Drone footage of Reddit's major investor rounding up people for religious belief | Hacker News Reader

Drone footage of Reddit's major investor rounding up people for religious belief

reddit.com

127 pointsmissosoup44 comments

I expect this to get deleted as HN has apparently decided that pointing out the CCP is heavily invested in Chinese Tech and directing their actions is a flaggable offense.

I'm sure the next time an NSA scandal is exposed that'll get taken down immediately too... right?

I think they get deleted because it becomes a flaming shit war real fast and is very unproductive.

I personally don't think this title or video are relevant in the slightest on HN, and despite Reddit thinking China controls the website, there are regularly 200,000+ upvoted anti-China messages and theories on the very front page that immediately disprove their argument that China has any pull on Reddit.

I just watched another thread that was in no way a flame war get deleted in the tik-tok topic.

They have taken to deleting ANYTHING that mentions the CCPs investment in Chinese Tech, regardless of whether it's a cordial discussion or not. When people are asking "why would the US be concerned about a stupid app like Tik-Tok" and the response is: because the CCP is heavily invested which is concerning - that shouldn't be deleted. The fact it was brings into question the motivations of the moderators...

https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditMinusMods/

This must all be China. Your theory is no more than conspiracy.

Well no -- They don't fund all our operations.

I think this may be the end of the American experiment. How can you have mostly open organic institutions that anyone can influence and keep out bad actors, especially when one of those actors is another enormous state with the ability to plan and execute plans over decades?

I feel like pre-internet and the current level of globalization this would make some sense, but why would the end result here not be a corruption of open institutions by powerful bad actors?

The American governments job is to keep bad actors from funneling a bunch of money to companies. Another part of the American government’s job is to funnel money into foreign companies and interests. It’s an ever changing game.

Company’s should also question who they are really getting foreign money from and for what purpose. An individual can also choose not to work for a company if they do not agree with their apparent values.

Good point about the government's job. I forget we could not live in such a corrupt time/place.

I think it is worth remembering how tightly tech companies are with the military industrial intelligence media congress complex.

A lot has come from (D)arpa, intelligence contracts, military development, law enforcement.

The US has also privatized a lot of intelligence and military sectors where consultants and others perform jobs that the government might not strictly be allowed.

No moderator touched this post or, as far as I can tell, even saw it until I just came here. Users flagged it. The baity title would be reason enough. Reddit drama tends to get flagged here also, for obvious reasons.

HN hasn't "decided" anything like what you say. The issue is that nationalistic flamewar makes people angry and dumb (and worse). People who want to rant and post denunciatory rhetoric—whom there are a lot of, and growing—need to find another place to do that. Thoughtful, curious conversation on China-related topics is as fine here, as it is on other topics, and as it always has been.

The way we operate HN hasn't changed. What has changed are macro social and geopolitical trends. We can't expect HN to be immune from those, but certainly we need to protect it from degenerating into a flamewar site, and that is what the vast majority of this community wants from us.

> The issue is that nationalistic flamewar makes people angry and dumb (and worse). People who want to rant and post denunciatory rhetoric—whom there are a lot of, and growing—need to find another place to do that.

I understand and commend the taking down of nationalistic flamewars, for the most part. But that way of operating has one flaw: it gives cover for very back things being carried out, since very bad things are polarising and therefore its denouncing a "flamewar".

I apologise for the question because there is no way to ask it that isn't polarising, but I would really like to know: If Nazi Germany was putting Jews in trains right now, would a post about it get removed from HN? It's a serious question, I think your users deserve to know.

I'll take the fact you didn't answer as "yes, it absolutely would".

Tencent is owned by the CCP: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2019/03/28/commentary/w...

However, this isn't specifically Tencent. I don't know why the title doesn't highlight this is specifically the CCP.

This was on the front page then went poof from the front page without slipping to the 2nd or 3rd page and was not flagged. Why did that happen?

I saw it as flagged to death. The title definitely needs work, and it's also much more political than is generally allowed, but I do think it's important to be aware of.

It's not just Tencent. Plenty of people here have jobs or companies partially owned by China. Don't expect everyone to just be on the side of the people in the trains.

That's the unfortunate truth. Money matters more than people's lives.

Users flagged it. That's the usual reason.

More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23849682

(It’s Tencent; the title is awful.)

Is this from Xinjiang? Are they just conflating Tencent with the CCP, or does Tencent have some involvement with the camps there? IIRC, the Chinese government is attaching private business operations (e.g. factories) to the camps to use the prisoners as labor. Is there any authoritative source for this footage?

I trust reddit accounts about as far as I can throw them, and given they're just incorporeal information, I can't actually throw them at all.

If I understand it correctly, it's the CCP, which holds the same power over Tencent as it does every other company that operates in China.

Sorry about the title, I tried to keep it as faithful as possible to the source as per guidelines.

