Typing 共匪 (communist bandit) in YouTube comments will automatically be deleted | Hacker News Reader

Typing 共匪 (communist bandit) in YouTube comments will automatically be deleted

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78 pointssfj34 comments

There are people that say that it's not censorship if it's a private company doing the redaction, but if big tech does it on behalf of the government is it censorship or not?

I'm no authority, but I'd say absolutely a yes.

It might not be censorship (in the classic government sense) but its still very sad to see US based companies and organizations bow down to China. Granted I am aware China is not the only communist country.

Another example of companies bowing down to China: https://www.reuters.com/article/china-basketball-nba-espn/es...

Plus a Github repository of companies that kowtow to China's interests from a previous discussion here on HN:

https://github.com/caffeine-overload/bandinchina

don't forget blizzard/activision

Whether through State or private entities, censorship is censorship. The State doesn't get a karma pass for using private companies platforms rather than their own.

But is YouTube actually doing it on request of a government?

If posting "Communist bandit" in plain english doesn't get removed, then it's safe to assume they do.

Or perhaps the Chinese phrase just got caught in the spam filter as a false positive while the English phrase didn't?

YT's spam filter is notoriously terrible so I don't think this is far out there.

The US constitution bans government limitations on free speech because the people of the 1700s believed that the government was such a powerful force in society that it needed restrictions placed on it.

It's the 21st century now. We might need to reevaluate whether private enterprise has grown powerful enough that it needs to have similar restrictions as well.

But govt is given monopolistic power on violence. Private companies did not acquire power on violence, and the power they did acquire on speech and other things was done through market competition.

Companies used to have plenty of violence, and arguably a monopoly of violence in some contexts, e.g. the massive private armies of the Dutch West India or British East India companies.

Coca Cola has murdered union reps, and fruit companies have used actual government militaries as tools of their own game, too.

Hell, it's a primary trope in cyberpunk -- mega-corps having their own private ninja cyborg army, and with the growth of Iraq-era military contracting, it's not crazy to see that happening.

"By 1803, at the height of its rule in India, the East India company had a private army of about 260,000—twice the size of the British Army"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_West_India_Company

The question was never "Is this censorship?" it was "is this justified?" which is also sometimes conflated with "is this legal?" Is it censorship? Yes. Is it justified? No, because YouTube doesn't operate in the Chinese market, so they have no reason to believe this move protects their interests. Is it legal? Yes.

I hope this is just an automated mistake and they correct this and not filter against it.

If they don’t I feel they went down that slippery slope of beyond PC correctness and into prescriptive discourse. Truly lamentable given the nature of the medium. How are people supposed to have a “conversation” at all if something as innocuous as this gets flagged....

Simple, talk only about things the CCP approves.

It's about time the West left China and focused on India. The Chinese society needs a generation or two to catch up politically, after three decades of insane economic and social changes.

This is absolutely not innocuous. China has seen many regimes fail over time. When a regime becomes corrupt and unfit to rule they are labeled as "bad men and bandits". Saying "Communist Bandit" indirectly through cultural reference characterizes Communists as unfit to rule and set to fall from power. Of course conversation and real speech has great value, but we are talking about an authoritarian regime experiencing a bout of paranoia.

I think we all want this to be a technical glitch, but I think that's not the case. This policy was made to appease an authoritarian government, and extending beyond their borders by design.

It was happening maybe 6 months ago if you used the words 'israel' and 'nuclear' in the same comment.

It seems pretty likely because it sounds like a phrase that bots or fake users would spam.

Not to mention that there's actually a word filter feature for content creators so you'd need to figure out if this is youtube deleting the comments or the channel owner.

> you'd need to figure out if this is youtube deleting the comments or the channel owner.

I tried this myself on a Joe Rogan podcast, who doesn't speak Chinese and is based in L.A. and my comment was removed with 20 seconds. I very much doubt that he was the cause of the censorship.

the "held comments" feature on youtube algorithmically hides comments it deems inappropriate if that feature is turned on and it's left to the review of the creator. I'm not sure if Joe Rogan has that turned on or not, but to accuse youtube of biased political censorship you'd have to actually show explicit bias towards the content.

I feel unless shown otherwise (and I'm not really keen on spamming random hate speech into youtube comment sections), I'd assume that slurs like that may have been caught in some generic filter.

From: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9483359?hl=en

YouTube can hold potentially inappropriate comments for review in the following languages: Arabic English French German Japanese Korean Portuguese Russian Spanish Turkish Vietnamese Thai Indonesian

Chinese is not one of them.

Seems like this has been “fixed” now, I’ve tried it on Binging with Babish and the comments is still up after 5min.

I know it's kind of a meme and hyperbolic to talk about the "commies at Google" but these circumstances are quite interesting.

No surprise.

Context: it's a slur that was used during the Chinese civil war by the Nationalists to refer to the Communists, still used by Taiwanese. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_bandit

IMHO it makes sense that youtube removes comments that are just a slur and nothing else. Those wouldn't be tolerated on hackernews either.

Based on the few times I made the mistake of reading the comments on YT, I do not believe that YT removes other slurs automatically.

I’d be fine with it if they removed all slurs. Or at least a reasonable effort to remove generally acknowledged slurs for many cultures. I know the line can be fuzzy.

This is the correct explanation but got downvoted. Comments containing only one slur would be considered as spams.

> IMHO it makes sense that youtube removes comments that are just a slur and nothing else.

The comment only needs to contain it, not solely consist of the phrase. I tried, “welcome mr. joe rogan to the land of 共匪” on a Joe Rogan podcast, and it was deleted in within 20 seconds.

That's interesting. I was basing my comment of the demonstration in the tweet which used just the slur and nothing else, so I didn't know.

But what if I want to seriously claim that the communists, and specifically the Chinese communists, are bandits (or at least thugs), not based on the Taiwanese using it as a slur, but because of their actions?

I recognize that slurs are outside of polite discourse. But not everything that anyone uses as a slur should be off-limits for serious discussion.

Then you could say something like "共产主义者是土匪".

"共" doesn't really mean "communist", from my very basic duolingo mandarin I remember it means something like "together". The slur is a very specific abbreviation which doesn't make sense without the context of the civil war.

So its an insult directed at supporters of a political party? Do we really want to be deleting peoples messages using slurs based on political affiliation?

What if someone deems that "Nazi" is a slur that used against anyone right of center? Do we delete messages that include the word Nazi?

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