Same, I went on some video that has very few views and it is a blanket, Youtube-wide censor.This is gonna backfire so hard, Streisand effect is coming.I tried 共匪 and 共.匪, both got deleted.

So, are the people commenting 共匪 flagged at Google, now ?

Google Translate to&#x2F;from Chinese is often terrible, especially with short phrases. Try 剿匪 which means busting gangs&#x2F;bandits (剿 = bust, so this phrase is an action against bandits). However, Google translates it to “bandit”.

It looks like Google translate doesn’t offer suggested synonyms&#x2F;related words for that term either. It translate the word to “gangster”.

Try looking at your comment in an Incognito window and sort by new. You&#x27;ll still see your own comment if you&#x27;re logged in, but you won&#x27;t see it otherwise. I just tried this.

My comment with &quot;共匪&quot; on the Tank Man video [1] was deleted within minutes.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=YeFzeNAHEhU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=YeFzeNAHEhU</a>

Just tried it on a video about WHO and Bruce Alyward.  It&#x27;s still up after 6 minutes.  Either we&#x27;re inundating their censor bot, it&#x27;s been shadowbanned, or Google has stopped under the flak.  I&#x27;ll keep checking later.

You must have excellent karma. Mine was deleted after ten seconds. I simply wrote: &quot;Just testing if comments containing 共匪 will be deleted&quot; to a Rick and Morty video.

Mine&#x27;s been up for [edit: an hour]; make of that what you will.

Notably, there are a lot of YouTube videos and playlists that contain 共匪 in the title. So they&#x27;re not banning it in every text field, just comments.

Try commenting 共匪 on any youtube video, the comment will be deleted after ~15 seconds

If that&#x27;s the case, shouldn&#x27;t Youtube ban words like &#x27;cuck&#x27;, &#x27;libtard&#x27; and &#x27;snowflake&#x27;?

I think you are reading things into the comment your replying to that aren&#x27;t there.

Youtube doesn&#x27;t censor most pejoratives in comments, as you can tell by reading any of the comments.

They definitely don’t ban the word “commie” in English, so why ban the Chinese one?

Sure, vote me down but it&#x27;s true - extranational powers do not have citizens&#x27; rights in the US, and even if they did, pejorative language is not something citizens are insulated from as a right.Google is siding with a fascist prison-state over Americans&#x27; right to free speech, it is deplorable.And furthermore, the only real justification for a global ban for a US-based company could be &quot;hate speech,&quot; which clearly enough communist operatives claimed it was, but just because somebody&#x27;s feelings are hurt doesn&#x27;t make something hate speech, it doesn&#x27;t come down to cancellation politics.In other words, Google is siding with the Party Room of Control because Google is not an American company. If they were, they would not let this stand.

A banded together band of bandits bandying about their propaganda.  Communists are not US citizens, and even if they were, the US does not have laws to protect softies from &quot;pejorative speech.&quot;   Clearly, someone claimed it was &quot;hate speech&quot; -- which it is not -- and now it&#x27;s banned globally on YouTube because US laws stipulate they must not entertain Hate Speech, but until a US judge says &quot;Communist Bandito&quot; is hate speech, zero relevance.

This phrase is a pejorative for Communists; it is more or less equivalent to the term &#x27;commies&#x27; in English.EDIT: Please don&#x27;t downvote me for contributing relevant facts to the discussion. I do not support censorship.

One fascinating thing about being Very Online in the past 10-20 years is watching the messages of astroturfing campaigns slowly leak into public sentiment. I&#x27;m sure the same thing happens with other forms of media, primarily cable television. But as an example, with the whole 50 Cent Army, a few people have heard convincing arguments from them and turned into unwitting (or otherwise) propagators of the same rhetoric.

I like how there are a bunch of comments in those other threads insisting Google doesn&#x27;t do anything moderation that&#x27;s &quot;political&quot;.

Off topic, but this framing really struck me:&gt; the anti-Trump center&#x2F;center-left&#x2F;leftSo... basically everyone who isn&#x27;t a Trump supporter, then? Is that really how you see the world? The president of the united states vs. literally everyone else? And you&#x27;ve chosen the political side instead of the social consensus?

To be fair, Google is in a no-win situation. Post-2016 election, there has been enormous pressure put on Google (and Facebook and Twitter) to ramp up their censorship from the anti-Trump center&#x2F;center-left&#x2F;left. The mainstream media is on it too and relishes taking shots at social media every chance they get (the YouTube &#x27;adpocalypse&#x27; was spurned by a hit piece by Washington Post against some minor doofus thing that PewdiePie did, and explicitly targetted advertisers of YouTube).Even tech commentators are in on it. Kara Swisher, for example, has been railing at social media companies every chance she gets to get them to ramp up censorship against things she deems offensive.

they are all despicable to me. I boycott amazon and apple for those reasons. Google is so entrenched in everyone&#x27;s life that is much harder to let go. And that&#x27;s why I keep trying to get rid of it... nothing left holds me except the huge amount of google docs that I share with many others

Good luck with that. Their services are essential to my life and I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;re doing this dramatic draconian version of censorship everyone thinks. Never seen this kind of hate from the HN crowd towards amazon or apple&#x27;s manufacturers and warehouse workers working in deplorable conditions, which is far and away the worst thing a company could be doing. Not whatever this is.

wow, three &quot;google bans&#x2F;deletes&quot; on the frontpage today. Its never too early to start ditching everything google.

Very unfortunate - should be able to critique anything and not be censored.

This is the first time I am seriously considering leaving Gmail. Seems like a royal pain in the ass to switch though, since you don&#x27;t &quot;own&quot; your email handle like you would a domain.

I hope your youtube account isn&#x27;t linked to a gmail account you consider important.

Just tried it, and after 30 seconds it was deleted

Tried and was deleted after 30 seconds (3rd refresh)

Interesting - the support ticket at Google is from 11&#x2F;10&#x2F;2019, and doesn&#x27;t look like anything has changed since?

Which gets interesting when advice changes.

