
| annoyance. They don't need to be paid or leaned on by the
| CCP at all, they just actually feel that way.
|
| Dammit, now I sound too apologetic about it. Sigh...
| adventured wrote:
| Now wait just a minute.
|
| Are you suggesting that there may be vast, concerted
| intellectual fraud related to the origins of SARS-CoV-2?
|
| Such that the former director of the CDC has received death
| threats for suggesting the bullshit mainstream media
| peddled lies might indeed be false, and there may be a more
| likely alternate source to the beginning of the pandemic
| other than pangolins?
|
| Or that there is something slightly fishy about Peter
| Daszak being put in charge of The Lancet's investigation of
| the origins of SARS-CoV-2. Like he was previousy a fact
| checker - ha ha ha - for Facebook, helping to identify and
| remove "misinformation" about SARS2/Covid. Like he was on
| the WHO team sent to Wuhan - ha ha ha - to (not)
| investigate the origins of SARS2.
|
| Or that maybe there's something a little weird about Fauci
| blatantly lying to Congress, lying to the public, lying
| everywhere non-stop for the past year, as to whether it was
| possible SARS2 leaked out of a lab and whether gain of
| function was funded by the NIH through EcoHealth. And then,
| suddenly, completely changing his tune. Yeah, weird.
|
| Or maybe it's weird how the WHO very willingly, openly,
| ridiculously assisted China in covering up the origins of
| SARS2 in the early days, and has barely made the slightest
| of efforts to deny any of it (because they got caught on
| record helping to hide the outbreak from the world). And
| maybe it's weird how the WHO has suffered close to zero
| consequences from any of that fraud that helped kill
| plausibly huge numbers of people.
|
| Or maybe it's weird how so many of the big tech companies
| simultaneously unified to censor discussion about the lab
| leak theory. Of course it's not like we now know for a
| fact, thanks to insider leaks and Congressional discovery,
| that many of the social media and big tech companies work
| closely together to censor things they ideologically or
| politically dislike or otherwise find inconvenient to
| whatever their mission is these days.
|
| Nah hell, it's obviously all conspiracy theory,
| misinformation, deserving of aggressive censorship.
|
| edit: the downvotes, fortunately, don't change or hide
| reality, no matter how many times you hit that little down
| arrow
|
| I was supporting the lab leak theory here on HN at the
| beginning of the pandemic. I was right then. I'm right now.
| Another thing that hasn't changed in that time is the mob
| trying to downvote the discussion away.
| emodendroket wrote:
| The reality is just the opposite. Even a cursory
| examination of the news will show a torrent of anti-China
| coverage (and attendant changes in public sentiment toward
| China) which just happens to coincide with a US campaign to
| "confront China" in "great-power conflict." The idea that
| China is controlling this discourse is risible.
| tschwimmer wrote:
| Somewhat refreshing to see the normally mild-mannered dang
| show a flash of annoyance at conspiratorial thinking for
| once.
|
| Thanks for your consistently even-handed and dedicated
| moderation efforts sir.
| underdeserver wrote:
| Seconded.
|
| Thank you, dang, for a clear, direct, elaborate, level-
| headed response.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| I wish it was more than mild annoyance being expressed.
| There has been a huge uptick in /r/conspiracy style posts
| and accusations over the last few months (none of them
| valid, except one but that was purely by accident).
| tinus_hn wrote:
| What would that achieve? Suddenly people see the light
| and no longer believe there is a conspiracy? Seems rather
| unlikely to me.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| Ideally they'd stick to other forums.
| gok wrote:
| Why is flagging anonymous?
| dang wrote:
| For the same reason voting is, if not more so.
| neolog wrote:
| I'm curious if tank man posts got flagged an unusual amount
| of times?
