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Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

I'm stunned. YouTube removed testimonial accounts of families of people currently in Xinjiang concentration camps -- because the speakers showed ID cards of their family member, violating YouTube's harassment policies on personally-identifiable information. That's not speculative inference -- the YT representative flat out *tells* the author:

>"We welcome responsible [sic] efforts to document important human rights cases around the world. We also have policies that do not allow channels to publish Personally Identifiable Information in order to prevent harassment."

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>I'm stunned.

Not sure if they are still doing it. But for a fairly long time YouTube censor the word CCP and some other negative words related to CCP.

Not surpassing consider some of those moderators are pro CCP.

Peter Thiel talked about this in happening in Facebook moderation. But I gather most on HN somehow loathe him so it might not matter much what he has to say.

This doesn’t sound bad or wrong at all. Can someone help me understand the outrage? We all know China likes to disappear people and YouTube would be complicit in that if they allowed these people showing their ids to stay up. Sounds like a common sense security step designed to at worst protect YouTube from the liability of being complicit in those people’s deaths and at best an attempt to help them.

afaik these are testimonials for people who are disappeared now, so they are already in the hands of the chinese regime

The id cards are shown to help prevent China from disappearing these people. So YT taking the videos down is the opposite of what YT claims to want.

In what way does that help prevent China from disappearing these people?

It helps to increase awareness, and that helps with pressure on China's regime.

> In what way does that help prevent China from disappearing these people?

Because the disappearance would be more visible to foreigners, and therefore more embarrassing to China. It's bad PR.

IIRC, some Soviet dissidents were merely harassed for an extended period time and/or offered the option of exile, because they were so well known in the West.

Not to sound too stark, but... have the CCP not made it abundantly clear that they don't give a fuck about "embarrassment" and "visibility to foreigners" in the last several years? They will do what they want to whomever they want if there's a serious enough need to do it in their eyes. Uygur, Hongkonger, foreigner, doesn't matter. The current party leadership are way beyond the point where visibility/embarrassment in Western press means anything.

The CCP isn't a big monolith. It's thousands of people with different levels of callousness. Even if some people are willing to damn the torpedoes and flat out execute potential political rivals, there are still people who care about appearances.

> Not to sound too stark, but... have the CCP not made it abundantly clear that they don't give a fuck about "embarrassment" and "visibility to foreigners" in the last several years?

At least with Xinjiang, they deny all the negative stories and have invested quite a bit of effort to push unbelievable "positive" propaganda about it. Disappearing someone who's known outside of China undermines that propaganda effort. That doesn't mean they won't do it, but clearly identifying yourself like these people did makes such actions more costly, which can tip the scales (e.g. it might save you from a bullet and land you in prison instead).

If you stay anonymous, no one may know unless the pile of bodies gets too big to deny.

> Atajurt has collected thousands of video testimonies from family members of Turkic Muslims who have disappeared in Xinjiang. Witnesses show their identification to prove they are real people.

Given that these people are giving their testimony to Atajurt (and not the Chinese government), these are people trying to share their story so the rest of the world knows how bad things are. As the article says, this knowledge is either shared directly (the videos themselves are shared), or indirectly ("the information in the videos is then used by other organizations..., which documents [sic] where detentions are occurring, which communities are most affected, and who has disappeared."). YouTube is therefore preventing one of the most oppressed groups in the world from explaining how they are oppressed.

That sounds pretty bad to me.

Get that [sic] out of here. The information is (information which is documentation of ((where detentions occur) & (which communities are affected)).

If the victims can't document their own identities (and their still-victimized family members), it's harder to apply real political pressure to the CCP about the camps. They can keep claiming theyre not really camps, the escaped victims are paid actors, not real people, etc. This isn't doxxing - these are victims voluntarily documenting their experiences.

The Google policy on PII linked from YouTube's response quoted in the article is intentionally a bit broad and vague and considers "full name" PII, but lots of people say their full name on YouTube videos. Showing ID cards isn't mentioned in the policy - those could violate the rules about addresses, but the ID documentation being shown certainly isn't accurate anymore: the people in the videos escaped the camps and I presume aren't in China anymore.

Maybe it's the documenting of the relatives still in the camps YouTube objects to. If this is a violation, would a news clip about a missing child that includes the child's name and photo also be a violation? Seems like it should be. If YouTube takes that down, are they trying to help the missing child?

>Maybe it's the documenting of the relatives still in the camps YouTube objects to. If this is a violation, would a news clip about a missing child that includes the child's name and photo also be a violation?

