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.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @04:03AM (14 children)
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @04:37AM
Burgers? Who do they think they are? Alex Jones?
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @04:40AM
What a surprise.
So AIDS was fucking a monkey and coronavirus was from fucking a bat?
I don't think you get it from eating one, only fucking one. What else do the commies have to do anyway?
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by khallow on Wednesday May 27 2020, @04:53AM (1 child)
That's pretty low considering that she finished a 130+ km race with a concussion and broken rib. If she had been hit by covid, I doubt she would have even started, much less finished [army.mil] the race with the injuries she had.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @05:07AM
Asymptomatic carriers are a thing. But it's just China trying to deflect its biggest PR crisis.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @05:46AM (3 children)
Among healthy 34 year-olds, the death rate is tiny. Bayes says it is much more likely Dr Li died of criticizing Pooh Bear's government.
(Score: 3, Informative) by MostCynical on Wednesday May 27 2020, @08:09AM (2 children)
the "criticism" was "spreading false rumours" about the disease..
For which he was incarcerated, even while sick, until they let him go, at which point, he was too sick to respond to treatment, and died..
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2020, @10:19AM (1 child)
And there is was NO treatment so ....
It's retarded how much lies you have in one fucking sentence. The guy wasn't even in jail. He had a reprimand. But whatever, spread the lies because they make you feed superior or something.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2020, @05:28PM
Your engrish is showing.
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @11:22AM
Will the US get the virus under control, like China has? [babylonbee.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @01:11PM
That's just silly.
The food problem in the States is a processing problem, not a production problem.
I would think it would be much easier to find people to work in cramped conditions to butcher non-infected animals than to work in the same conditions to butcher infected people. The whole idea just defies any type of logic.
Then again, so does not wearing a mask in public with a respiratory infection pandemic raging.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @01:19PM (3 children)
Funny that, my brother-in-law was on the phone to his sister in the 'States a couple of days back, she more or less came out with the same story, though with the Gates mob thrown into the mix as well.
Assuming she's not unique in thinking this, when a percentage of US citizens also believe that the Chinese aren't totally responsible for this as well based on what they're being 'fed', you do have to wonder who's pulling the strings, and to what ends..and bear in mind, even if it's ultimately Chinese propaganda this stuff is based on, it is quite possible for any Chinese global 'shit-stirring' to be both beneficial to China, for internal consumption there, and to the countries they're deploying said 'shit-stirring' against, the 'political reaction' to said 'shit-stirring' being useful for internal consumption in the targetted countries.
TL;DR We're all being played, so welcome to the planet of the mushrooms!; so very, very dark, and so much shit to digest...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday May 27 2020, @01:55PM (2 children)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @02:11PM (1 child)
True, but when all the major powers now employ/deploy state sponsored troll units as part of their IW operations (hello there, anyone from the 77th reading this...) it's becoming increasingly difficult to spot the /b/tards from the bastards....err, well, you get what I mean..
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Wednesday May 27 2020, @02:43PM
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @04:50AM (7 children)
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...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @05:20AM (5 children)
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)
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
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @04:48PM (2 children)
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)
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
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
What?, even more ominous than the actual demonstably active mechanism that's implementing the filtering?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @05:46AM (7 children)
The kikes and the chinks are quite cozy, with an extremely strong military and economic alliance. It's to be expected that kikes, like Google's management, would cover up for their chink allies. It's no accident that these comments are being censored. The kikes would be more than happy to help the chink communist party, especially if it means destroying America.
I hate niggers, kikes, wetbacks, towelheads, chinks, pakis, dune coons, japs, injuns, curry munchers, gooks, and all other darkies. I only hate darkies because they all hate America and want to destroy our country and our civilized society. My hate is strong and I'm damned proud of it. In fact, my hate is getting stronger as I talk to you people. However, I'm not racist, and there's nothing racist about my comment. The left will accuse me of being racist, but it's because they know I'm telling the truth and can only try to discredit me with ad hominem logical fallacies. The left is a mouthpiece for the darkies, all of whom want to destroy America.
America will be great again when we finally admit that all darkies are our enemies and remove them from our country. This story is just more evidence that the darkies are in cahoots and nothing good comes from it.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @06:07AM (3 children)
Now I hate Israel as much as the next guy, but Israel did cancel its desalinization plant they were going to have China build for them due to US pressure. They appear to have picked their side.
