13 karma · joined February 12, 2021
When I posted about two countries pressuring tech companies into silencing oppressed communities (including one country credibly accused of genocide) [1] it was flagged for being “political”.
But China bad. Whatever fits your agenda I guess. Goodbye.
As far as the "oppressive regimes" statement, it is political - but also the actions of these governments towards their respective minority group have been well studied, and for a lack of better words, oppressive. There are other words, like genocidal, that have also been used to describe these actions, but I hesitated to use them on this forum.
My post should have been clearer in that I do not wish to break Hacker News tradition in discussing the underlying political issues that don't relate to technology, but only the pressuring-tech-companies-into-censorship issue. It's still political, but I think it invites much fewer flame wars.
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I understand that automated algorithms make a lot of these decisions, but I hope not everyone working with these companies is complacent enough to shift the blame onto some zeros-and-ones. I don't know if this post will bring about "change" but with so many of us tech workers here, I think this is a great platform to discuss these. The best time to discuss this has passed, but now is the next-best time.
I DO NOT WISH TO MAKE THIS A POLITICAL DEBATE, and I trust the great mods here will remove such content here.
India may well be trying to do right by farmers, as they claim. Sri Lanka may have worries about national security, as they claim. Hacker News has not been the place for these discussions.
[1] https://www.india.com/technology/youtube-pulls-down-punjabi-...
[2] https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/02/09/thousands-march-justice-...