The difference is that a missing child is unlikely to be punished for appearing on YouTube. The same can't be said for a detained political prisoner.

If they're in the camps, they are already being punished and abused. Might there be some retaliation? Yes, that's possible. But never calling out abusive behavior because then the abuser might escalate their abuse is a great way to encourage abusers.

They're free post whatever content they want on their own servers. YouTube doesn't want to be blamed for any retaliation that occurs. It's disingenuous to suggest that they're intentionally silencing human rights just as it would be disingenuous to blame YouTube for any retaliation if they had left the videos up. It's called having a different value system. People these days are seem to react with any sort of action that they disagree with the worst possible interpretation possible.

They should also be worried about being blamed for preventing the victims from speaking out

Dude these are basically Holocaust victims pleading for help and you're saying they shouldn't be allowed to prove they have real identities?

I dunno, this seems to be pretty consistent with YouTube's other policies. They aren't crossing any new boundaries here. Note:

1) YouTube isn't doing anything wrong. They obviously support in principle the rights of humans.

2) They are consistently applying their policies. This could reasonably be used to dox people (eg, holding up ID of your enemies so maybe they get rounded up eventually).

3) They are probably going to be forced to do stuff like this anyway in compliance with local government rules, so there isn't much they can practically do.

You might (quite reasonably!) want YouTube to be active in promoting some combination of human rights and/or free speech. But YouTube has made their in-practice policy quite clear. They are also going to defer to what the local authorities believe is acceptable.

> 3) They are probably going to be forced to do stuff like this anyway in compliance with local government rules, so there isn't much they can practically do.

Isn't YouTube banned in China? What "local government rules" are you thinking of, specifically?

I was thinking Chinese ones. Didn't realise YouTube was banned. But nevertheless, as a principle, they have made it clear that they don't want misinformation on their platform and the local government will be pretty clear that this is misinformation.

That wouldn't be a radical departure from policy for YouTube. This is well trod ground.

> ...they have made it clear that they don't want misinformation on their platform and the local government will be pretty clear that this is misinformation.

Come on. "not wanting misinformation on their platform" != kowtowing to authoritarian regimes outside of their jurisdiction.

How, as a matter of policy, do you expect them to make that distinction?

The obvious way to do it is to ask the local government what is misinformation. Google isn't an expert on the truth of everything, for all that their search index being impressive.

> How, as a matter of policy, do you expect them to make that distinction?

They make their own call on what misinformation is (or who to trust to identify it), which is how they actually do it.

> The obvious way to do it is to ask the local government what is misinformation. Google isn't an expert on the truth of everything, for all that their search index being impressive.

That's not the obvious way, that's a stupid way for reasons that should be obvious for anyone with any knowledge of history or current events. Keep in mind this is political information, not technical information.

> Isn't YouTube banned in China? What "local government rules" are you thinking of, specifically?

Google has tons of offices in China, and RnD sweatshops

>1) YouTube isn't doing anything wrong. They obviously support in principle the rights of humans.

YouTube is a company. The default for a company is indifference to every topic. And that's fine. YouTube doesn't "obviously support in principle" anything.

The people there will support things, but companies are not just the mathematical average of the people there. It's specifically about how those people choose to act when they're acting in the name of the company. Nothing about YouTube makes me think it's interested in using the platform supporting the rights of humans.

If there was some clickable and advertiser friendly content produced by people promoting human rights, I'm sure YouTube would be happy to host that. But they're happy to host almost all flavors of advertiser friendly content. I'm sure they would take credit for hosting that video as if YouTube itself was doing something that moved the needle on human rights. When all they're really doing is not prohibiting the content on their default-allow platform.

It's been known for years that YouTube removes evidence of warcrimes because those videos are too graphic.

>2) They are consistently applying their policies.

When videos about a topic they "obviously support in principle" runs up against the general purpose policies, what would "support" look like other than creating a special case in their policies?

>3) They are probably going to be forced to do stuff like this anyway in compliance with local government rules

What government is telling YouTube to make videos about human rights abuses unavailable worldwide? And why would a company that "obviously support in principle the rights of humans" choose to do business within that government's jurisdiction?

yeah, I get that I'm being really critical and holding youtube to a high standard. But it's also totally fine if YouTube chooses not to meet that standard. Most companies barley have the manpower and expertise to execute on a signal focus. YouTube doesn't have to try to move the needle on human rights issues. All I really mean is that we shouldn't default to giving them even a single ounce of unearned goodwill on their human rights record.

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