This is why I believe it is important to teach our children from first principles; we can no longer rely on media, left or right, to convey a large percentage of truth. I am old enough that the cliche "believe only half of what you read" is still good advice. Too many people glued to their devices, knee-jerk responses without much thought and propagate misinformation at almost the speed of electrons without consulting their slower-thinking, rational mind. I find relief in going back to first principles for many things now even if it is time consuming.
I lived in Macau for 7 years and Indonesia for 1 year. I used a VPN when I first arrived in Macau due to trips to the mainland. Hong Kongers are looking for VPNs like crazy this week, since the CCP announced new efforts to monitor "trouble makers" in HK. HK will never be the same.
In Steven Levy's new book (which I really liked), Facebook: The Inside Story, he talks about teenagers in Macedonia pushing fake political news stories to drive traffic to their ad-laden websites so they could make money.
They didn't care about the political content, the incentive was to figure out what would get shared the most/fastest so they could drive traffic. They tried fake news targeting the left, but it wouldn't get very far because people would call it out in comments and then the posters would delete/remove it.
Fake news targeting the right (primarily crazy anti-hillary stories) would spread without any resistance and drive a ton of traffic, so they ended up focusing their attention there.
I think this is pretty good evidence that there's a bigger problem on the right since the Macedonian teenagers didn't care about the politics and just wanted to drive traffic for money.
There are lots of other interesting details in that book - it's good.
I didn't write false or fake news. I wrote we cannot rely on media, left or right, to convey a large percentage of truth. My comment is more one of bias, and if you think bias is mainly a right thing, and very little bias on the left well,...to paraphrase David Foster Wallace's short parable: "Water? What's water?" - a fish.
I’m curious what google would not censor. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding this but it looks like google is supporting a political party here. The dollar value of this must be huge.
I believe that associating the euphemisms with their original context is the type of problem machine learning is well equipped to solve- anyone have the expertise to share their conjecture?
What are you talking about? This thread already had multiple comments about how fast it disappeared, I just responded to one of them.
I like HN, and I'd believe abusing the flag system is hurting the site. I see people talking about this all the time, so people are obviously interested, but instead of really being addressed, there's usually people like you reminding everyone that talking about it is against the guidelines.
This is the same company that created an alternate version of their browser + search engine specifically for the CCP in order to censor citizen's online activities.
This is a reported issue[0] since last year, but is now apparently going viral [1]. 五毛 translates as "50 cent party", the somewhat well-known CCP astroturfing division.
According to the comments in [1], another apparently banned phrase is "gongfei" ( 共匪 ) , which supposedly translates as "communist bandit".
Youtube certainly doesn't have enough moderators to look at every comment, best they can do is have watch words/phrases that flag a comment either for automatic deletion/shadow deletion/human moderation.
Well, there's this thing called the 50 mao party, due to them being paid 50 mao cents for each propaganda comment they post on behalf of the CCP.
We should see if we can discuss that party on youtube, or if wu3 mao2 dang3 gets censored. According to the article, every mention of wu3 mao2 dang3 is being suppressed.
The scary part is that there is a significant contingent of people in tech who believe Youtube is morally justified in doing this because it's a private platform, and therefore and not subject to human rights standards like freedom of speech. Want to criticize an abusive regime? Build your own Youtube clone!
But, so are the rest of the major corporate news outlets. In the US, they're all garbage, and Fox isn't any worse than the others.
The best way I can describe this is by analogizing to Canada, where I'm from. In Canada, when you watch or read the news (eg CBC), for the most part it just tells you what happened. In the US, when you watch or read the news, for the most part, it tells you how you're supposed to feel. Of course, Fox tells you you're supposed to feel conservative and (eg) NBC tells you you're supposed to feel progressive. But they all do this. They all editorialize. They all try to manipulate your emotions. None of them are willing to just present facts and let you think for yourself.
This is exactly my feeling with French news as well (the mainstream ones at least).
Since one of our national sports is to protest, people complain that "they" (the bad news paper or station) is showing one side only, and that "we" are different.
In reality they all tell the same thing, objectively without even editorializing it. So I can read Le Monde, Le Figaro, l'Obs, la Croix or l'Humanité and get the same info. And this is very good.
There are other ways to shape discourse, too, though. For example, cover some stories to the point of obsession and simply completely ignore others, even if they should qualify as big news. The best way to counter that is to read a lot of widely varied news stories and insist that all of them present solid, factual and scientific grounding.
eqdw:
>Fox news is a laughably pathetic excuse for news.
>But, so are the rest of the major corporate news outlets. In the US, they're all garbage, and Fox isn't any worse than the others.
I agree that all the major corporate news outlets are pretty bad. But Fox News is _significantly_ worse. They push patently false narratives on purpose. Up until March, Sean Hannity was calling the Coronavirus a "leftist hoax". He never apologized or corrected himself and even had the audacity to further report "we've always reported accurately on the Coronavirus". Most of their shows push some form of the "deep state" conspiracy theory. And now they're helping the president push this "Obama-Gate" hoax.
Everything they do is designed to help the GOP and the president.
Jon Stewart once put it very well when he said (paraphrasing) - "other news orgs are sensationalist and maybe a little bit lazy, but none are as activist as Fox News".
Google blocks what governments don't want spread since it wants to be on good relations with them. Same way it's blocking covid-19 related things that are deemed fake news. And in Germany it'll block Nazis.
Things are not black or white, I'm afraid. My comment is not directly related to this matter about the Chinese Gov.
Freedom of Speech will always collide with questions of hate speech, massive spread of fake informations, astroturfing...
You'll always have to draw a line between moderation and censorship, and yes economical interests will be involved but way before that it's already a complex subject.
I don't think you can say they're morally justified in doing this, just legally. We can/should use outrage and bad PR to get them to change how their platform works.
There's a startup idea... Build a platform for free expression of ideas that caters to a Chinese market and then wait for the Chinese government to pay you to give them censorship privileges.
The problem as we've seen is that giving unlimited freedom of speech on these social platforms results in very bad things as state actors use it to incite social unrest. Of course, in protecting Europe and America's ability to remain safe democracies you also end up protecting China's ability to be a dictatorship. Keep in mind that western governments generally support China so you'd have a private company go against the government policies of the nation it is based in.
People have a choice. Money or democracy, you can have a lot of money and still have democracy. But w hensmall numbers of people have most of the money, the less democracy there is.
I know at least in Australia, our political class has certainly decided to make that trade. China has a stack of cash, and we have standards to sell.
Yes, but it will be tough for them to compete with YouTube, which has lost money consistently since Google acquired them in the early 2000’s. Google is effectively offering YouTube below cost which creates an anticompetitive effect.
