Comment by saltedonion
6 years ago
You have a good point. But TikTok is much more risky, and as as such requires much more scrutiny given existing body of knowledge between how chinese social media / chat companies such as WeChat enforce government censorship and aid in propagating misinformation.
This might be a shock to most people in the western world, but if you go on almost ANY news website in china, the headline news is dedicated to government propaganda.
The reality is that Chinese firms and government operates together intimately. Nearly all sizable firms have a party secretary that is involved in board level decisions, and steps in when things get political. You can ponder who has the final say.
> The reality is that Chinese firms and government operates together intimately
No, I get this, but here's the thing: YouTube and, more specifically, it's advertisers do everything that you're accusing China of. There are material consequences if YouTube doesn't keep in line. What this means is that a status quo that pleases advertisers will be maintained.
It's every bit propaganda as dropping leaflets, but you can't point out a boogeyman pulling the strings.
These are not even remotely equivalent things.
Advertisers are not a homogeneous block. YouTube et al can afford to piss off some advertisers; if they're pissing off all advertisers, the material is probably extremely objectionable to most humans.
I challenge you to point out an example of content that has been banned from youtube because it offends advertisers, that you really think the banning of which is a significant issue. There's no shortage of material on YT hypercritical of Goldman "Vampire Squid" Sachs.
Whereas there is a long litany of material banned from Chinese networks for obvious political reasons. Furthermore, if you don't like YT's policy, you can use other video sharing sites or even gasp host your own videos. Try doing that in China and see how long it takes for men with guns to show up.
YouTube's algorithm suppresses LGBTQ content more than usual which is something that most people agree shouldn't be suppressed. At the same time, I don't think it's because advertisers want to suppress the content. I just think it's a bug with YouTube's algorithm.
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> YouTube et al can afford to piss off some advertisers; if they're pissing off all advertisers, the material is probably extremely objectionable to most humans.
You don't have to have consensus from advertisers to ban something. If an advertiser of significant enough size, or a block doing similar, threatens, YouTube will listen.
> I challenge you to point out an example of content that has been banned from youtube because it offends advertisers, that you really think the banning of which is a significant issue.
You don't have to ban it, you just have to demonetize it and content creators will fall in line.
> Whereas there is a long litany of material banned from Chinese networks for obvious political reasons.
I really think you need to reckon with this. You speak a lot about hosting your own shit, but, as American hegemony crumbles, your consumption will meet road blocks.
All American companies move in lockstep. We see one company after another pull out of facebook advertising very quickly last week. They work together as a group with a consistent goal.
This week we saw one social media platform after another ban the same people. The North American cartel moves together as one, once again.
You can host your own videos but if you do expect to be banned by paypal and mastercard and visa. Because all north american companies are just different faces of the same underlying entity.
Chinese companies offer real competition to that. Chinese companies are very good for my political freedom.
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While private corporations also have incentives and private individuals bring their own biases into play, there remain extremely important differences between the capabilities of corporations and states. State actors can effectuate arrests within their own territory, deploy military assets, make territorial claims, conduct assassinations, and generally use their information-gathering and influence to support significantly more violent goals.
Like, I get that the milquetoast world advertisers want to live in is some kind of lens that colors the views and opinions presented by their platforms. It's just that the worst that happens from being influenced by it is it that you live a more boring life and consume more product. That's not nearly as worrying as being influenced to hating racial minorities in an attempt to distract from the South China Sea or something.
> State actors can effectuate arrests within their own territory, deploy military assets, make territorial claims, conduct assassinations, and generally use their information-gathering and influence to support significantly more violent goals.
Coca cola sent death squads into South America.
> That's not nearly as worrying as being influenced to hating racial minorities in an attempt to distract from the South China Sea or something.
I don't know if you've noticed, but there are currently protests going on in America over racist injustice.
> It's just that the worst that happens from being influenced by it is it that you live a more boring life and consume more product
And how do you think this interacts with the above point?
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The concern is the coordination between Chinese foreign affairs/security services and the commercial sector.
For US-based firms, that’s simply not the case.