Nope. Well, sort of, but not really. It&#x27;s more like. You are on Earth now. All the big govs work together at the highest levels. The whole nationalistic shtick is for us proles down here in the bleachers, working the boilers, eating scraps. You know, like entertainment? Something to get all excited about, like.And all govs control info. Democracies just pretend they don&#x27;t (they do it covertly, through narrative control, disinfo, etc). Social media now presents them with a problem. They have to censor platforms, which makes it overt.This is against the historical trend of democracies modus operandi for information control. Brave new world out there!Edit (this thread now has restrictions, can&#x27;t reply you, below, so here):I mean more &quot;nationalistic shtick&quot; as in the trope of &quot;US vs China&quot; or &quot;US vs Russia&quot; etc. They have to be able to start a profitable war, for something, right?All the same...expanding the argument (as you have) to the &quot;truths we hold to be self-evident&quot;, well, they are unfortunately not implemented in as iron-clad a way as us proles would think. It should be obvious. I love the US, living there, the people, the environment, everything about it...aaaannndd....structurally, you can&#x27;t really say that the debt trap, opioid epidemic, Wall St bailout, social division deliberately inflamed by the media, covert info control and surveillance, democratic &quot;theatrics&quot; that stymie results, really equates with &quot;life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness&quot; can you, chum?I mean, I sort of agree with you a little bit, even, in a way. It is sad. And I do think it is an impressive argument. Yes. Very much! ツEdit (to your edit ツ): Yes, the Muslims in camps, that is a hard thing for Westerners to get their head around. It&#x27;s funny, tho. I wonder about it, for a few reasons:- Western tech supports the security in XJ- China has protected Russian, and US interests along its Western (Central Asian) borders with regard to the countries there, the Tajik, Afghan and Pakistan areas. It could have caused plenty of troubles for US&#x2F;Russia there, but on the face of it their security interests align. And honestly, who do you think is coming across the Afghan-Chinese border (or via Tajik) and doing some of the interrogations in the detention centers, working right alongside Chinese? You guessed it, the [C_A] ツ.- I would have thought an American would be more supportive of counter-terrorism&#x2F;deradicalization&#x2F;counter-narrative. Being soft on sepratist terrorists almost seems like being an apologist for terrorism. Something I know no American would ever do...I&#x27;m sure. :P Especially considering how tough the English speaking world has been on terrorists in the Middle East. I can&#x27;t imagine them standing up to support Islamic terrorism in XJ, or is that just because it&#x27;s against CN and it&#x27;s like &quot;enemy of my enemy is my friend&quot;? But truth is CN no your enemy. Really no!- The XJ narrative is actually cooperative propaganda between US&#x2F;China. 90%+ of &quot;whistleblowers&#x2F;defectors&quot; are Chinese disinfo agents working this psyop. Preparing for the &quot;great discrediting&quot; that will come. The remaining ones are fakes&#x2F;unaffiliated individuals trying to get attention. The real story is: There is strong CT presence in XJ, but the &quot;camps&quot; is fake news, as you say. People apply to go. Like college. And yes, some people wish they were not there, just like college! But they can leave. Only people who are &quot;detained&quot; are terrorists, exactly like in the US.- This XJ propos is a complex info strategy but boils down to:1) an overly critical narrative works to support China (just like the overly critical MSM actually supported President Trump into election because it fired up his base);2) regular Chinese, seeing how crazy and fake is Western coverage of XJ, begin to distrust more and more Western media, helping the Party;3) eventually, when the time is right, XJ will be revealed as to have been wildly-mis-assessed by Western media, in a &quot;mea culpa&quot; moment that boosts Chinese world image, and plays to the idea of it having been unfairly &quot;maligned and mistrusted&quot;.4) For the US side, anything that supports criticism of China plays well domestically for racist&#x2F;nationalist reasons, and can be used to fire up a base,5) Also for US, anything extremely emotive and triggering, can be used to make proles act irrationally and distract them, and also thereby to grease the wheels for other moves such as law passage, etc. It&#x27;s also a distraction to how they&#x27;re working together.It&#x27;s all just calculations designed to take the global proletariat to a destination, through the best path. Path has to be right for each country&#x27;s circumstances. So each country needs their own story. That&#x27;s all it is. Don&#x27;t worry about it. As long as you obey the law, you&#x27;ll be fine.I hope this &quot;red pill&quot; doesn&#x27;t taste too bitter. I&#x27;m not trying to rock your worldview. Nor offend you. Actually I hope you feel a little more a peace about everything. The world doesn&#x27;t have to be perfect, nor make perfect sense...but it&#x27;s all still OK. Focus on the stuff that matters to you. Ignore the noise because it&#x27;s a lie, and it&#x27;s gonna happen anyway. You still have a lot of power to make your own life good.

Actually, this is more like: “In other news, you are in China now.”I don’t care that much about how Chinese citizens let their 共肥 party censor them, but it’s not ok when I am being censored for speech that could be considered offensive to the communist party of China.

As an American that&#x27;s a pretty easy choice you&#x27;re asking me to make.

In other news, Youtube will soon be coming to China. Pick your adventure, which do you want? Youtube in CN or write whatever you like?You&#x27;ll also get videos deleted if you include in them info against WHO advice.

Generic corporate spam filters can OCR for spam text in pictures and have been able to do that for many years, I would assume Google can too.

What if &quot;共匪&quot; is presented graphically? Do the sniffers have the image recognition to flag those too?

How far does this go? How far could it go?Can one take out an ad with &quot;共匪&quot; in the text? Adwords against it? Is this censored on Orkut? Would Google consider censoring Gmail? Or Google Voice? Would they consider bleeping Google Meets?Google will need to be very public about who signed off on this and under what framework.

Section 230 of the CDA either needs to be re-interpreted by the judiciary or Congress needs to get its act in order and pass a new law that is more reflective of society in 2020 and beyond.  It&#x27;s not 1996 anymore...

What could be more American than selling out your values in the name of making more money?

I find it so ironic that the reason for censoring a slur against communism is because a capitalist company stands to lose revenue from angering the government of China.

Youtube is blocked in China though, so using VPNs technically Google shouldn&#x27;t know they are based in CN.

How far Google has fallen. From proactively fighting political censorship to silently facilitating it.

&gt; Also, seems to have been at least since 2012<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.greatfire.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2012&#x2F;jun&#x2F;all-blocked-keywords-according-google" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.greatfire.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2012&#x2F;jun&#x2F;all-blocked-keywords-...</a>You&#x27;re misrepresenting that link. It&#x27;s not a list of things that Google censors, but a list of things that Google wanted people to know are blocked by the Great Firewall (i.e. Google calling attention to censorship, not censoring themselves).

Viral noticing is fed by widespread predispositions, which change over time like fashion.There is a critical mass of people paying attention to censorship in general, and recently a critical mass of people attentive to the evils of the CCP.Also, seems to have been at least since 2012<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.greatfire.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2012&#x2F;jun&#x2F;all-blocked-keywords-according-google" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.greatfire.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2012&#x2F;jun&#x2F;all-blocked-keywords-...</a>

From the actual Google Support question, this was posted on 11&#x2F;10&#x2F;19. Why are we only now just noticing? Was it previously confined to China and has now just rolled out globally?

It appears that the comment is only deleted when it’s made on videos. I made a comment on a YouTube “post” and it’s still there.

That doesn&#x27;t justify their behavior - it condemns it.