Although they did sell our nuclear secrets to the Chinese in the past and attack the Liberty, so who knows.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday May 27 2020, @06:30AM (2 children)
We've always been at war with eastasia...
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @08:32AM
And the White supremasterbatorts and the Polacks have always been really close, I mean, really, really, close, in a way that only real men could understand. And so, when shit like this cums up, you have to ask yourself, "Do you feel lucky?", or more like, "Are you Bi-asian-curious?" If you are, please stand to the left of the Yellow line, next to your guide, the Runaway, who will lead you to your appointed quarters. Or eights. With Runaway, one never knows, since he knows so little. Why is this shitpost on the frontpage of SN? Truly an embarrasment. I blame janrinok and systemd. Wankers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @01:48PM
Have you heard of ‘manufactured consent’
Well this is manufactured cold war
(Score: 4, Touché) by bradley13 on Wednesday May 27 2020, @09:18AM (1 child)
Apparently not, since you posted AC.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @10:50AM
A freedom Chinese comrades don't have.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @12:36PM
(Somewhere deep in the Outback...)
Aboriginal tribal elder: (Looks up from his iPad) shit, this whitefella has rumbled us, the Abo plan to destroy the US has to be brought forward, send a message to our main co-conspirators, the Kalahari bushmen...
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday May 27 2020, @06:28AM (1 child)
Your name better not be Harry Buttle.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday May 27 2020, @12:41PM
Or Pooh Bear.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday May 27 2020, @11:57AM (2 children)
Perhaps Youtube's filters have been hacked? China has some competence in this domain.
(Score: 2) by progo on Wednesday May 27 2020, @05:18PM
What?! No. CCP is directing Google how to behave. No "hacking" needed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @08:01PM
They obviously have the code to censor this stuff automatically, and it is controlled by some configuration switch. They just happened to flip said switch on some update to production. My guess is that they are trying to break into China, as YouTube is currently banned there, and made this code to try and sell themselves to China. They then activated it, probably accidentally, across all machines instead of none or a demonstration subset.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday May 27 2020, @01:01PM (5 children)
"五毛" is "five mao" and is such a trivial and ubiquitous amount of money that nobody would ever censor it. It's like censoring every incidence of "nickel."
"共匪" is a portmanteau between "共产" (gongchan - "communist") and "土匪" (tufei - "bandit"). It's not naturally occurring in the language, so censoring it is not accidental.
YouTube, Google, Twitter, and Facebook are treading on increasingly thin ice with their censorship. Yes, maybe some people are OK with it today because it's censoring speech or ideas they don't like. How will they feel tomorrow when it's their speech or ideas that are censored? It will happen, because purity spirals always arise. What happens to the TERFs when the transexuals get their hands on the censorship cudgel? What happens when anti-vax people are allowed to censor those who like vaccines?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Wednesday May 27 2020, @02:00PM
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday May 27 2020, @03:14PM (3 children)
It is entirely possible for it to be accidental. Google has created a labyrinth of automated systems that can do stupid things. For example, nuke Google accounts because they spammed emotes on YouTube livestream chat (intended to be fast-paced environment like Twitch):
https://www.businessinsider.com/markiplier-youtube-fans-heist-lost-access-google-accounts-spamming-emotes-2019-11 [businessinsider.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday May 27 2020, @03:38PM (2 children)
Such a system would be immediately useless because it would be hitting false positives at such a rate as to make "legitimate" conversation useless. In this case, we have two terms that both criticize the CCP, one of which is so anodyne in and of itself and the other which is an artificial construct, targeting topical videos on YT. That's no accident, and we shouldn't let Google get away with pretending it is. Because if we don't spank them now, and spank them hard, then they'll only retreat into ever subtler forms of shaping information for nefarious purposes. That will kill democracy and human freedom for 1,000 years.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @11:30PM (1 child)
Usage of 共匪 dates back to the national government in 1927, censoring it is definitely not an accident.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday May 28 2020, @11:28AM
That's interesting. I didn't know that. Sun Yat Sen died a little while before then, I think, but I wonder if he coined it.
Washington DC delenda est.