Yes, YouTube needs to make sure Nike is happy. But Nike didn’t just kill two dozen Indian soldiers.
Certainly there’s privacy related concerns with US companies - as with Chinese companies. But nobody had accused the DoD of manipulating YouTube search rankings.
If the DoD wants to conduct a YouTube propaganda campaign, they can buy advertising like everybody else.
> The concern is the coordination between Chinese foreign affairs/security services and the commercial sector.
> For US-based firms, that’s simply not the case.
Disingenuous or naive?
I don't know, I still remember how, in a poll before the invasion of Iraq, a majority of Americans though that Saddam Hussein was connected to the 11S attacks.
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> Yes, YouTube needs to make sure Nike is happy. But Nike didn’t just kill two dozen Indian soldiers.
Probably not the best company to choose given their history.
Technically: less the case.
Consider past agreements about/agency infiltrations to create backdoors and the like[0] or canary clauses[1] in licenses and why they exist.
Still better despite being only a partial mechanism for increasing balance between powers.
[0] https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-microsoft.en.html
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary
>> This might be a shock to most people in the western world, but if you go on almost ANY news website in china, the headline news is dedicated to government propaganda.
>> The reality is that Chinese firms and government operates together intimately. Nearly all sizable firms have a party secretary that is involved in board level decisions, and steps in when things get political. You can ponder who has the final say.
> No, I get this, but here's the thing: YouTube and, more specifically, it's advertisers do everything that you're accusing China of. There are material consequences if YouTube doesn't keep in line. What this means is that a status quo that pleases advertisers will be maintained.
You're basically saying: "YouTube has to please group X, TikTok has please group Y. Since they both have to 'please groups,' they're doing the same things!" That's a flawed comparison, because the the devil is in the details: the relevant differences between group X (YouTube advertisers) and Group Y (the Communist Party of China) get obscured when you're reasoning about such high level abstractions.
Here's one difference: the CCP is a totalitarian dictatorship that exerts direct control over Chinese corporations. Youtube, flawed as it is, is not that.
Either you compare the CCP to the US government or Tiktok to Facebook.
This.
Why must every single posting on Hacker News that involves China be flooded with whataboutism? It's a recurring thing, not even subtle.
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> Here's one difference: the CCP is a totalitarian dictatorship that exerts direct control over Chinese corporations.
Maybe we shouldn't have worked so hard to support building up their manufacturing base when we knew this all along.
Oh well, we just get to repeat the Dutch mistake of financing your enemy into having a robust manufacturing base until they gradually overtake global control.
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YouTube and, more specifically, it's advertisers do everything that you're accusing China of
YouTube and its advertisers aren't countries, and aren't engaged in recent, deadly military skirmishes with India.
> YouTube and its advertisers aren't countries, and aren't engaged in recent, deadly military skirmishes with India.
It might help to read the parent posts I was replying to, but we're talking about the effects of black box algorithms.
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YouTube does simply not send people to concentration camps and torture them for uploading "wrong" videos. They get demonetized. If you don't see the difference I am not sure how to convince you.
Here's the thing, all those corporations you suggest are pulling strings and controlling things do not have a nuclear arsenal or national state security operations. There are material consequences if you do not toe the Chinese party line. As in you can pay for that with your freedom or your life.
YouTube doesn’t have concentration camps.
You're not wrong - and I'm extremely distrustful of the "ends" that commercial interests optimize for - but to be honest I feel like the commercial interests are at least more transparent.
Unless or until they approach the scale of a nation-state (and to be fair, many do) it seems like commercial interests are at the very least clear (and arguably market-driven and subject to competition).
For a specific if arbitrary example: I don't think Facebook values privacy (or YouTube free speech) but that's a side effect of their primary objective. Maybe it's a distinction without a difference, but it sure feels more sinister when the app is purpose built for privacy-invasion or opinion-manipulation.
The difference is that in Canada, I’m Canadian, I can say practically anything I want about the government and nothing bad would happen to me. If I were to be crazy and slander Trudeau calling him a pedophile or something I’d be ostracized socially by many people but I wouldn’t end up in jail. If you really want to test equivalencies I challenge you to fly to Beijing and accuse Xi Jinping of that in public and that would be the last anyone would see of you. The police would probably plant drugs on you and put you in a hole.
