Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Wednesday May 27 2020, @03:57AM   Printer-friendly
from the oops!-(we-got-caught) dept.

YouTube is deleting comments with two phrases that insult China's Communist Party

YouTube is automatically deleting comments that contain certain Chinese-language phrases related to criticism of the country's ruling Communist Party (CCP). The company confirmed to The Verge this was happening in error and that it was looking into the issue.

"This appears to be an error in our enforcement systems and we are investigating," said a YouTube spokesperson. The company did not elaborate on how or why this error came to be, but said it was not the result of any change in its moderation policy.

[...] Comments left under videos or in live streams that contain the words "共匪" ("communist bandit") or "五毛" ("50-cent party") are automatically deleted in around 15 seconds, though their English language translations and Romanized Pinyin equivalents are not.

[...] The accidental censorship is even more puzzling considering that YouTube is currently blocked in China, giving its parent company, Google, even less reason to censor comments critical of the CCP or apply moderation systems in accordance with Chinese censorship laws.

The automatic deletion of these phrases was highlighted on Tuesday by US technologist and former Oculus founder Palmer Luckey on Twitter. But earlier reports of the issue date back to the middle of May when they were spotted by human rights activist Jennifer Zeng. As mentioned above, though, The Verge also found complaints on YouTube's official help pages dated to October 2019.

Shadows of Project Dragonfly.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @04:50AM (7 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @04:50AM (#999515)

    Google (and they not alone) has built in a large variety of automatic censorship mechanisms in all of its systems, some for China, some for other repressive regimes, some for the US as well.
    This part must have accidentally got turned on again through some unforeseen combination of configuration switches that drive their system. It turns into something so complex that a human can no longer understand how a particular switch is going to affect production.

    The thing that will be surprising to me is whether or not the keywords are 'recent' or 'old'. If they are old, then that just confirms a) that google worked very closely with the CCP on what needed to be censored and b) that they hope to one day go back and enter the Chinese market (and then be able to show "look how good we are pre-censoring things".

    If these keywords are recent, well, then that's even more ominous...

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   +1  
       Insightful=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   1  
  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @05:20AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @05:20AM (#999522)

    Oh come on. This is about as accidental as the cheating wife claiming she slipped, fell, and landed on a dick.

    Google is not liberal. Google is not conservative. Google is a power hungry self centered multinational corporation that only cares about Google. And you can replace Google with Larry Page and Sergey Brin who, thanks to hierarchical shares, alone control the majority of voting power at Google making it a "public" company only on paper. As China becomes economically and politically more powerful, expect to see more and more 'accidents' that involve censoring dissent against the Chinese government. And *this* is precisely why people have, for years, been warning about the dangers of censorship. People support it when they find it expedient to their personal creed, but it's so naive. Multinational corporations are not your friend, nor ally.

    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @09:10AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @09:10AM (#999547)

      Oh come on. This is about as accidental as the cheating wife claiming she slipped, fell, and landed on a dick.

      Wait, what? What are you saying, you mean Barbara lied? WTF! I believed her, especially the part about naked jumping jacks, the plumber, and falling...

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday May 27 2020, @01:58PM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday May 27 2020, @01:58PM (#999626) Journal
        So what? Gullibility never cared about those things before.
    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @04:48PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @04:48PM (#999761)

      As China becomes economically and politically more powerful
      I see this a lot. I am going to float a contrarian idea. That will not happen long term. Not with their current government.

      They have been systematically looting Hong Kong since 1999. The protests in HK are a sign of that the money is starting to run out. Basically everyone is asking 'hey that cool job that paid well is gone what happened?'. There are a lot of them. When a socialist government runs out of money they never act to create wealth. They act to destroy it and gaslight (and censor) everyone into thinking they are doing a good thing. That mid 2010s building rush was a sign of it. That money did not come from nowhere. They did not end up with one of the worlds largest malls for no one to move into it when done. They are building huge vanity projects but not understanding their own economics. When the vanity projects fail expect to see more censorship and gaslighting.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @07:08PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @07:08PM (#999855)

        The problem with your hypothesis is that this has already happened. China became the world's largest economy several years ago and continues to grow at an accelerating rate. Here [wikipedia.org] is a list of nations by GDP. China is currently approaching a 50% larger economy than the US. China will, in the very foreseeable future, have an economy larger than both the EU and US - combined. This is why companies are starting to kowtow to China. But it also gets even 'better' - within 10 years India is also expected to overcome the US. That may happen even quicker now due to corona. As worldwide economies continue to develop, economies start to become more and more just a function of population. 330 million can't compete against 1.4 billion. The same reason India today looks economically irrelevant yet will rapidly be overtaking the US. Again, 330 million competing against 1.4 billion.

        Hong Kong is economically irrelevant - currently accounting for 1.6% of the Chinese GDP. To give some contrast that's the exact same share that Wisconsin or Missouri of the US GDP. The reason there's so much intrigue is strategic. Hong Kong is obviously right next to the mainland. For some sort of analog imagine if Peurto Rico was geographically just off the coast of New England, and had a sizable minority of pro-Chinese individuals increasingly actively trying to destabilize the state, possibly with foreign support, and even doing things like actively waving Chinese flags while doing so.

        ---

        As an aside this is also the same reason that the US will likely try to start a war, probably a cold one, with China after this virus while using the virus itself as the casus belli. War is awesome for the economy and the US' only hope of remaining relevant is to try to destroy China's desirability as a manufacturing source. War tends to add the sort of uncertainty to achieve just that. And who knows, it may even end up working. World War 2 followed nearly immediately after the great depression and it set the stage for American supremacy that sent us rocketing to where we are today.

        • (Score: 2) by quietus on Thursday May 28 2020, @11:58AM

          by quietus (6328) on Thursday May 28 2020, @11:58AM (#1000136) Journal

          As to your first para, about GDP: China officially has 16 (sixteen) corona deaths outside of Wuhan. Do you also believe that number?

          As to Hong Kong being irrelevant: there's this little thing called a stock exchange, which has an outsized influence on a nation's economy. Hong Kong, especially, has an outsized influence to the Chinese economy as it is the only venue through which Western investors can support the CCP's economic illusion circus.

          And to your third para, the United States looking to start a war with China: no, but it will be dragged into one. If you fear that China is unfairly competing against Western economies, destroying their economies ... think just about what those very same tactics mean to China's neighbors.

          Countries like Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Thailand and even Russia and South-Korea are looking at a future as commodities suppliers, and nothing more: their industrial base either being destroyed by razor-thin profit margins, if not below cost, production by China; or simply being taken over and -- as is the Chinese habit -- their decisions being centralized, in China.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @12:43PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @12:43PM (#999582)

    If these keywords are recent, well, then that's even more ominous...

    What?, even more ominous than the actual demonstably active mechanism that's implementing the filtering?