from Hacker News

Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube

by zaggynl on 5/18/20, 3:04 PM with 1177 comments

• by dang on 5/18/20, 9:11 PM

  All: please don't miss that there are multiple pages of comments. Unfortunately the two top subthreads have become so large that they fill out the first page entirely. You have to click 'More' at the bottom to see the rest (there are almost 1000 at this point).

• by koheripbal on 5/18/20, 3:39 PM

  I think a more fundamental problem is a single private company having a near-monopoly on various public communication channels, and having financial interests in various global dictatorships.

  The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this.

  Google's "We're a private company" get-out-jail-free card cannot continue to apply.

• by gabaix on 5/18/20, 3:31 PM

  Youtube is in a tough spot. They will be blamed:

  - if they don't take down speech some consider hateful

  - if they take down speech some do not consider hateful

  共匪 is seen as an insult by a group, but others do not. If Youtube bans nothing, then hate speech thrives and they get bad PR. If Youtube bans anything anyone flags as hate speech, then they become de facto as censorship agents for foreign powers. Anything critical can be seen as offensive and taken down by CCP or Russia.

  Youtube is more and more siding towards removing content. I wonder, can US regulators do something about it?

• by socrates1998 on 5/18/20, 4:05 PM

  I can't fathom how private companies still think that they can make the CCP happy AND their western customers.

  The CCP holds values that are completely untenable to western values. As time goes on, companies who don't know this will lose massive brand value in the western world.

  The NBA has managed to tight rope this so far, but I doubt they can hold it together for very much longer. The CCP is still calling for the Houston Rockets GM to be fired 10 months after he tweeted vague support for the Hong Kong Democracy movement. They still refuse to show NBA games domestically because of it.

  One vague tweet in support of democracy.

• by humaid on 5/18/20, 3:31 PM

  Similar happens with the name "Eric Ciaramella", which YouTube instantly deletes. This is a name of a CIA whistle blower. It would be interesting to know what other words are in the YouTube censor list.

• by mikaeluman on 5/18/20, 3:30 PM

  Imagine you posting “nazi bandits” on a WW2 video and seeing it vanish after 15s.

  We in the IT community need to disassociate with google as much as we possibly can.

  Free speech is more important than ever.

• by jimbob45 on 5/18/20, 4:15 PM

  Counterpoint: this is (weirdly effective) reverse psychology. We know China runs slave camps near the NK border and slavery is typically demonized here in America. However, no one talks about it because China deplatforms relatively benign topics instead. Do we really think they wouldn't prefer a Winnie the Pooh image of their leader over slave camps? Even Tiananmen Square is preferable to forced human organ harvesting.

• by JumpCrisscross on 5/18/20, 3:24 PM

  How far does this go? How far could it go?

  Can one take out an ad with "共匪" in the text? Adwords against it? Is this censored on Orkut? Would Google consider censoring Gmail? Or Google Voice? Would they consider bleeping Google Meets?

  Google will need to be very public about who signed off on this and under what framework.

• by zaggynl on 5/18/20, 3:04 PM

  Try commenting 共匪 on any youtube video, the comment will be deleted after ~15 seconds

• by barbegal on 5/18/20, 3:42 PM

  As a software engineer I understand these sort of bugs.

  A product manager in China asks: can we find a way to prevent people commenting on these videos with comments that contain the word 共匪. Engineer goes away and comes up with a plan to train an AI model to detect these comments. He present's this solution to his manager who informs him that the solution needs to be in place next week, there is no time to gather the required training data and annotate it. There is also no budget for this project.

  So the engineer goes off to find a new plan and finds that Google already has a basic spam comment detector which uses simple heuristics to delete comments. He adds a new rule to the detector. Mark as spam if it contains the "共匪" sub-string.

  His boss is now happy, it gets sent to a test team in China who confirm that commenting with the word 共匪 on one of the videos results in the comment being deleted. Test passed job done, ticket closed. At no point does this get escalated or reviewed by anyone properly.