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| Flagging amounts to anonymous moderation, which is why you
| see a lot of conspiratorial responses to it. Users have no
| way to know who is removing a post from acceptable discussion
| via flagging.
|
| One possible way to address this is to make visible a list of
| users who flagged a post. The arguments against this are
| obvious. But without such information, in the end you have to
| accept one result of anonymous moderation is the generation
| of conspiracy theories.
|
| It's a tradeoff, of course.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| hn_go_brrrrr wrote:
| Oh, you have multiple mods now? I thought it was just you,
| after sctb left.
| dang wrote:
| The situation hasn't changed since Scott left; it's just
| that we were the only two public mods so now I'm the only
| public one.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I don't doubt posts are flagged by users as opposed to
| moderation.
|
| But at the same time, it also seems like flagging can be too
| easily abused, and can lead to accusations of censorship and
| distrust. (Though I've certainly seen it work well in cases,
| especially for false/defamatory articles.)
|
| But it really does seem like we're at the point where
| longstanding users need to also be able to vouch for flagged
| stories, or something like that. And even if that doesn't
| automatically restore the story, it could at least show a
| label like "pending moderator decision" or something.
|
| At a time where trust in the media and authority is low... a
| little bit of greater transparency might go a long way. :)
| dfabulich wrote:
| > longstanding users need to also be able to vouch for
| flagged stories, or something like that.
|
| This is the critical point. Today, users can "vouch" for
| [dead] stories, but can't vouch for [flagged] stories until
| they get flagged so much that they convert to [dead].
|
| The other "Tank Man" story was flagged, but never quite
| dead, so users couldn't vouch for it; from users'
| perspective, it appeared to simply disappear.
|
| Allowing users to vouch for the other story would have
| helped considerably.
| actuator wrote:
| Should we have vouch for stories that haven't been marked
| flagged yet as well? I will search for HN's ranker
| formula but right now, it shows this story in 8th place
| to me. The upvote/time would put it on top, so I am
| guessing either most upvotes are old and there is a decay
| involved in ranker or it is also being flagged. It could
| also be an auto flame war detector pulling it down, HN
| has one based on upvote/comments of the post, I am not
| sure if there is one which considers voting within
| comments itself.
| Causality1 wrote:
| Yes. From observation, there are a number of topics which
| inevitably draw the attention of a personal army that very
| much cares about that topic in a specific way, and to a
| much greater degree than a typical user.
| yongjik wrote:
| But flagging works most of the time. There are just too
| many submissions that result in utterly predictable and
| boring comments. I myself succumbed to the temptation many
| times, and left tons of comments when it came to, say,
| Trump's latest antics. Frankly HN will be (marginally)
| better if someone erased every comment of mine in any
| thread that mentions Trump.
|
| Without user flagging HN will be unusable.
| 6foot4_82iq wrote:
| Three or four coordinated accounts is all it takes to have
| de facto editorial control over HN.
| dang wrote:
| I'd love to hear how you think you know that. Actually,
| better than that, please show us all some links to where
| this happened. If what you say is true, it would be easy
| to find many examples.
| zamadatix wrote:
| "But it really does seem like we're at the point where
| longstanding users need to also be able to vouch for
| flagged stories, or something like that."
|
| Isn't this already a thing with the "vouch" button on said
| posts? https://i.imgur.com/Hp9nu58.png
| gus_massa wrote:
| The vouch button only appears for dead stories. I
| sometimes would like a wtfitf button.
| tolbish wrote:
| By the time a story needs to be vouched for, it loses the
| momentum it previously had gettting it to the front page.
| So you need a way to prevent vouching from being
| necessary in the first place.
| [deleted]
| idbehold wrote:
| Another approach is to penalize users (e.g. stop trusting
| their flags) who flagged a post which then got unflagged by
| a mod.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| It's possible to email the mods vouching for stories (or
| comments). I do this fairly frequently. Not (yet) in this
| case, though there was a politically-tinged story earlier
| this week that I alerted mods on.
|
| What's particularly insidious is that killed stories both
| don't show up in Algolia search results (this is somewhat
| understandable, but in the case of political flagging,
| problematic), and even where favourited (something I also
| do with some regularity), may not be visible to non-
| logged-in users and IIRC actually disappear from the
| index in time.
| retrac wrote:
| I have a flag on my platform that flags users who
| reported things I agreed with the removal of, as
| "trusted" and their reports are given more weight in the
| algorithm next time. Sort of the inverse of what you
| propose where everyone is somewhat untrusted by default.
| (But not entirely untrusted.)
| dejj wrote:
| What is that platform of yours?
| geoduck14 wrote:
| Facebook
| detaro wrote:
| the mods take flagging rights away from people they find
| abusing it
| idbehold wrote:
| My proposed approach is a little more automated. The mods
| don't have to find and remove flagging rights
| individually, they just unflag a post and instantly all
| the users who had flagged it lose some credibility for
| future flags.