If you were being paid $300K&#x2F;year, it costs your employer (as a rule of thumb) 1.5x, or about $450K&#x2F;year. The only reason they could spend $450K&#x2F;year on you is if they expected to make at least that much money with you, compared to what they would make without you. Even if you aren&#x27;t directly working on this stuff, you are providing them with capital that is being spent on it.

It’s good that you would refuse to do the work. Sadly they can easily find someone who badly needs the money, doesn’t understand the problems the feature creates, or doesn’t care about doing the right thing. If all the workers organized it would make a bigger difference, but the company actively discourages worker organization.

No one will ever ask you to implement something &quot;like that&quot;. It probably was an ordinary blacklist that probably started to &quot;protect children&quot; form porn and such, then it went on to &quot;protect teenagers&quot; from radicalization, and now it will protect adults from anti-communist&#x2F;chinese comments. We&#x27;ve made the bed.

by &quot;like that&quot; do you mean &quot;a community moderation system&quot; or &quot;a system for the CCP to backdoor explicit takedown rules into the system?&quot;Based on what we&#x27;re seeing right now, this is likely caused not by the latter, but by the former. Consider: the ML-assisted thread moderation logic can be vulnerable to brigading. If several tens of thousands of Chinese people decided to start flagging comments with that phrase, YT would also start killing the phrase (because its sample is biased towards seeing &quot;That phrase usually results in a flag, so the community clearly doesn&#x27;t want it&quot;).

I like to think I’d take the high road but the Milgram shock experiment[1] shows that most people, including me, probably wouldn’t.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Milgram_experiment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Milgram_experiment</a>

It might be easy to say this, but I believe I would quit if I was asked to implement something like that.  But perhaps I&#x27;d be different if I were paid $300k a year. (I sure hope not, though)

With all that blood on their hands, they&#x27;d better be careful in handling the check or else the bank won&#x27;t be able to read the routing number.

Laughing all the way to the bank... It justifies the behavior to people who think for themselves and not for some intangible global internet community. i&#x27;m not trolling.

Other than the hn-liberitarian anything that resembles censorship in any form is bad circlejerk, I don&#x27;t actually see what the fuss is about here.Assume I believe that moderation is a reasonable action. Why is this unreasonable moderation, who is harmed?Put another way, assume that I have some line on the sand drawn on when I would leave. Assume also that I believe that what I&#x27;m doing at Google has net-positive impact. Why should I move my line in the sand back to &lt;whatever this is&gt;?

Don&#x27;t say that he&#x27;s hypocriticalRather say that he&#x27;s apolitical&quot;Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down?&quot;&quot;That&#x27;s not my department!&quot; says Werner von Braun

I have a bunch of friends at Google; it&#x27;s a mix of &quot;not my department,&quot; &quot;the pay is good,&quot; and a few &quot;true believers.&quot;

Money. Being part of a massive company with lots of compartmentalization. A majority left-leaning political affiliation which tends to be softer on China and against nationalism&#x2F;borders.

Google employees have proven themselves capable of collective action:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;11&#x2F;01&#x2F;technology&#x2F;google-walkout-sexual-harassment.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;11&#x2F;01&#x2F;technology&#x2F;google-walkout...</a>Do it again.

They can organize against project maven but apparently this issue isn’t attractive enough for them.

Not a Google or YouTube employee, but, practically, what would change? In the most likely case, a bunch of Googlers who believe it&#x27;s important to be apolitical at work would take over the product and implement much stronger censorship to get promo. In the unlikely event all of them (and every applicant drooling for a FAANG job) had a change of heart too, Tencent would gladly step into the vacuum.

I try to avoid buying Chinese products, but unfortunately I end up doing so more often than I&#x27;d like. But ultimately, my lifetime contribution to the Chinese regime of a few thousand dollars worth of consumer products pales in comparison to the lifetime contribution of millions of dollars of capital that each Google employee is raising for the company to spend on directly supporting the regime with censorship and surveillance tools.

&gt; I’m genuinely asking because where I live it’s impossible to buy stuff that wasn’t made in China.So wait, now buying something that was made in China means condoning the CCP? That&#x27;s a pretty big jump in logic.

&gt; It’s almost impossible to lead en ethical life in this day and age if you do anything related to tech.That doesn&#x27;t change that an engineer in the bay area can choose to work for Google or choose to find an alternative place of employment. People can choose more ethical choices without living in a pure ethical panacea.

It’s almost impossible to lead en ethical life in this day and age if you do anything related to tech.So the lesson is: Being ethical in one way is hard, so don&#x27;t bother being ethical in any aspect of your life?

How do you buy hardware? I’m genuinely asking because where I live it’s impossible to buy stuff that wasn’t made in China.It’s almost impossible to lead en ethical life in this day and age if you do anything related to tech.

Of all the reasons, that&#x27;s not the hill I&#x27;d die on.

Google is an advertising and tracking company. Full stop.

A real-world example would be companies that make parts for nuclear bombs, but also make parts for thermostats.If there were no other thermostat companies, you might have an argument. But there are plenty of other thermostat companies, and plenty of other tech companies than Google.

Google is a pretty huge company.  What if they&#x27;re working on something unrelated - maybe even something that benefits the world?

I wish that people who use the &quot;a few bad apples&quot; quote as a defense (especially when it comes to the police) would realize the full quote is &quot;a few bad apples spoil the barrel.&quot;

I guess the same as consultants working for McKinsey, or bankers working for Goldman&quot;Not my department &#x2F; group &#x2F; office&quot;&quot;Just a few bad apples&quot;I mean yes, those are valid points - and I&#x27;d imagine most junior workers being there just for the future (career) opportunities.No junior engineer at google is going to have any say in strategic and political decisions like censorship.

So because one company does bad things, it&#x27;s OK for other companies to do bad things?

Other companies have been doing the same for many years?

Are you speaking as a Google employee or just from personal opinion?Also, this viewpoint is naive. Simply more information isn&#x27;t better. What if all that information was about the flat earth theory and nothing else? Wouldn&#x27;t more &quot;mutually consistent&quot; information be a better goal? Flat earth stuff is fun but you must limit yourself to a very small plausible universe in order to really buy into it.

&quot;To organize the world&#x27;s information and make it universally accessible and useful.&quot;&quot;The world&#x27;s&quot; doesn&#x27;t mean &quot;The part of the world we like most.&quot; &quot;Universally&quot; doesn&#x27;t mean &quot;Nobody in China gets to use our system until the Chinese government adopts Western notions of information control.&quot;Google would operate in North Korea if it could, because as a point of philosophy, it&#x27;s believed that access to more informtion, even curtailed by the government, is better than access to only information controlled by the government.