  And if you don't believe this can happen anywhere, see the Scunthorpe problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

• by nunodonato on 5/18/20, 3:16 PM

  wow, three "google bans/deletes" on the frontpage today. Its never too early to start ditching everything google.

• by exo-pla-net on 5/18/20, 4:19 PM

  YouTube filtering slurs and hateful memes is not surprising.

  They would target anything that gets spammed and reduces the quality of discourse (such as it is on YouTube).

  I see no evidence that China is getting any special treatment here. It was the subject of hateful spam, so now it gets a filter. Same would apply to any other country or topic.

  From my perspective, the absolutist "freedom of speech"/anti-censorship belief is naive. There would be no havens for intelligent communication online without censorship.

  When an intelligent, well-reasoned critique is deliberately suppressed, protest is warranted.

  Until then, it's shrill and spammy and divisive and ascribes nefarious intent to people simply trying to keep the room clean and is, ironically, best moderated away to preserve the quality of discourse elsewhere.

• by MangoCoffee on 5/18/20, 3:30 PM

  its really sad to see Google kowtow to China. i guess money trump everything.

  a free, open and democratic China is Taiwan. you can see it by Taiwan's handling of covid 19. they are open about their cases, allowed press to ask unlimited questions and show everything to Taiwanese and not conceal any info.

  its sad that Western companies love money more than the Western values that they always talk about. "Don't be evil"

• by AdmiralAsshat on 5/18/20, 3:26 PM

  From the actual Google Support question, this was posted on 11/10/19. Why are we only now just noticing? Was it previously confined to China and has now just rolled out globally?

• by myartsev on 5/18/20, 3:21 PM

  Interesting - the support ticket at Google is from 11/10/2019, and doesn't look like anything has changed since?

• by sacks2k on 5/18/20, 3:33 PM

  We never had free speech online. Only the illusion of it.

  I've noticed, especially recently, that most websites that allow commenting will shadow ban comments they disagree with, even if it's not trolling or abusive.

  The scary part is that most people don't even see this and just assume that all of the comments they see are the only ones on the site. This can create the false sense that a larger number of people have a particular viewpoint.

  This sort of censorship and controlling behavior absolutely effects the outcome of our elections and is much worse than anything Russia can even dream of.

  The Chinese government knows this well and in addition to online troll campaigns, they fund our media companies directly and will pull funding if these companies don't toe the line.

  With Covid ripping through the profits of many of these media companies, now is the time they will buy them up in mass.

  We all should be prepared for an online future of CCP controlled media and influence.

• by tru3_power on 5/18/20, 5:06 PM

  In the end, we just have to stop using this stuff. We’re all addicted, complain that google shouldn’t have all this power, yet we can take that power away by choosing not to use these platforms. I’m guilty of this myself.

• by zozin on 5/18/20, 3:24 PM

  Section 230 of the CDA either needs to be re-interpreted by the judiciary or Congress needs to get its act in order and pass a new law that is more reflective of society in 2020 and beyond. It's not 1996 anymore...

• by kevin_thibedeau on 5/18/20, 4:12 PM

  I vote for 1989年4月 as a replacement. It's just a harmless date.

• by self_awareness on 5/18/20, 3:18 PM

  Just tried it, and after 30 seconds it was deleted

• by dirtydroog on 5/18/20, 5:38 PM

  Here's my take on what's probably going on:

  YouTube is a platform designed around showing video ads to targeted audiences. In order to show those ads they need to allow people to upload user generated content. This content needs to be 'brand safe', i.e. it cannot be content that advertisers don't want to be associated with.

  'Content' is more than just the video itself, comments are part of this.

  If an Easily Offended Entity, in this instance 'China', sees an ad from AdvertiserX appearing on content they deem offensive they can kick up a stink about this, this is especially true in China where nationalism is extremely strong. Western brands have a long history of apologising to China over minor things, they really cannot risk fervent nationalism from damaging their balance sheet either through boycotts or having authorities turning a blind eye to counterfeiting.