If you feel the source is misrepresenting the content in order to 'clickbait', such as saying 'a funder of Reddit' rather than 'Tencent' in order to generate extra outrage, then it's appropriate to make the edit. You can email the mods and ask them to make that edit for you if it's too late to do so yourself on the submission.

This post has already been nuked. And I'm pretty sure it wasn't because the mods had an issue with the title, otherwise they'd have edited it themselves as they usually do with bad titles. So no point reaching out now.

There seems to be a pattern with HN and China specifically. Not Russia, not any other major state actor, just China. Whether that's due to the userbase, external influence, or the admins, we'll never really know. Dang sure as shit will never openly comment on this issue even though reddit ended up admitting that they were heavily manipulated by China after a year of denying it any banning anyone bringing it to light. I've seen enough china-themed discussions that are otherwise on par with HN submissions get nuked to know that something's going on.

I've been commenting as openly as I possibly can on this for years now. The issue isn't that we're hiding the truth (as far as we know what it is) from anyone. The issue is that people's perceptions are so conditioned by their passions that it doesn't matter much what the truth actually is. Many people on both sides of this issue perceive every post they agree with as being flagged and removed, and every post they disagree with as being upvoted to the top every time. That's not an exaggeration. As I said to someone yesterday: if evidence were needed here, they could just look at HN itself.

It's wrong to say this hasn't come up about any other country than China. Before the China wave, there was the Russia wave, and passionate users were saying things like: "YCombinator is in the Kremlin's pocket. Wow. I fully expect this to be downvoted to oblivion. But wow." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15631095) and "Russian money might be making this very site possible" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15630920). These perceptions were just as wrong, and by just the same mechanism.

Blaming this one on the content of the material posted misses the forest for the trees, and denies your responsibility to post content of sufficient quality. Newsworthy is not sufficient if it’s filled with outrage and has a clickbait headline.

I flagged it, because I considered the linked headline and writeup to be of excessively poor construction and quality. The material itself was interesting once I grasped it behind the layers of distraction and outrage-rabblerousing, but I can’t endorse that presentation style here and so I absolutely flagged it.

If you had written up a blog post about this event, linked to supporting material such as the Reddit post, and offered some background on why this is new and terrifying — then I might have upvoted it instead of flagging it.

Could somebody explain what is going on here? How is this related to reddit and how is it clear that people are rounded up for religious belief? I just see something that could as well be regular prisoners being transferred.

A Chinese company invested $150 million in Reddit.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/11/18216134/reddit-tencent-i...

Anything else? I mean taking money from Chinese corps is probably ethically problematic but that's about it. We don't know who got rounded up why and if Tencent is related to that beyond being a Chinese company, right?

As a descendant of Polish Jews that got out in time, god damn this is disturbing.

Why was this flagged? Chinese state behavior is absolutely relevant given their involvement in western tech.

CCP money

Ironically, $$$

> Why was this flagged?

Likely because it attracts unsubstantive comments.

I don't have access. Could someone kindly clarify what this is about?

https://gfycat.com/oddballfairgerbil

wtf... :-(

EDIT: any idea why this also got flagged on HN?

It happens to my posts here every now and then whenever I say something that doesn’t make the CCP look good.

To be honest, I think the Chinese people are awesome and have a great culture that has given the world a lot. I am just extremely concerned about some of the crimes against humanity that the CCP does which are being normalized. Nevertheless, the USA is in the same boat, but when I am critical of our state my comments don’t get flagged.

I flagged this because the title is clickbait, and not news whicj in my opinion goes against the spirit of hacker news.

If this would be just a direct link to tencent investing in Reddit, or how Reddit has not taken any strong stance against HKs new data privacy law, then I think it would fit here.

Fair enough. I don’t agree with the title either. Also, outside of the CCP/Tencent connection, there is very little “tech discussion” around this.

Here are direct links to the video:

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/OddballFairGerbil-mobile.mp4

https://giant.gfycat.com/OddballFairGerbil.webm

They should work better with the WaybackMachine, as links to the gfycat page result in a 404 in the archived versions.

In surprised that someone was able to get done footage of this. You would that a drone around an area like that would be taken down asap.

It's a mavic 2, it's rather small and inaudible above 50 meters or so. Which seems to be roughly where it's hovering based on the footage. It has a camera with optical zoom. Ironically, it's made by the Chinese company DJI.

Also, wild speculation, but maybe it did get taken down. The footage shown is a recording of the live telemetry feed streamed to the base station, not the much higher quality video stored on the SD card on board the drone itself.

This kind of genocides is why the yearly Holocaust remembrance posts on the internet are moot. What's the point of never forgetting a genocide if we're just going to sit by and watch others take place.

Look, I'm very much against China here, but this kind of clickbaity rhetoric doesn't help. Maybe Reddit should divest, I think there's a strong argument for that, but their investors at Tencent are not themselves doing the genocide.

Centralized government, centralized blame.

The nature of Chinese security law means that there is no meaningful distinction between Tencent and the Government or China when it comes to security matters.

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