|
| EDIT: The "flagging trustworthiness" could even help mods
| to find posts which might need to be unflagged quicker
| based on the average trustworthiness of the flags.
| munk-a wrote:
| But unfortunately that could lead to a chilling effect on
| flagging deserving content. I like having dang and other
| moderators involved as the final say to reverse a
| decision if it's necessary. I am pretty conservative with
| my own flagging and vouching (I've vouched precisely once
| and it was a comment I strongly disagreed with but was
| clearly made in good faith and added to the discussion)
| and I believe that other folks are as well. Since the
| system mostly works and since social media upvoting
| algorithms are so insanely complicated to balance well I
| think it's fair to avoid rocking the boat.
| prepend wrote:
| I don't think so. I'd still be able to flag, just my
| flags would count for less. And not make that discount
| visible to me.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Wait, flags are only meant to be used for bad things?
| I've been using them for "title is bad, pls change"
| requests. (Oops.)
| stingrae wrote:
| i would like an option in the settings to disable/enable
| my ability to flag content. On mobile, I have
| accidentally flagged things and recall it being
| challenging to hit the button to unflag.
| Dah00n wrote:
| Vouch is already implemented.
| blibble wrote:
| only for comments, not stories
| dang wrote:
| It works the same way for comments and stories.
| itcrowd wrote:
| Also for submissions
|
| (Maybe the karma threshold is different, but i do see it)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Karma threshold isn't the only criteria. I'm at ~47k
| karma and do not have access to vouch functionality. I
| might be in a sort of permanent semi penalty box (which I
| take no issue with, not my sandbox), so take with a grain
| of salt.
| blibble wrote:
| for me it's there for [dead] stories, but not [flagged]
| ones
|
| [dead]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397440
| (has vouch)
|
| [flagged]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396685
| (no vouch)
| itcrowd wrote:
| Good point. Same here
| grzm wrote:
| Vouching works for [dead] comments and submissions, not
| those that are only [flagged] (but not [dead]). I believe
| this is what 'crazygringo is referring to.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| The mods respond to emails (contact link in the footer)
| about observed issues, so that's always an option if y'all
| think something needs a human revisit and there's no site
| button for it.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Modern censorship relies on using online communities'
| reporting, flagging and moderating systems to the censor's
| advantage.
| dang wrote:
| No doubt that's true but if you're saying something
| specific about HN, I'd like to know what it is. Also, the
| word 'censorship' is too vague now. People just use it
| about whatever they disagree with. So if you have a
| specific question, it would also be good to use more
| precise language.
|
| You guys need to realize that you have a trump card (can I
| say that? or too soon?) that users of other platforms don't
| have: direct access to the people running the platform, who
| are willing to answer any question about it.
| xibalba wrote:
| Does not much of the "content moderation" on HN get done via HN
| _users_ flagging posts?
| whymauri wrote:
| Yeah, and it can take a surprisingly small amount of flags to
| take down a post. So it could literally just be a dozen
| people flagging them, not even in a coordinated matter.
|
| Something similar happened on Jan 6 this year with a lot of
| individual users being like 'No, this isn't related to tech,
| so we'll flag it." until a couple posts got enough traction
| to actually stay at the top.
|
| BTW, you can 'anti-flag' by vouching a submission. I've done
| this a few times when HN insta-flags posts about inclusion in
| tech.
| ddlatham wrote:
| It looks like the main reason why the first Ask HN story (
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925 ) disappeared was
| because it was flagged.
|
| But that's just the surface reason. The deeper reason is
| because of HN's design which seems to weight flags much more
| heavily than up votes. This means that a non-trivial minority
| can successfully drag a story off the homepage, even if a
| majority believes it is important and worthy of discussion, and
| even if the comments are actually constructive.
|
| Unfortunately we are not able to see what the count of flags
| are, and I don't know the scoring algorithm to see what portion
| of minority is needed to make a story disappear, or if it is
| even greater than a fixed portion (i.e. whether flag count may
| have a greater than linear effect, compared to linear support
| from up votes).