  So YouTube will remove this content, not because they're under the thumb of China, but because advertisers call the shots.

• by zanethomas on 5/18/20, 4:56 PM

  They are also deleting comments containing 五毛 which refers to China's army of censors.

• by mmhsieh on 5/18/20, 3:28 PM

  The netizens of China have come up with very clever code talk to get around censors. For instance, Hu Jintao's surname can be broken up into the Chinese radicals for "Old Moon." So instead of Hu, they refer to him as Old Moon, etc. I wonder if non-Chinese Google users will be doing the same thing soon.

• by haram_masala on 5/18/20, 3:29 PM

  Why would Google do this, though? They seem to have mostly ceded the Chinese market.

• by kauffj on 5/18/20, 4:09 PM

  If you think the idea of trusting giant social media corporations with the levers to control our speech is outrageous, so does everyone working on LBRY.

  We are working hard to design systems that have the same user experience as the traditional web, but fundamentally redesigned so that this kind of behavior is outright impossible. LBRY allows for local control of the publishing experience, and layers identity, discovery, and payments on top of a distributed data network.

  P2P desktop client: https://lbry.com/get

  Web-version: https://lbry.tv

  Tech documentation: https://lbry.tech

  Almost 100 people contributed to LBRY last month, and more than 2 million people used it.

  Come join us, and escape YouTube :)

• by russli1993 on 5/18/20, 4:11 PM

  I write some comments on Youtube that explains my understanding of the situation happening in China, in a objective as much as possible. And it turns out it could be viewed as Pro-china. Then these comments gets deleted by Youtube. Whether its reported or deleted by the system I don't know.

• by root_axis on 5/18/20, 5:23 PM

  Look at all the flagged comments in this thread and all over the site. HN is the most influential technology forum on the internet, the government should really get involved in preventing the kind of mass censorship that goes on this forum. I am being entirely sarcastic.

• by leoh on 5/18/20, 5:45 PM

  >In 1996, Microsoft halted sales of its Windows 95 operating system in mainland China due to discoveries that it contained the term in Chinese-language input method software bundled with the operating system following police raids on computer stores.

• by f0ok on 5/18/20, 5:42 PM

  "This question is locked and replying has been disabled."

  Does anyone know about other censored phrases or expressions?

  On a completely different note, wouldn't it be possible to create a free (as in freedom), open-source, decentralized search engine?

• by cwperkins on 5/18/20, 5:57 PM

  There's something I've been thinking about lately and its the fact that I learned about the Black feelings of the Hasidic (Jewish) community moving to Bergen-Lafayette neighborhood of Jersey City only after the mass shooting that occurred their earlier this year. I saw a news report from the neighborhood and a resident mentioned how they have seen a big shift in their neighborhood and longtime residents were getting harassed to sell their homes for the incoming Hasidic residents as they were looking to leave Brooklyn for cheaper real estate.

  I bring this up in relation to free speech because it seems to me like there was no outlet for the residents to speak up on what was happening. It looks like there was a chilling effect and some discussions may just not have been had. I think its important to provide that forum to air grievances so that a chilling effect does not occur and people feel like they are a frog slowly being boiled alive.

  I don't think Democracy is the model for all nations today, but I do think that as countries develop and have a certain educated populace that they will trend in that direction. Its better to be enfranchised, then completely trust the decisions made on your behalf elected by a group of technocrats but it requires a populace voting in good faith and of a certain education attainment overall.

  We must keep an open dialog and forum for people to speak freely. I like to think of confronting prejudice as a first responder running towards danger. I don't cower from having those conversations, I'd much prefer to deconstruct them. I have to say though that the internet makes that hard since it is easy to find echo chambers.

  I really want to see communities like r/politics on Reddit better try to foster rich, insightful discourse because I really don't see it that way now and if someone feels differently, I would love to hear from you.