It&#x27;s not really the same though - I can choose to work for an organisation, whereas I don&#x27;t get to choose where I am born.

This is a very poor comparison since nobody chooses their original country of citizenship and it usually takes lots of money or familial connection to obtain citizenship elsewhere.

People are plopped into existence as a citizen of a country. Not quite the same as choosing to work somewhere.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thenib.com&#x2F;mister-gotcha&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thenib.com&#x2F;mister-gotcha&#x2F;</a>

I have much less mobility as a US citizen to move to another country than I have as a software engineer. Almost any Google employee could have an offer somewhere else within 3 weeks of starting their search.

This analogy holds water about as well as a sieve.  You can&#x27;t shop around citizenship in most other countries.  You can&#x27;t just willy-nilly decide to renounce citizenship in one and go become a citizen in another.  I&#x27;m sure people will jump in here with counter examples but I&#x27;m also sure they&#x27;ll be the exception and not the norm.  You&#x27;re also born into citizenship.  Comparing citizenship to the job market just seems so silly.

Bit easier to change employer than citizenship.

To begin with, citizenship is forced upon you. You don&#x27;t have a choice about it. Yes, you can (in some cases) renounce it, though that&#x27;s quite a momentous task - it involved pretty much cancelling your existing life, and takes many years. And as you say - most other countries may be worse - and the ones that aren&#x27;t may not accept you either way.Not working for Google, in particular, is extremely easy. Something that roughly 99.999% of the world&#x27;s population succeeds at without even trying :-) And most people who are working for Google are also likely to be able to find another job quite easily.The two are not comparable. At all. In any way or form.

It&#x27;s more similar to working for a local government. Like should you be a school bus driver in Arizona, given their record?

How do you justify being a citizen of your country? (not sure what country that is, but most of them have done bad things in the past). It&#x27;s possible to be a part of a large organization and not agree with its every action.

FWIW, open source is not an absolute good. It is undercutting the ability of your peers to make a living. It is making software a commodity, such that capital rich hardware owners can make a killing. See AWS.Commoditize your complement. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gwern.net&#x2F;Complement" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gwern.net&#x2F;Complement</a>

&gt; nothing good would come from the Go team quitting over unrelated political stuff.Are you sure about that? It might actually harm google enough that they respond by giving into some demands.

I don&#x27;t work there anymore, but this is a confused argument born of zealotry. Taking Google&#x27;s money to work on open source is totally fine. More money spent on good things might even mean less spent on bad things.For example, nothing good would come from the Go team quitting over unrelated political stuff.

&gt; Google &amp; YouTube employees on HN: how do you justify still working at this company?Not a Google Employee , but in 99% of the case it&#x27;s money + experience&#x2F;situation.This is similar to what others tech company are doing ( Reddit , Adobe etc.. ) in terms of arbitrage when they decide to enter Chinese Market , Partner with Chinese VC or with ideas that challenge their values.Regardless of where you&#x27;ll go in tech you&#x27;ll end up in Amoral corporations like Google&#x2F;Amazon&#x2F;Microsoft which are driven solely by Money and Growth , regardless of the consequences. ( Remember Gillette and Child Labour ? Nestlé ? )Also , the last people who tried to Unionize at Google , which could have enable them to do something about it , got laid off instantly[0] , same pattern happened in all others tech companies...[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;25&#x2F;20983053&#x2F;google-fires-four-employees-memo-rebecca-rivers-laurence-berland-union-busting-accusation-walkout" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;25&#x2F;20983053&#x2F;google-fires-fo...</a>

It doesn&#x27;t have to be &quot;cognitive dissonance&quot;. They simply might not share your political views.

I’m not a Google employee, but really all companies of large enough size care only about the bottom line. Large companies don’t have morals, they just try to make money at all costs, full stop. Google is a bit more hypocritical in that they pretend to be about more than this, but lots of companies are similarly hypocritical, especially tech companies. It’s really only small businesses that have any sort of humanity (sometimes).Google pay better than most, and if you’re on the right team I assume you get to work on very interesting&#x2F;challenging projects. They’re just as heartless&#x2F;selfish as any other bigco, but I don’t know that they’re worse.

If every HN submission were spammed with &quot;communist bandits,&quot; do you think at some point the mods would just write a script to block such comments? It doesn&#x27;t seem absurd to me to think that they might. It wouldn&#x27;t bother me in the least if they did. That type of comment is even less edifying than &quot;first&quot; or &quot;top&quot; or &quot;did anyone else come here from 9gag.&quot;I work for Google. It does some things I don&#x27;t like but this does not prima facie appear to be one of them.

They want to have political influence and believe they are serving society&#x27;s best interests.  They believe dissenting voices must be silenced.

I am not relating the reader to my experience with SourceHut - I haven&#x27;t told anyone to quit and start their own company rather than work for Google - but remininding them that the market for their talents is strong and that we have the luxury of choosing who we work for. I have held and spoken of these convictions since long before SourceHut. Read my blog archives or my old HN comments since pre-SourceHut and you&#x27;ll find much of the same.Who is using SourceHut to build software I disagree with on ethical terms? I am not aware of such a project.

Google employees are more than capable of getting jobs at thousands of other smaller companies with narrower customer bases and clearer ethical stances. Nobody &quot;needs&quot; Google SWE money. You can still easily clear 6 figures while taking a moral stance so this &quot;think of the starving&quot; argument doesn&#x27;t work.

Drew, ever since sourcehut got a little positive attention you seem to have adopted this mindset of &quot;I started my own company and don&#x27;t have to work for the man anymore, why doesn&#x27;t everyone else just do the same?&quot; You need to realize that this is an extremely narrow minded view to have. Not everyone can start their own business. What would you have done if sourcehut hadn&#x27;t gained enough popularity to be successful? You would probably be working for [CORP ABC] who surely would be doing something you disliked, too. That would not make you a &quot;bootlicker&quot;.In fact, I&#x27;d like to ask this question of you: your website is undoubtedly being used by people to build software that you disagree with, perhaps even censorship. How do you justify still hosting your site instead of shutting it down? Enough of the cognitive dissonance. Face your choices and tell me how you square yourself with them.Is it because you need the money from your site? So do Google employees (probably).Is it because you still enjoy the work of building your site? So do Google employees (probably)?Is it because on the aggregate you think that your site still provides benefit to society, despite it possibly being used for things you disagree with? So do Google employees (probably).There are plenty of reasons why people still work for Google, and you probably would relate to them too if you stopped being so combative towards anyone who works for [big corp].

What is an example of some good that you have done from within Google?