|
| I have heard the rationale of attempting to avoid flame wars
| and heated discussion of controversial topics, but I'm not sure
| that it's the only way or worth the price of making things
| important to most of the community disappear. So far, follow up
| submissions seem to still be on the home page, but as I write
| this comment, I can see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396783 already drop from
| the top position down to #6 and I wonder if it will disappear
| also.
|
| I hope that HN may reconsider what options are available to
| keep discussion constructive and useful while still allowing
| important topics to be seen and discussed without being buried
| by a minority.
|
| Edit - 2 additional notes a few minutes later:
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396783 has now dropped
| more than halfway off the front page.
|
| - Whoever downvoted this comment, please consider responding as
| well.
| xenocyon wrote:
| _> I usually trust HN to be a bastion of free speech_
|
| You must have a remarkably selective definition of free speech
| then. Stuff gets flagged all the time, and users are suppressed
| via opaque and obfuscated methods.
|
| To be clear, I'm not saying that moderation is a bad thing. But
| increasingly I notice that people use the term "free speech" to
| simply mean "speech I agree with".
| kian wrote:
| I believe the principle of charity is enshrined in the HN
| guidelines. There's no need to assume ill intent here, either
| on my part or on the part of many others who believe in the
| bedrock, foundational principle of free speech. I don't see
| how you could make the connection that being outraged that
| China has managed to censor search results nearly globally on
| one of the top-three search engines on the day of the
| anniversary of the event being censored could be interpreted
| as arguing for only 'speech I agree with'.
| kokanator wrote:
| HN, time for an explanation. This is not trivial.
| dang wrote:
| Having spent the time digging into it, I'd say it turned out
| to be pretty trivial.
| twirlock wrote:
| >I usually trust HN to be a bastion of free speech
|
| Whoops
| dTal wrote:
| "Political" or "controversial" content is always^H^H^H^H
| _sometimes_ punished by HN (sorry, dang). While I think this is
| a highly questionable policy which is itself political in
| nature (reinforcing as it does the status quo), it need not be
| specific to China.
|
| A statement would certainly be nice, however.
| kian wrote:
| This explains the flagging. It does not explain the
| 'duplicate content' article from CNN on the origins of the
| Tank Man photo, which I believe requires HN moderator
| activity.
| dang wrote:
| That is false. If you changed "always" to "sometimes" you'd
| be on the green. I've written about this extensively:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.
| ..
|
| Some good threads to start with might be
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490 and
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844. Also
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869, which shows
| how far back political discussion goes on HN, as well as the
| argument _about_ politics on HN.
|
| If you (or anyone) takes a look at that material and still
| has a question that hasn't been answered there, I'd like to
| know what it is. Please just make sure that you've actually
| familiarized yourself with the past explanations, though,
| because the odds are good that they do answer the question.
| nolok wrote:
| Not american here. My reponse is not directly to this
| subthread, but to likening this subject to politics.
|
| I think there is a massive difference between political
| discourse (which are mostly about opinions) and fact vs
| lies discourse (which I would qualify as one where
| something that is definitely provable or in this case
| definitely happened is denied as untruth or never happening
| by one side, with said side pushing for increased conflict
| in the discourse so as to get the entire thing stopped).
|
| I understand the wish and sometime need to push the first
| away, but the second is entirely different and when you
| agree to push it away you are by default siding with the
| lies faction, even if you have a very good and valid and
| pure reason for it. The question then remaining being, what
| obligation has a platform that's massively use for
| discourse to remain partial to those things ? Legally none,
| at least in the US. Morally, to each their own.
|
| I understand the issue is way more complex than that, and
| that you have a third type of discourse which uses the same
| rules to push something false (eg bill gates vaccine
| nanobots get activated by 5g !!!), and I have no idea what
| the correct solution is or isn't. Just wanted to maybe
| clear out why "we're not taking side" is taken by some as
| taking sides.