  I personally think Reddit should create a new "Featured Comments" feature like they have in comments on NYT and appoint mods of different biases to choose Featured Comments on highly upvoted content. In the US House of Representatives they give members of the house equal time to address the floor and should we try to virtually recreate that type of forum as well?

• by throwaway17_17 on 5/18/20, 6:29 PM

  I don’t understand the shock here, Google doesn’t even allow for Taiwan to be considered a country on its search page. When you search for Taiwan it shows the map picture and says ‘Taiwan’, but Germany for instance shows the map picture and says ‘Germany Country in Europe’. This is the very top of the page on the mobile layout. Doing things to avoid disgruntling the CCP is standard operating procedure for Google at this point.

• by jshevek on 5/18/20, 3:29 PM

  I'm not sure how reliable the following site is, but it looks like this has been banned at least since 2012, along with a long list of words that I find shockingly restrictive.

  https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2012/jun/all-blocked-keywords-...

• by dkdk8283 on 5/18/20, 3:18 PM

  Very unfortunate - should be able to critique anything and not be censored.

• by djdjrjebfbfjd on 5/18/20, 7:26 PM

  I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess the phrase was added to their hate speech filter. I would guess that if I wrote racist or anti-semitic phrases those would be automatically deleted as well. Sometimes it gets a bit silly. I remember that in the game Words With Friends you’re not allowed to play “jew”. Which is one of the easiest ways to use a ‘j’.

• by jpxw on 5/18/20, 3:54 PM

  https://translate.google.com:

  “共匪” => “Gangster”

  Interesting

• by 1cvmask on 5/18/20, 4:00 PM

  All these platforms have always been censorship platforms. It is the nature of the beast. They can explicitly or implicitly censor. They can censor by making sure the algorithm downvotes or content is not discoverable. Many governments, ranging from the US government to other countries have had these platforms like YouTube enforce censorship of content:

  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/12/us/politics/youtube-terro...

• by really3452 on 5/18/20, 3:37 PM

  Hopefully something like DTube (https://d.tube/) is able to disrupt the Youtube market soon. This google censorship stuff is getting ridiculous.

• by AmazingTurtle on 5/18/20, 4:17 PM

  "This question is locked and replying has been disabled."

  See, they pulled a sneaky on ya

• by alewi481 on 5/18/20, 3:30 PM

  I wonder if Google Play Books pulls down works with that phrase included within.

• by yingliu4203 on 5/18/20, 3:38 PM

  Google is becoming another wechat, one or two words a time. The stages are: - ban one or more words - lock your account - control the visibility of your speech - report your actions to Chinese government - ...

• by nromiun on 5/18/20, 4:40 PM

  I am kind of surprised (and worried) that anyone is surprised by this. YouTube has always been known for very heavy moderation. This is only about comments but they also delete tons of videos without any explanation. If the creator is big enough they can cause some outrage in Twitter and get YouTube's "offical" attention and then maybe they will fix it. Otherwise you are out of luck. I wish there was some alternative platform creators could switch to.

• by leephillips on 5/18/20, 6:09 PM

  “This question is locked and replying has been disabled.”

• by est on 5/18/20, 3:40 PM

  In my best guess, if large enough people report a repetitive keyword in a comment, the NLP will mark it as backlist corpus and auto-deletes posts next.

• by arduanika on 5/18/20, 5:38 PM

  Never forget Dehomag:

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

• by sergiotapia on 5/18/20, 4:40 PM

  Stop using youtube, better more decentralized versions exist in the form on lbry.tv or peertube. Why keep planting trees in their walled garden?

• by xhruso00 on 5/18/20, 3:20 PM

  Tried and was deleted after 30 seconds (3rd refresh)

• by peter_retief on 5/18/20, 4:48 PM

  I did a search on youtube for 共匪 and got many results? I added 共匪, 五毛党, or 五毛 as a comment and it quietly disappeared after a few seconds

• by torrance on 5/18/20, 3:26 PM

  It appears that the comment is only deleted when it’s made on videos. I made a comment on a YouTube “post” and it’s still there.

