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Comment by panpanna | Hacker News Reader

That is actually worse.

Would you trust the third party that flagged this as offensive:

F*ckCCP89

Edit: given that her account was permanently deleted after just 45 seconds, I actually think some party member working at WeChat is monitoring her activities in real-time. The password probably get him angry enough to push the permadelete button.

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Actually, the timeline indicates to me that it was automatic. Considering that they wouldn't assign someone solely to watch one journalist's account for infrequent changes, I think it's unlikely that any human saw it in the first few seconds after it happened and took it on themselves to take irrevocable action in the next second after that. My feeling is that queueing delays of various sorts took up most of the 45 seconds, but I would love to hear better ideas on that point.

Would a native Chinese speaker even have that visceral emotional reaction to English profanity? I'm curious about how that impact translates.

They don't need to have a visceral emotional reaction, they just need to know it's a strong anti-CCP sentiment. Given how frequently we use Fuck ____ in English for things we don't like (Fuck Cancer, Fuck the police, etc), it's a pretty obvious one.

I'd also assume they'd assign the english speaking North American dissidents to a monitoring person who speaks good english.

If the account was blocked in 45 seconds then it would be highly unlikely it was moderated by a human.

But given that people have not been able to reproduce this suggests this was probably not automated.

Also, I have hard time seeing an automated system that deletes someone's account including all data for using the f-word in their password.

Maybe the people trying to reproduce it didn't already have strikes against their account and this reported could have.

Why? China does flag people for monitoring 24/7. Is it hard to believe that in China where the party values stability over everything else that they would not have ID people that they feel post / report unfavorably on the CCP as someone to be tracked / watch by a human at all times? The Chinese state security apparatus is quite good and has near unlimited budget and man power.

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