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| I did notice it the past that HN articles critical of China
| behaved in a strange way. In the past all the comments in the
| comment section were downvoted, sometimes you could see
| dozens of comments greyed out, every single one of them.
| (Probably because it's not possible to downvote an article).
| Now the articles are flagged, probably whoever was organising
| this realised that flagging an article is effectively
| downvoting it.
| dang wrote:
| No one is organizing anything. It is all just normal
| community + software + moderator interaction. People read
| sinister "organization" into it purely because of their
| pre-existing conceptions. It's a big Rohrschach test and
| nothing more.
|
| I say that based on looking into literally thousands of
| such cases, and spending god knows how many hours poring
| over data. My comments are based exclusively on what I know
| about HN--I know nothing at all about other sites because I
| don't have their data. But I know a lot about HN, and I can
| tell you that the users making breathless insinuations
| about this stuff have literally no idea what they're
| talking about. The truth is just painfully boring. (Edit:
| here's a detailed explanation -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397230.)
|
| As for why the comments in such threads get downvoted, that
| is easily explained by the fact that flamewar topics
| attract shitty comments, and shitty comments get shittier
| as people get politically and nationalistically riled.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| > It's a big Rohrschach test and nothing more.
|
| This is a really insightful way of describing this
| phenomenon.
| yorwba wrote:
| I've downvoted everyone in an entire thread before. Not
| because I'm a member of a shadowy organization (otherwise
| I'd be blowing my cover posting this) but because all of
| them were really bad. HN being HN, usually someone will
| take the time to write a good comment, but especially on
| emotionally charged topics, the earliest comments will be
| both short and just a reflection of the posters views
| _before_ they read the article (if they read it at all)
| which makes it likely I 'll consider them downvote-worthy.
|
| I think there are probably quite a few users who behave
| similarly. But there's no need for us to form an
| organization, because each of us can just use the user-
| moderation tools as intended, without having to coordinate
| our actions with each other.
| troelsSteegin wrote:
| That returns results via DDG and Google. I am querying from the
| US. I am suprised to see no results through Bing directly.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I get zero image results for "tank man" on DDG
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| see also:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395028
| jasode wrote:
| I'm guessing it is a "hand tuned" search result tweak because
| just appending _" china"_ returns a few images:
|
| https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=tank%20man%20china
|
| (For those who don't see results, this is my screen grab of the
| above at 18:12 UTC : https://imgur.com/a/3tzPV49)
|
| Also, _" Tiananmen Square massacre"_ still returns some image
| results:
|
| https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Tiananmen+Square+massac...
|
| Therefore, the tweak for _" tank man"_ doesn't seem to make any
| sense since all the other phrases to get to the same sensitive
| topic are not suppressed.
| drdeca wrote:
| Indeed, if you search for "tanpk man" (without quotes) it says
| "including results for tank man" and has many pictures of tanks
| and men (but none of tank man...) So, it clearly is associating
| some images with "tank man", it just doesn't show results if
| your search is for "tank man"
| jasonhansel wrote:
| "Tank man china" returns no results as of 19:01 UTC.
| ggggtez wrote:
| Yes, I'm sure this is done via word-filter.
|
| Historically, China doesn't provide a list of banned terms
| themselves, and companies have to reverse-engineer the list of
| prohibited terms. Likely Bing has a list of the most obvious
| terms, as recommended by their lawyers.
| amilios wrote:
| As of right now, "tank man china" gives some results, but not
| _the_ tank man photo. Looks like it 's been scrubbed. Crazy.
| drdavid wrote:
| > Microsoft said the issue was "due to an accidental human
| error and we are actively working to resolve this."
|
| (I did some searching.) This is from a report here:
|
| https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/microsoft-bing-raises-c...
|
| Of course, the search result is an MSN link.
| tankenmate wrote:
| "6 4 incident" returns meaningful results on Duck Duck Go and
| Google, but nothing on Microsoft Bing.
| jonathlee wrote:
| Adding "tiananmen square" to "tank man" does return the photo
| as the 3rd result: tank man tiananmen square
|
| Also, the misspelled version of Tianenmen that I first used
| worked as well.
| int_19h wrote:
| OTOH "tank man tiananmen" is also censored. It's pretty clear
| that there are some specific queries being mishandled here.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Turning safe search off also returns results more like you'd
| expect, though a bunch of those images are blanked out even
| then.
| cogs wrote:
| Even searching for tank woman or tank cat returns results!
| ALittleLight wrote:
| It's the 6th result for "tank guy" for me. "china protest man
| tank" also gets it. "Tiananmen square" doesn't autocomplete on
| bing either, for "some reason"...