• by fareesh on 5/18/20, 8:39 PM

  I propose the following solution:

  1) You must be signed in to view "controversial" comments

  2) When you sign up you are given a "Safe search" style set of options for what kind of comment moderation you want (Safe, Moderate, None).

  3) For users who want no moderation, apply US law or whichever law applies. For everyone else, apply the existing censorship.

• by gonational on 5/18/20, 5:04 PM

  “Then they came for me...”

  I think we need to band together against censorship in general, not only when it’s related to China.

• by anigbrowl on 5/18/20, 5:52 PM

  Can any native Chinese speaker offer some additional context, like whether this is likely just a request from the CCP to mute criticism in general, or whether the phrase in Chinese has some specific meaning/implications beyond the separate meaning of the two characters?

• by ixxi on 5/18/20, 3:56 PM

  The only way this makes sense is if the intention isn't to ban in order to stop the term being used, but the opposite; to appear to ban in order to cause a sensation.

  Is any anti-CCP content banned/blocked? epochtimes? falungong? ... it's all still there.

• by geuis on 5/18/20, 5:34 PM

  Just tried this on one of my own youtube videos. Got deleted after only a couple of minutes.

• by dionian on 5/18/20, 3:11 PM

  This phrase is a pejorative for Communists; it is more or less equivalent to the term 'commies' in English.

  EDIT: Please don't downvote me for contributing relevant facts to the discussion. I do not support censorship.

• by asah on 5/18/20, 3:33 PM

  The corner cases is why reddit cmostly using armies of humans for censorship aka moderation - there are auto-report and auto-censor bots only for the most egregious cases.

  (former mod for a top subreddit)

• by ickwabe on 5/18/20, 7:28 PM

  There's a gazillion videos all over youtube criticizing, mocking, and calling out the Chinese government for all sorts of repressive activities.

  I'm confused as to why people would think youtube is bothering to sensor those two characters in oparticular as opposed to something much more likely like spam/bot filtering or channel word filtering. I'd think the Chinese Gov would be much more animated about videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9AvUuEPgvA

  or this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=S3RzKKfNkTk

  or this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4TReo_G74A

  or any of millions of other videos.

  i can find plenty of negative comments directed at the chinese communist party in comments all over youtube.

• by lifeisstillgood on 5/18/20, 3:29 PM

  Some interesting background on wikipedia:

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

• by vuln on 5/18/20, 11:24 PM

  Man I love the fact that the upvotes continue to increase.

• by lern_too_spel on 5/18/20, 4:34 PM

  Tried it myself. Can confirm. 15 seconds on the dot.

• by silasdavis on 5/18/20, 3:44 PM

  I think that just tipped me on to the negative side ambivalence wrt to Google. It's been a journey.

  Profanity filter gone wrong? Meh.

• by beshrkayali on 5/18/20, 3:42 PM

  Reddit has been doing this for a while now.

• by donatj on 5/18/20, 9:39 PM

  Just leaving this here: https://xn--b6qv5b.com

• by abandonliberty on 5/18/20, 4:56 PM

  This is mainly algo-driven through the report functionality, right?

  Does Google even have any sort of significant oversight?

• by broabprobe on 5/18/20, 11:27 PM

  the date on this is 11/10/19, why wasn't this posted till now?

• by qbaqbaqba on 5/18/20, 6:33 PM

  What next? Winnie-the-Pooh?

• by whoevercares on 5/18/20, 5:19 PM

  Personally I’m not really offended by rare appearance of “共匪”. Politically this word implies the failure to recognize the legal government of mainland China, which goes against international consensus. I’m not surprised this word is blocked at scale

• by wdr1 on 5/18/20, 9:38 PM

  I just commented on a few of my videos & it's still there?

• by beyondkaoru on 5/18/20, 8:08 PM

  I was skeptical, so tried it out myself and tried making a comment there with 'communist bandits' / 共匪. My Youtube comment was indeed removed completely and silently, including from my comment history. I am very disappointed with Youtube.