And in Canada, corporations are not exactly actors which perform rigid functions outlined by the government.. the liberals, who are currently in power, don’t have party members sitting at the top of companies whose function is to literally oversee compliance to liberal propaganda.
China isn’t quite as bad as western media makes them out to be, I’d argue that in many ways they have been improving and loosening up, but it’s silly to pretend that YouTube is no different than TikTok or that Amazon is no different than Alibaba.
> If you really want to test equivalencies I challenge you to fly to Beijing and accuse Xi Jinping of that in public and that would be the last anyone would see of you. The police would probably plant drugs on you and put you in a hole. Free of speech is wrote right on chinese consitution. You could say anything you want unless you are spreading rumors.
Currently, the advertisers seem to be pulling back from "evil" and have done so in the past.
So they actually have a good influence, redirecting marketing dollars for "marketing" ( since it looks good on the outside).
China doesn't care, they even block Winnie the Pooh.
> This might be a shock to most people in the western world, but if you go on almost ANY news website in china, the headline news is dedicated to government propaganda.
Those people would be even more shocked by the extent to which this is true in the western world as well.
In China, all headlines are designed to propogate the SAME propoganda. In other parts of the world, all headlines are designed DIFFERENT propagandas.
“Look how many sauces we’ve got to choose from for McNuggets!”
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Not even remotely true. The West has myriad choices to choose from in comparison. I don't think you understand how in sync the media is there. They'll literally run identical stories at the same time on every major network, and publish the same set of stories in their papers day after day.
Sinclair is trying to get there!
https://theweek.com/speedreads/764546/watch-surreal-video-co...
Is it though? At least you can see different sides, different voices.
Different voices from the same narrow Overton Window.
Lets say it's December 2015 and I want to find out what ISIS has to say about it's activities.
It was nigh impossible to find unfiltered information from them.
And that is usually enough to placate Westerners. Even if, say, the "different sides" are just different heads of the same snake, which is often the case.
The only two political parties in the US, for instance, differ remarkably little in terms of foreign policy and labor rights. Headlines in major US media will virtually never indicate there is any significant room for debate here. The public is satisfied with the false dichotomy of "raise military budget by $100B" vs. "raise military budget by $200B".
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All the voices are within the Overton window though.
We're that much better at it that the masses think there are different sides. At the top, it's all the same.
> The reality is that Chinese firms and government operates together intimately
In China, the government has more power than corporations. In the US, corporations have more power than the government.
Which FAANG has nukes?
I suppose spacex isn’t part of the fang nor do they have nukes but pretty sure they might just have the best aim :)
Google's trove of collected personal information comparably powerful as nukes, if released.
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Who controls the military?
>This might be a shock to most people in the western world, but if you go on almost ANY news website in china, the headline news is dedicated to government propaganda.
I still can't get over the lack of self-awareness in this post.
> Nearly all sizable firms have a party secretary that is involved in board level decisions, and steps in when things get political.
That's scary and still people have the audacity to compare Chinese propaganda outlets with YouTube, Google etc.
> but if you go on almost ANY news website in china, the headline news is dedicated to government propaganda
Well I have news for you... Most of the news about international politics you read in the west are propaganda as well- and it works so well you're about to hit the downvote button in disbelief.
Why should India ban a Chinese social media company and not an US social media company, it's a matter of national security? This claim is just xenophobic nonsense.
One is a private corporation in a relatively progressive and free country, the other is a company controlled by an authoritarian nation-state. There's clearly a difference...
> One is a private corporation in a relatively progressive and free country,
I think he is referring to Google.
Google is a public company, not that it should matter in this context.
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Because one attacked and killed Indian Soldiers, and has a active border dispute with India.
China bans every app ? Xenophobic nonsense ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...
Wikipedia notes: This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it
There's nothing xenophobic about the claim that PRC blocks a huge portion of the internet. I operate several websites that are blocked by CCP in PRC, despite having no relation to any policy priority of the CCP or law/edict in PRC.