|
| It's surprising and shameful to me that Microsoft would be
| censoring so brazenly even in US search results. Also
| embarrassing on a technical level that their censorship is this
| bad. It's also pretty bad at image search compared to Google
| (compare Google Images "tank guy" to Bing's).
|
| Companies that sell their soul for money are one thing, but
| Bing has ~2% market share in China, and for this they are
| crudely censoring search results worldwide? Madness.
| tacostakohashi wrote:
| I, for one, am glad that this particular Microsoft censorship
| is global in nature for all to see.
|
| A lot of people say China's internet censorship doesn't
| matter because it's mainly/just within their own borders, and
| anyone in China can and does just use a VPN to get outside.
| While the latter might be true, it misses the point - China
| is doing a great job of making self-censorship about a number
| of their sensitive topics a global phenomenon.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| The first one returns no images for me
| narrator wrote:
| Yandex, the english language version of the Russian search
| engine, does not censor anything. It's by far the best search
| engine for politically controversial topics. You can even search
| for Putin stuff and get good results.
|
| https://yandex.com/images/search?from=tabbar&text=tank%20man
| ComodoHacker wrote:
| Russian version surely has its filters.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Probably, but different ones. This is somewhat reminiscent of
| the old advice (which I could swear was Schneier's, but can't
| seem to actually find) to layer ciphers developed by mutually
| hostile countries, seeing as it's highly unlikely the same
| actor would know how to break (e.g.) US, Chinese, and Russian
| crypto simultaneously even if each of those can be broken by
| their origin country.
|
| Although I have to note that I'm not aware of any censorship
| in Yandex web search, unlike for example Yandex News where
| pretty blatant examples occur regularly--but Yandex News is
| pretty irrelevant outside ex-USSR anyway. Except for
| apparently socially acceptable censorship like that
| engendered by "right to be forgotten" laws and DMCA, of
| course.
| chalcolithic wrote:
| This won't last for long.
| cynwoody wrote:
| The Russian site also appears wide open. Example:
|
| https://yandex.ru/video/search?text=navalny%20putin%27s%20pa...
| a3n wrote:
| > Try less specific keywords.
|
| Checks out.
|
| https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Vehicle+being&qs=n&form...
| iso1631 wrote:
| https://twitter.com/MikaelThalen/status/1400906032176640004
|
| A Microsoft spokesperson tells me that "accidental human error"
| is to blame for missing images of "tank man" on its Bing search
| results.
|
| "We are actively working to resolve this."
|
| The incident comes on the 32nd anniversary of the Tiananmen
| Square Massacre.
| partiallypro wrote:
| There's no way it was accidental. It could have been a rogue
| employee that pushed something globally that was supposed to be
| limited to China...but the idea that it was an accident on the
| anniversary sounds like a made up story.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Or it could have been a normal employee that ticked the
| "censor everywhere" box rather than "censor china"
| iso1631 wrote:
| Of course that makes the assumption that it's known and
| accepted that Microsoft censor the search "tank man" to
| some parts of the globe, and the accident is that the
| censorship applied to a larger than desired scope.
|
| It seems unlikely that you could accidently censor
| something like this globally without trying to do it for at
| least one specific target demographic.
|
| It's also plausible that the fault was brought in
| deliberately by a rogue engineer to raise the subject
| globally.
| partiallypro wrote:
| But why would it happen today? The term is likely censored
| year round in China, why would it suddenly go from China to
| global?
| iso1631 wrote:
| Well today is the anniversary
| jessriedel wrote:
| Possibly because the filter was updated/refined in
| preparation for more traffic and new potentially
| prohibited results, and during that update process the
| geographic range of the filter was accidentally set to be
| worldwide.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| A lot of terms in China only get censored around the
| sensitive dates. Or, to put it differently, around the
| time that there is a sensitive date (PRC anniversary, CCP
| anniversary, June 4 etc) there seems to a burst of newly-
| censored terms. Because there is no official list of
| banned terms, this is done proactively by censors in the
| tech companies who want to avoid a potential warning from
| the government or pile-on from nationalist netizens.
|
| It's possible that the English term "tank man" wasn't
| censored on Bing image search in China before, but it is
| now. Over there the Tiananmen massacre is usually
| referred to as the June 4 incident, so it's usually the
| characters Liu Si (6 and 4) that are censored in search
| results. Because Bing isn't a very popular website in
| China, it might be that "tank man" slipped through until
| now.