• by tourist2d on 5/18/20, 3:55 PM

  Why is this news?

• by Zanneth on 5/19/20, 7:27 PM

  Just read on Wikipedia[1] that the Chinese Communist Party raided computer stores back in 1996 that sold Windows 95 because the OS contained text input software with the “communist bandit” word in its dictionary. Microsoft had to temporarily halt sales because of the incident.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_bandit

• by zheli on 5/20/20, 3:17 PM

  共匪

• by Gollapalli on 5/18/20, 5:52 PM

  Every damn day, I see more and more reasons why google should be hit with anti-trust.

• by janee on 5/18/20, 7:52 PM

  Scrolling through all this I still can't find an explanation. Can anyone shed light on the context of this slur?

  From my ignorant perspective I just don't understand why it would necessitate a takedown.

  Is it aimed at the whole country, some subset of people, the party, communism in general??

  I don't get it.

• by ddevault on 5/18/20, 3:27 PM

  Google & YouTube employees on HN: how do you justify still working at this company? Enough of the cognitive dissonance. Face your choices and tell me how you square yourself with them. For shame.

• by chenzhekl on 5/19/20, 1:32 AM

  Isn't it an offending word to some just like what jap is for Japanese? I don't think it should be allowed just because people don't like communism.

• by Simulacra on 5/27/20, 2:55 PM

  共匪

• by octocop on 5/18/20, 7:52 PM

  共匪

• by hujun on 5/18/20, 3:45 PM

  another fact, you know which population uses word "共匪"? people in Taiwan, this is actually very old word dated way back from early 1900s when Kuomintang was still controlling China; they call communist party "共匪", and keep using that term after they got defeated in China civil war, and fled to Taiwan island.

• by rmason on 5/18/20, 4:38 PM

  Can someone help me? Who are the communist bandits? Are they people who oppose the Communist government in China?

• by missosoup on 5/18/20, 3:27 PM

  There was a previous unrelated discussion about this just a few hours ago which was climbing to the top of the front page when I saw it. And then just vanished: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221264

  It's not flagged, it just went from #13 on the front page to invisible. In a single refresh. How does that work? Looking at the votes and age, it should be in the top 5 of both Ask and the front page. What's the metric or decision that made it disappear?

  @dang might be worth commenting on this? Moderation is fine, opaque removal of content with no explanation, not so much. I fully believe @dang has the best interests of the community in mind, so please give us a clear explanation of what's going on here.

• by vxNsr on 5/18/20, 5:46 PM

  Same thing happens with JoeBiden.info on facebook. You can't send it in messenger, facebook will tell you it's blocked. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before google manually adds it to the "unsecure websites" list

• by xster on 5/18/20, 4:33 PM

  Surprised how everyone just reads the title and no one is discussing whether "Google deletes comment globally" as reported by a single forum post by "Anti-communist hero" who posted one time in 2019 is factually true.

• by Dahoon on 5/18/20, 8:34 PM

  >Anti-Chinese communist party hero

  Yeah, most definitely a YouTube user.

• by BitwiseFool on 5/18/20, 3:26 PM

  I find it so ironic that the reason for censoring a slur against communism is because a capitalist company stands to lose revenue from angering the government of China.

• by thoughtstheseus on 5/18/20, 4:59 PM

  N/A

• by buckminstrix on 5/18/20, 3:23 PM

  In other news, Youtube will soon be coming to China. Pick your adventure, which do you want? Youtube in CN or write whatever you like?

  You'll also get videos deleted if you include in them info against WHO advice.

• by aml702 on 5/18/20, 5:15 PM

  shame on Google

• by mesozoic on 5/18/20, 9:14 PM

  共匪

  Does Hacker news?

• by sebastianconcpt on 5/18/20, 11:23 PM

  Welcome to the next stage of censorship:

  Google anti-anticommunism is not covert but overt now.

  Take note kids: all forms of anticommunism are going to be pathologized and, when possible, criminalized.