It has been harder and harder every year, and frankly I&#x27;m really disheartened and demoralized these days. Articles like this one don&#x27;t really surprise me anymore. It&#x27;s not my department, but I feel complicit none-the-less.But when I look out at the tech industry landscape, it is clear that I can do more good from within, because I have more freedom and influence on the work, and I believe that the work is net positive for the technology ecosystem.Businesses large and small seem to have their heads on backwards here in Silicon Valley. Their founders are all highly profit-motivated, and don&#x27;t truly seek to make the world a better place. Those that wear a facade of idealism give me no reason to believe they are any better than Google. If I left Google, where would I go where I can work without shame? I even have a hard time imagining starting my own business without falling prey to the same broken mechanics that brought us to where we are today.At least at Google, I can say with confidence that there is ongoing work by people I trust - who in turn are given a lot of autonomy by the company - to make the world a better place with technology.

This is a pretty narrow view of the available jobs for software engineers. I have personally never worked for any of the industries&#x2F;criteria you listed. I just pulled up the latest &quot;who&#x27;s hiring&quot;:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23042618" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23042618</a>Of the first 12 posts, one is the FBI, one is questionable (using proxies to circumvent rate limits, anti-scraping tech, etc), and the other 10 seem anywhere from boring to laudable.Most tech jobs do not require you to make broad ethical compromises to work there.

- Not a google employee- Am an employee of a large company whose practices would probably also not stand up to public scrutinyFirst question is has this been verified beyond &quot;someone said so&quot;? Perhaps it has - but any search I do ultimately leads back to the same comment.Second, google is hardly the only company to occasionally kowtow the the PRC. I don&#x27;t think any large company wants to a face-off with them. Are there more ethical employers? Probably, but they&#x27;re probably small and not everyone wants to work at a small company pace. Also, if the company got larger and push came to shove, I suspect they&#x27;d do what they needed to do to stay on China&#x27;s good side. It&#x27;s a better option than going under.Really a lot of employers are ethically shaky.- Is it better to work for the DoD? Some people say no.- Is it better to work for a Big Bank? Some people say no.- Is it better to work for Big Pharm? Some people say no.- Is it better to work for a place that frankly abuses their warehouse workers? I think we&#x27;ve had that discussion.I&#x27;m not sure where that leaves anyone who likes gainful employment, particularly outside the Silicon Valley startup culture.That doesn&#x27;t necessarily translate to &#x27;throw up our hands&#x27; but it does meant a more nuanced approach to where we work, how we feel about our employer, and how we measure that against all the other places we do business with that also have their dark sides.

The companies doing evil things all pay the best.

Be careful, HN put a severe post limit on my account for asking this question in threads about Google misdeeds.The best answer to your question I received from a Google employee, is that the pay is good and the work is interesting.

Google &amp; YouTube employees on HN: how do you justify still working at this company? Enough of the cognitive dissonance. Face your choices and tell me how you square yourself with them. For shame.

Will the people who previously defended YouTube&#x2F;Google&#x27;s other censorship come out of the woodwork again? It&#x27;s not as if it is no longer a private website able to moderate its content however it desires.Will they respond to this controversy with that then-popular xkcd strip[1] about how, &quot;if you&#x27;re yelled at, boycotted, have your show canceled, or get banned from an internet community, your free speech riots aren&#x27;t being violated. It&#x27;s just that the people listening think you&#x27;re an asshole, and they&#x27;re showing you the door.&quot;?[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1357&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1357&#x2F;</a>

Just out of curiosity: what ideological agenda?

HN is extremely corrupt in that way, but don&#x27;t worry, my reply to you will be flagged and people will continue to ignore HN&#x27;s extreme biases, and ideological agenda.

&gt; If this is true, follow the moneyIsn&#x27;t it more likely it was flagged off the front page by overly-enthusiastic users?I&#x27;ll also admit that this link, to a support thread, is more compelling than the Ask HN, where half the comments were questioning whether the phenomenon was actually happening.

If this is true, follow the money. HN is run by a Venture Capital firm. What are their incentives? Who does the business have to keep happy?

Hacker news and dang in particular has a very good track record of even handed and well thought of moderation. They have definitely earned benefit of the doubt from me. Let&#x27;s wait a little before bringing the torches.

YCombinator has a financial incentive to support the Chinese regime.

The submission I linked is not flagged (at least as far as I can see from my account?). Either there&#x27;s some non-intuitive stuff going on with the way submissions stay on the front page, or HN soft-nuked it. Either way I think we deserve an explanation and a clear understanding of the underlying rules.

Yeah I&#x27;ve seen what looks like the same pattern.I&#x27;m not sure this is a behind the scenes Snidely Whiplash situation or ... just mass flagging by users with a specific POV.

It so happens that we&#x27;ve entered a period where technology, morality, ideology, etc. are converging - to censor those who wish to talk about these connections would seem very antithetical to a culture of inspiring bright minds, innovation, and technological advancement for the good of mankind.

the best and surest way to have your account deleted from facebook is to post porn.the best and surest way to delete an inconvenient discussion from hn is to spam it with a political flame war.i don&#x27;t have proof that this is the case here but i wouldn&#x27;t be surprised that such threads are actively heated up and&#x2F;or gaslighted by nation state sponsored censors.

Some users tend to flag stories about China and censorship because they generate a lot of nationalistic and hot headed comments and very little actual intelligent discussion. Just look at the comments attached to this submission.

I seriously doubt that there’s anything to “look into” from @dang’s perspective. A huge share of his moderation lately is focused on “nationalistic flamewar”, and from his perspective, it’s probably easier for any thread that might tend towards that to just quietly sink off the front page.

I also experienced this on numerous Chinese government-related posts in the past, where front page articles were not flagged, but quickly disappeared. Don&#x27;t really have an explanation. Would be great if @dang can look into this.

Interesting.I suspect the formula is changing if only because the sheer volume of spammy type stuff skyrocketing to the top seems to have subsided.There was a short run where a lot of nearly raw spam type posts were quickly rising to the top, and sticking a long time despite almost &#x2F; all the comments being about how terrible the spam is.

Good analysis, but - obviously - outdated and besides, the biggest input and wildcard is &#x27;what are the penalties&#x27; and without knowing those the analysis is not super useful even if it is accurate to a rough approximation.Keeping the spammers out is already quite a bit of work so I&#x27;m perfectly OK with the secret sauce staying secret.

A few years ago, I reverse-engineered the HN ranking algorithm [1]. Basic ranking is based on votes vs age, but there are numerous other factors. Penalties are applied based on words in the title or the domain. Posts with too many comments got penalized as controversial. A &quot;voting ring detector&quot; triggers other automatic penalties.HN ranking has probably become more complex since I looked at it. Manual moderation also impacts ranking.[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.righto.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;11&#x2F;how-hacker-news-ranking-really-works.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.righto.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;11&#x2F;how-hacker-news-ranking-really...</a>

I&#x27;ve participated in several active, somewhat neutral threads here that have disappeared entirely from the site with no indication that they have. Unable to find by browsing backwards by new or backwards from front page.The one in question was that new Michael Moore documentary. There was a lively discussion, but obviously didn&#x27;t fit the established narrative here, and it was disappeared.