| jessriedel wrote:
| This is plausibly a filter intended for Chinese IP addresses
| that was accidentally applied to all searches regardless of
| geographic location.
| [deleted]
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| this thread had given bling my first click
| throwaway789256 wrote:
| But there are results for "tank man" tienanmen:
|
| https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=%2b%22tank+man%22+tiena...
| MikeDelta wrote:
| Odd, if you search for tanks man, or tank men, or tank man
| picture, you get all sorts of nonsense (tanks man shows one
| actual image).
|
| But zero results for such generic words means it has to be
| blocked actively.
| whoopdedo wrote:
| Or if you add any arbitrary word to the search, e.g. "tank man
| the"
| [deleted]
| hyperion2010 wrote:
| 8964 also returning lego kits and trains.
| bmcooley wrote:
| Searching "tiennenman square massacre" pulls up the image as the
| second result.
| verdverm wrote:
| searching "tiennenman square" also results in a suggested
| narrowing search which includes "tank man" at the end
| deanCommie wrote:
| Elsewhere on HackerNews there are discussions about how GDPR
| regulations affect the internet entirely - not just in the EU.
|
| And there are famous examples how California environmental
| regulations bring up the quality of products US-wide so everyone
| benefits from safety and consumer protections not just people in
| california.
|
| In both cases, this is because it's easier to just have ONE
| version of a product if your market subset (EU, California) is
| big enough to justify it becoming the DEFAULT version of the
| product.
|
| I...am truly terrified this is where we are heading with
| censorship and Chinese policies and the rest of the free and open
| web. At what point do companies that have to censor information
| for their chinese audience decide it's just less of a hassle to
| have the same censorship apply blanketly world-wide?
| teddyh wrote:
| > _At what point do companies that have to censor information
| for_ [local] _audience decide it 's just less of a hassle to
| have the same censorship apply blanketly world-wide?_
|
| This has already happened. The U.S. has _much_ more strict
| standards regarding nudity than the rest of the world in
| general, but the world has largely adopted U.S. norms, and
| nudity is now censored worldwide. So much for multi-
| culturalism.
| azalemeth wrote:
| Indeed -- at least in English. Continental Europe is a bit
| more sensible, IMO ;-).
| toss1 wrote:
| That may be what they are doing.
|
| And let us be clear - it is bad enough when the major tech
| companies gladly apply CCP or RUS filtering within those
| territories.
|
| The CCP is the friend of no one but themselves, and they are
| global expansionists. The RUS govt is an international criminal
| syndicate masquerading as a govt.
|
| If the tech companies start applying those same CCP/RUS
| standards globally, then the response should be to shut off
| those countries from the internet.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| This situation is very advantageous for China companies. They
| can access foreign markets unhindered, but foreign companies
| can't access their market without cowtowing to the CCP, and not
| all companies ready for it.
|
| Maybe the correct solution would be to symmetrically block
| China's businesses in US and EU, so they would have to abandon
| either censorship or export of services
| j_barbossa wrote:
| Every time I see posts like this or about Taiwan I'm happily
| upvoting. I'm a big fan of the Streisand effect.
| surround wrote:
| DuckDuckGo:
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&iar=images&kp=-2
|
| Yahoo:
|
| https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?q=tank+man
|
| Qwant:
|
| https://www.qwant.com/?t=images&q=tank+man
| aphextron wrote:
| Yahoo and DDG both use Bing results.
| rolobio wrote:
| Wow! That's a surprise to me! Could it be because they are
| pulling other engines' results? Or is this purposeful?
| detaro wrote:
| duckduckgo and yahoo both use bing as the backend.
| koolba wrote:
| Interestingly if you search for "tankman" (no space) you get some
| a mix of military tanks and some men wearing tank tops.
|
| https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=tankman
| jostmey wrote:
| Same for duckduckgo. duckduckgo is blocking images of tank man
| during the Tiananmen square massacre
| mediaman wrote:
| Just checked - you're right!
|
| At first I thought it was because safe search was enabled, but
| disabling it gives the same results (zero).