• by aml702 on 5/18/20, 5:16 PM

  SHAME on Google

• by runawaybottle on 5/18/20, 3:31 PM

  All youtube comments should end with ‘Communists Bandits’. Digital civil disobedience.

  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthago_delenda_est

• by rbanffy on 5/18/20, 5:26 PM

  As someone who's regularly on the receiving end of far-right anti-communist rhetoric that, in places I have lived, includes death threats and a reasonably credible suspicion government may soon want to arrest and disappear some people, I welcome some measure of hate speech suppression.

  Before I hit submit, let me add a mandatory "burn, karma, burn" because I know what I'm stepping into.

• by yandrypozo on 5/18/20, 4:54 PM

  Unbelievable :( it's like deleting all comments that include: "fascist bandits" Communism has killed more people than any other ideology.

  > The European Parliament has condemned communism as equivalent to Nazism

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

• by mikaeluman on 5/18/20, 4:02 PM

  Tested and verified. It was deleted right away. I didn’t even right anything harsh.

• by bryanrasmussen on 5/18/20, 3:51 PM

  At the risk of being branded insufficiently anti-chinese, anti-communist, or overly suspicious: I don't believe it.

  I mean obviously I believe putting the comment in youtube will get it deleted. I just don't necessarily believe it means what it says or the reasoning is because Google is pro-China.

  First off, 15 seconds all the time means automatic deletion. Is this really a common enough phrase that they have automatic deletion set up for communist bandits, how about communist yak-fuckers? That sounds pretty unlikely to be set to catch that phrase, so maybe it would just be caught by an automatic sentiment/profanity analysis. How about just yak-fuckers, how about bandits? I'm not going to try all these out myself because

  I don't have the linguistic expertise to know if that ideograph means communist bandits, I do have some co-workers I could ask I guess, maybe tomorrow.

  Everyone is asking about the phrase in other google services, well in Google translate it translates it as Gangsters when I go to English and Italian. The second one is pretty suspicious because Gangster isn't an Italian word but that's what it gave me a couple minutes ago.

  I guess I will wait until later to see how this pans out before getting my rage fully on. rage cautiously in prep stage for now.

  on edit: fixed some grammar.

• by sb057 on 5/18/20, 3:27 PM

  Will the people who previously defended YouTube/Google's other censorship come out of the woodwork again? It's not as if it is no longer a private website able to moderate its content however it desires.

  Will they respond to this controversy with that then-popular xkcd strip[1] about how, "if you're yelled at, boycotted, have your show canceled, or get banned from an internet community, your free speech riots aren't being violated. It's just that the people listening think you're an asshole, and they're showing you the door."?

  [1] https://xkcd.com/1357/

• by baybal2 on 5/18/20, 11:11 PM

  I do remember, google had a record of collaborationism in China, especially around 6-4.

  They were self-blocking gmail, their forums, blogger, etc.

  Now, the 6-4 hysteria came to Youtube, now in US!

• by voiddb on 5/18/20, 11:38 PM

  To all the people think "共匪" is hate speech, what do you think we should do with such a group that killed millions? Go check the history of CCP. Calling them "共匪" is a gross understatement.

• by ecmascript on 5/18/20, 3:35 PM

  The US government should do something about Google, the sooner the better.

• by sebastianconcpt on 5/18/20, 4:58 PM

  The left invariably requires censorship in order to give the impression of prevailing and being strong. Those who’s interests are in line with their values implement it.

• by lonelappde on 5/18/20, 3:36 PM

  And the support page is locked, so Google is also censoring people from trying to understand the rules they are expected to follow.

• by alfiedotwtf on 5/18/20, 8:40 PM

  So I posted this last night [1], it got to the front page (77 points at the time) and after about an hour, it was gone... also missing from the Ask HN page.

  I could imagine YouTube toeing the Chinese party line, but Hacker News? Really?! Is this about the Y Combinator fund not wanting to upset Chinese money?

  This really leaves a bad taste in my mouth @pg

  1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221264