This is very worrisome. If we cannot as computing professionals raise the alarm about censorship and tech abuses on a primary forum for computing professionals, what options are left? Ethics is an important part of what we do for a living. We cannot back down from that now or ever.

Same thing happened to this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20863498" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20863498</a>. I meant to email dang to ask about it but never got around to it.

I had a similar thing happen to my post [1] a month or so ago — one minute it was #1, then after a refresh, it vanished. No flag (that I know of), no explanation.When things happen like this, explanations are helpful to the submitter and&#x2F;or the commenters, whichever was causing the problems.I suppose this opens things up for debate, but not sure a silent removal of content is great for the community either.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22633570" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22633570</a>

I always assumed the activity in comments might affect how long the submission stays on the front page.I don’t know this for sure and this is just a guess. It would be great to know the details, waiting to learn more seems best.

Perception is reality. If you control what portions of reality the public is allowed to see, you can control their minds and their behavior.The primary behaviors that need controlling are adherence to authoritarian dictates, and voting.

Perhaps there is an innocent explanation? Or are HN users not smart enough to decide for themselves and indeed tear apart controversial views on the burning topic of the day should the arguments presented warrant such treatment?

That one was flag-killed by users (I&#x27;ve turned that off now). Moderators didn&#x27;t see it.The combination of taking an extreme contrarian position and presenting it in a grandiose and inflammatory way is pretty reliably fatal. I&#x27;m of two minds about that. On the one hand, I don&#x27;t like to see minority views get killed for being contrarian. On the other hand, if the initial conditions of a thread are that inflammatory, we&#x27;re guaranteed to get a flamewar, which is bad for this site.

Earlier today, a post linking to this article vanished: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wmbriggs.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;30833&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wmbriggs.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;30833&#x2F;</a>. It was generating upvotes and discussion.

Yeah pretty much all of HN&#x27;s lines about how it&#x27;s much better than other communities go out the window.Perhaps such conversations can be had productively, but I&#x27;ve yet to see it.

Might it be because threads like these often cause toxic, rude, unproductive, and generally tribal discourse in the comments?Looking around the comment threads, I certainly don&#x27;t see a lot of intellectual curiosity being stimulated or minds being expanded. I see a lot of dogmatic accusations, hyperbolic bemoaning-the-downfall-of-civilization, and general &quot;how could you possibly believe that?!&quot;-toned rudeness. Not our finest hour.

Not the first time I see something like this, would have I not been using hckrnews.com I would have missed it.

&quot;I fully believe @dang has the best interests of the community in mind&quot; -- which community?  Censorship, I mean moderation, is preferential.

This is where I draw my line. I will not be using HN anymore

It seems like my comment was also vanished from the top of the thread? I don&#x27;t see what guidelines I came even close to breaking. Help me out here? No one&#x27;s going to see your reply, my comment is detached from the submission. But I do want to understand what&#x27;s going on here.

Hey, dang. I&#x27;ve sent a letter to hn@ycombinator.com 5 hours ago, questioning why my AskHN submission &quot;Self-censorship on HN&quot; has been flagged and blocked for further replies. Have you seen it by any chance? I&#x27;m really concerned about the issue.&gt; Do you really think we&#x27;re suppressing discussion of the suppression of the phrase &quot;communist bandits&quot; from YouTube? I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a.Also, can the suppression of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23221264" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23221264</a> (which missosoup is asking about) be connected with my &quot;HN censorship&quot; related comment in it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23221622" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23221622</a> ?

It was flagged by users and set off the flamewar detector. We review those, but not while asleep.The site guidelines specifically ask you not to post like this, but to send such questions to hn@ycombinator.com instead. Would you please review them (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>)? The reason we ask that is that such comments routinely spark completely speculative subthreads that range from completely off topic (at the high end!) to outrage mobs. They&#x27;re extremely repetitive and they basically act like a drug and not a nice one.We&#x27;re always happy to answer questions—it just takes time to deal with the firehose. Yes, you have to wait for an email reply, but you&#x27;ve had to wait for a reply to this comment too, and if you&#x27;d sent an email you wouldn&#x27;t have damaged HN. This digression (I&#x27;ll use a nice word) was the #1 subthread on the #1 story of HN when I saw it.You can&#x27;t compute a post&#x27;s rank from its timestamp and score. The software is more complicated than that, plus user flags affect things, plus moderator action. The &quot;why is this post at rank N when given the score X and the timestamp Y my mental algorithm tells me it should be at rank Z?&quot; question is an HN classic, but people grossly overweight moderator action, or rather sinister-moderator-misdeeds in the answers they give themselves.I mean, think about it you guys. Do you really think we&#x27;re suppressing discussion of the suppression of the phrase &quot;communist bandits&quot; from YouTube? I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a.

Seems like your comment has also been detached. I&#x27;m seriously confused right now.

If we&#x27;re downweighting an off-topic subthread A, but it has a subthread B which is actually on-topic, we sometimes detach B so that it doesn&#x27;t get pulled down by its parent. This is a good example. In this case A and B were almost completely unrelated.

Seems like a child comment has been detached from this thread and moved into a separate top-level thread, that is currently at the top (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23223772" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23223772</a>), while its&#x27; former parent (comment that I&#x27;m currently responding to) has been moved to the bottom (2nd page). QED.

There was a previous unrelated discussion about this just a few hours ago which was climbing to the top of the front page when I saw it. And then just vanished: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23221264" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23221264</a>It&#x27;s not flagged, it just went from #13 on the front page to invisible. In a single refresh. How does that work? Looking at the votes and age, it should be in the top 5 of both Ask and the front page. What&#x27;s the metric or decision that made it disappear?@dang might be worth commenting on this? Moderation is fine, opaque removal of content with no explanation, not so much. I fully believe @dang has the best interests of the community in mind, so please give us a clear explanation of what&#x27;s going on here.

The netizens of China have come up with very clever code talk to get around censors. For instance, Hu Jintao&#x27;s surname can be broken up into the Chinese radicals for &quot;Old Moon.&quot; So instead of Hu, they refer to him as Old Moon, etc. I wonder if non-Chinese Google users will be doing the same thing soon.