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&t=h_&iar=images&iax=image...
|
| Their regular web search shows no evident censorship though.
| Why is this? Does DuckDuckGo rely on a third party for image
| search that is itself censoring results?
| detaro wrote:
| Both are primarily based on Bing, at least for western
| markets.
| [deleted]
| tomkat0789 wrote:
| Here's an article about it:
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8v9m/bing-censors-tank-man
|
| Makes me wonder what other pitfalls there are to using DDG.
| hatsunearu wrote:
| More reasons not to use Bing--vote with your wallets.
| lolc wrote:
| More like vote with your eyeballs.
| johnfernow wrote:
| Since these pages will likely be updated, here are the archived
| links as proof of this happening:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210604192821/https://www.bing....
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210604180506/https://images.se...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210604194355/https://www.ecosi...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210604194336/https://search.ao...
|
| Some people probably think "nobody uses Bing", but Bing powers a
| lot of different search engines (Yahoo, Ecosia, AOL, DuckDuckGo,
| and more). It's the default search engine on millions of devices
| (Windows, and even if you change it, Windows search still uses
| it; Xbox uses it as well.)
| actuator wrote:
| It seems like their safe search is hiding even search results
| for other related search terms. I am not sure how they were
| moderated to be not safe. https://archive.is/KOTNB
|
| I hope Microsoft has a good write up on how this happened, both
| on the search term blanket ban and the safe search results
| thing.
| cm2187 wrote:
| I still get nothing with safe search off
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| ddlatham wrote:
| Looks like it has now been updated and returns images of
| various tanks and male athletes, but still no images of what
| seems most relevant to the phrase - the iconic Tiananmen Square
| photograph that goes by that name.
| karamanolev wrote:
| Still returns the same (no results) for images, at least for
| me.
| mfkp wrote:
| I noticed the same thing:
|
| It looks like microsoft caught on and is now returning
| generic results of "tank" or "man":
|
| https://imgur.com/sGEQRXe
|
| https://imgur.com/DjtXltn
| thebigspacefuck wrote:
| I saw results (none of actual tank man) but I searched again a
| few times and still see no results found.
| cheese_van wrote:
| From here:
| https://twitter.com/MikaelThalen/status/1400906032176640004
|
| A Microsoft spokesperson tells me that "accidental human error"
| is to blame for missing images of "tank man" on its Bing search
| results.
|
| "We are actively working to resolve this."
| kstrauser wrote:
| I archived these for posterity at https://honeypot.net/post/bing-
| is-censoring-tank-man-search-... because the previous thread got
| flagged.
| ipspam wrote:
| The 7th and 9th result are correct.
| jarek83 wrote:
| So they introduced main branch to replace master branch because
| they are so humanity-full entity, but they are happy to censor
| history at the same time?
| adamredwoods wrote:
| If you do a Bing search for 'tank man tiananmen' the bubble of
| suggested searches in the upper row shows the actual image.
| jpindar wrote:
| Microsoft says it was due to an accidental human error.
|
| https://twitter.com/josephfcox/status/1400913178125553665?s=...
| rvz wrote:
| Right of course is.
|
| Yet _' another accident'_ on the anniversary of the crackdowns
| of the Tiananmen Square protests. /s
| lilyball wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're trying to imply. The fact that it's
| the anniversary would easily explain why they're making sure
| it's censored properly in China, the human error is that it's
| being censored outside of China.
| dang wrote:
| Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397695
| about degrees of freedom and elephants. I have no knowledge
| at all of what's going on at MS, but it has to be a complex
| enough system to generate endless numbers of such datapoints.
| What makes them significant is that _we_ pick the ones to
| single out as meaningful.
|
| To be clear, I don't care about $BigCo, only HN; and if
| there's any actual evidence that this whole thing was
| anything other than randomness playing its usual tricks on
| the hivemind, that will actually be super interesting and on-
| topic for HN. But note those words "actual" and "evidence".
| Dig1t wrote:
| Obviously the intention of whoever flagged the original post is
| to keep this off the front page. I suspect that this post will
| also be flagged soon.
| afvictory wrote:
| There are also no results for "tank man" in Apple's GIF/#images
| tool in iMessage. There is a GIF present in Messenger's GIF tool
| which uses Giphy/Tenor.
|
| Edit: The same is true if you search "Tienamen"
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