It&#x27;s an insult but also a historical fact. KMT was listed a observer party in COMINTERN and Chiang Kai Shek himself was nominated as president of COMINTERN China branch. So in a sense KMT was the real Communist deal and CCP was a copycat version.COMINTERN even ordered CCP to join force with KMT to form &quot;united front&quot;, Mao himself was forced to join KMT. And it turned out to be a bloodshed purge by the KMT. Afterwards The CCP failed to hold its insurgent territories, CCP vows to kickout the Soviet consultants and cut links with COMINTERN and became independent, thus began the famous &quot;Long March&quot;. THe term &quot;bandit&quot; was invented at that time.

I was just about to post this:Communist bandit (Chinese: 共匪; pinyin: gòngfěi) is an anti-communist insult directed to the Chinese Communist Party. The term originated from the Nationalist Government in 1927.This is direct censorship on behalf of the Chinese Government.

Some interesting background on wikipedia:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Communist_bandit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Communist_bandit</a>

That doesn&#x27;t really answer the question of that other user.Google largely has largely taken being excluded from China in stride, the other user is wondering why they would do this now.

Because the Chinese market is huge. Because freedom of speech in the Western world is an individual liberty which platforms such as YouTube do not need to guarantee, whereas censorship in China is an absolute requirement they must abide by. The payoffs are asymmetric. If we had legislation in the EU or in the US that demanded that YouTube not tamper with users’ comments, then they’d have to choose between one side and the other. As it is, they’re not legislated as a utility, so they have editorial oversight.

The most charitable explanation would be, that this phrase is considered derogatory and offensive towards some, akin to say the N-word, and they have banned it on those grounds. Seems unlikely though.

Why would Google do this, though?  They seem to have mostly ceded the Chinese market.

I&#x27;m not sure how reliable the following site is, but it looks like this has been banned at least since 2012, along with a long list of words that I find shockingly restrictive.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.greatfire.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2012&#x2F;jun&#x2F;all-blocked-keywords-according-google" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.greatfire.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2012&#x2F;jun&#x2F;all-blocked-keywords-...</a>

I wonder if Google Play Books pulls down works with that phrase included within.

so what&#x27;s this &quot;Don&#x27;t be evil&quot; thingy that Google always talk about

You naively think that western governments are immune from being influenced by China.You&#x27;re wrong. Governmental institutions like the WHO have been influenced by China. The German government has been influenced: they have been reluctant to criticize China.There is no magical governmental institution that is immune from this. If the president was a Democrat we&#x27;d be in this same situation.

&gt;Western companies don’t talk about values, Western governments do.This is completely wrong.Every other ad on TV in the US is preaching about how much Walmart&#x2F;Amazon&#x2F;Pepsi&#x2F;etc. care about the environment&#x2F;LGBT rights&#x2F;safe working conditions&#x2F;etc.Western companies talk about their supposed values _all the time_, they&#x27;re just mostly full of shit when they do.

Western companies don’t talk about values, Western governments do. The past few decades have seen an aggressive destruction in the power of Western governments to subdue them to Corporate power. The US is a prime example where the Republican party’s only policy platform (not even exaggerating) is “tax cuts are the solution to every problem”.The US government specifically has been declawed and dismembered by the current administration to the point of uselessness. The only time it’s willing to assert power is to enable the corrupt dealings of political appointees and lobbyists.

Wait, but China is also doing the same. Have you watched any of the press conferences in China? They were frank and forthcoming with information, there were many reddit threads applauding it until everything got politicized around March.

Uh... western companies do a ton of business with Taiwan. The best semiconductor manufacterer in the world is Taiwanese, for goodness sake.The problem here is not that Taiwan is being ignored. In fact it&#x27;s got nothing to do with Taiwan at all.

its really sad to see Google kowtow to China. i guess money trump everything.a free, open and democratic China is Taiwan. you can see it by Taiwan&#x27;s handling of covid 19. they are open about their cases, allowed press to ask unlimited questions and show everything to Taiwanese and not conceal any info.its sad that Western companies love money more than the Western values that they always talk about. &quot;Don&#x27;t be evil&quot;

Plenty of times, see the entire open source movement or the cypherpunks, or the browser wars in which Firefox was a major competitor, there must be tons of examples.

There s no “we” in the IT community, theres the “well funded groupthink” and “the sea of the unknowns”. When did the IT band together to achieve something?

&quot;communist bandits&quot; doesn&#x27;t refer to communists in general.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Communist_bandit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Communist_bandit</a>

You’re right, they’re not the same. Communists have killed more people.

communism has killed more people than any other ideology or regime:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Prague_Declaration_on_European_Conscience_and_Communism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Prague_Declaration_on_European...</a>

The CCP is not the same as nazis. This is silly.

&gt;It&#x27;s not cut and dry.Yeah, it actually is. You tell the Nazi&#x27;s to fuck off and if they kick you out, they kick you out.

How do you feel about the German proscription on Nazi symbolism&#x2F;speech? It&#x27;s not absolute; for example, Mein Kampf is still published in Germany, but in academic critical editions which provide extensive historical information to place it in context.

A more fitting parabole would be, a US company banned from operating in Germany that could provide German citizens with an incredible amount of information if only the German government didn&#x27;t block any access to its service.Because in case you hadn&#x27;t noticed, Google is entirely blocked in communist China.

It&#x27;s more complex than that. Imagine that you are a US company operating in Germany that provides German citizens with an incredible amount of information that wouldn&#x27;t otherwise be available. You have thousands of people working in Germany. Occasionally, the Nazis ask you to censor things, If you don&#x27;t, your entire team is at risk and will all loose their employment and citizens of Germany will loose access to an incredible amount of information and services. It&#x27;s not cut and dry.

Imagine you posting “nazi bandits” on a WW2 video and seeing it vanish after 15s.We in the IT community need to disassociate with google as much as we possibly can.Free speech is more important than ever.

I have posted a link to a list elsewhere in the thread. (Not sure if it would be spam to repost it in this reply, sorry for the inconvenience.)

Are we playing &quot;what censorship is OK censorship&quot; now?  Who determines that &quot;pretty clear difference?&quot;  Isn&#x27;t the point of being against censorship is that nothing is above the interests of public scrutiny?   Partial censorship seems fundamentally contradictory in terms of the underlying moral justification.

Can&#x27;t you even see removing the CIA&#x27;s whistle blower&#x27;s name is in interest of US gov? How can that be interpreted as protecting an individual?

Interesting, but there is a pretty clear difference between censorship to protect an individual and censorship of critisising a government.

World Socialist Web Site as mainstream press needs very-very big quotes.And this Eric C character turned out to be a nobody (maybe a CIA analyst). So why censor this name? Could be a NSL? (But can that somehow compel the recipient to censor a name anywhere?)

Facebook deletes posts with that name in it as well. You&#x27;re not allowed, even if the name appears in &quot;main steam&quot; press. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsws.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;11&#x2F;face-n11.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsws.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;11&#x2F;face-n11.html</a>

Wow.It&#x27;s almost like the missions of popular websites fall in line with protecting individuals against government-sponsored attacks on whistleblowers.Witness protection isn&#x27;t some flashy thing in movies. It&#x27;s real and society benefits from it.

Here&#x27;s a related Reddit thread: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;WikiInAction&#x2F;comments&#x2F;du2nnn&#x2F;wikipedia_wont_allow_anyone_to_talk_about_eric&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;WikiInAction&#x2F;comments&#x2F;du2nnn&#x2F;wikipe...</a>

If you want to edit wikipedia, you need to know and play their game.Politically charged topics on wikipedia need multiple reliable sources.I can’t find any sources, that would pass as reputable on wikipedia, on this guy.Maybe if there was a script from Senate from Rand Paul, who spoke his name publicly, that could be used. New York Post is the only kind-of-reputable source I can find, I don’t think that’s enough for nowedit: people link Conservapedia etc, but you can quickly see the stuff is full of misinformation. The like to point out, as Rand did, that Schiff daughter was in some relationship with the CIA guy. This is provably false.Maybe the Wikipedia rule on sources is actually good.

There are articles about him on WikiSpooks[0] and Conservapedia[1].[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wikispooks.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Eric_Ciaramella" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wikispooks.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Eric_Ciaramella</a>
[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.conservapedia.com&#x2F;Eric_Ciaramella" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.conservapedia.com&#x2F;Eric_Ciaramella</a>

There doesn&#x27;t seem to be any deletion log associated with &quot;Eric Ciaramella&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Special:Log?type=delete&amp;user=&amp;page=Eric+Ciaramella&amp;wpdate=2020-05-19&amp;tagfilter=&amp;subtype=" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Special:Log?type=delete&amp;user=&amp;...</a>, but then who&#x27;s to say that they haven&#x27;t just deleted these logs too.

Wow.No Wikipedia articles on him either, and reports of people getting permanently banned from Wikipedia for trying to create that article, or even mentioning him in another.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Whistleblower_Protection_Act" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Whistleblower_Protection_Act</a>

Am I reading this right? There is a list of censored words that applies across all google products, but only google employees can access it?Anyone at google want to be a whistleblower and share this list?

Anyone at Google, you can see the complete list here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cs&#x2F;Eric+Ciaramella" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cs&#x2F;Eric+Ciaramella</a>

Someone create a worm&#x2F;virus that just spams this name across the web.

The &quot;whistle-blower&quot; was a federal employee making allegations of hearsay and intent identifying other federal employees (not just the President). What is the line that decides that one is immune to scrutiny while others receive the full brunt? Is it partisan lines, or perhaps seniority cut-offs? Carter Page received no such protection from being targeted and publicly unmasked, despite being a long-time investigation informant.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;opinions&#x2F;while-were-talking-about-abuse-of-power-lets-look-at-the-fbi&#x2F;2020&#x2F;01&#x2F;23&#x2F;b6dfda80-3e25-11ea-baca-eb7ace0a3455_story.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;opinions&#x2F;while-were-talking-a...</a>Such ambiguity fosters an environment of pre-emptive accusations, rife with alternating investigations and immunity.

Do you find it implausible that an agent of the CIA could pose as a whistleblower to advance antidemocratic intelligence efforts against US citizens?Look, I&#x27;m not saying that&#x27;s what happened, I don&#x27;t know anything about it, but the idea that we should be shutting down inquiry into CIA agents interfering in other parts of our government, given the known history of the CIA, is absolutely crazy to me. And it&#x27;s not like they&#x27;ve changed! We&#x27;re talking about an organization that just recently illegally spied on the Congressional illegal CIA torture investigation and then lied about it to Congress (also a crime) - and got away with it!Even in other branches of the government, we know that &quot;whistleblowers&quot; are not always acting in good faith - the NY Times just did a story about a &quot;whistleblower&quot; lying to the press about what was happening and using that as an excuse to leak people&#x27;s personal information to the press, all in order to advance his own political agenda. If that can happen at the IRS, surely it can happen at the CIA? And surely we should at least be able to look into whether that&#x27;s a possibility&gt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;05&#x2F;17&#x2F;business&#x2F;media&#x2F;ronan-farrow.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;05&#x2F;17&#x2F;business&#x2F;media&#x2F;ronan-farr...</a>

That&#x27;s a strange equivalence, and a malevolent comment.Outing whistle-blowers (or supposed whistle-blowers) is bad for democracy. The government is supposed to be transparent to the people. This does not mean that the people should be transparent to the government, or that dissidents should be outed.

Snowden blew the whistle on legitimate information - the other guy did not &amp; that outcome was upheld in court.Hard to see how you could miss such an important distinction between the two unless you had some other motive.

Gotta love this site. Snowden is revered around here yet a whistleblower goes through the proper channels to report wrongdoing by the US government and they still get outed, named, and trampled. Do you want government oversight or not? Do you want whistleblowers or not?And dang is nowhere to be found

I wonder if that name is also blocked from HN. According to google there is only one hit besides this comment section.

Wow. But this case raises the additional point that the subject definitely wants, deserves and is legally entitled to anonymity.

Similar happens with the name &quot;Eric Ciaramella&quot;, which YouTube instantly deletes. This is a name of a CIA whistle blower. It would be interesting to know what other words are in the YouTube censor list.

All youtube comments should end with ‘Communists Bandits’. Digital civil disobedience.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Carthago_delenda_est" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Carthago_delenda_est</a>

its sad to see a company from &quot;Don&#x27;t be evil&quot; to kowtow but whatever

They consider offense to be harm because they seem to want to justify violence against their political rivals.

Compounding this is the veritable explosion of what words which are considered “harmful”, not to mention how vogue it is to be offended (“harmed”) on behalf of another group.If google is hoping to appease these groups, they’re in for a futile challenge.

Too big to moderate in relation to Google and Facebook sounds a little like too big to fail in relation to banks.

It seems the problem is often scale. When you can&#x27;t automate something at the same mistake level a human could, scaling it either requires compromises or extreme resource expenditure via something like tens of thousands of human moderators.

Youtube is in a tough spot. They will be blamed:- if they don&#x27;t take down speech some consider hateful- if they take down speech some do not consider hateful共匪 is seen as an insult by a group, but others do not. If Youtube bans nothing, then hate speech thrives and they get bad PR. If Youtube bans anything anyone flags as hate speech, then they become de facto as censorship agents for foreign powers. Anything critical can be seen as offensive and taken down by CCP or Russia.Youtube is more and more siding towards removing content. I wonder, can US regulators do something about it?

Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube