Has this article been discussed here before? I could have sworn I recall seeing this article maybe a week or two ago on the front page but I can’t find a past thread with any activity.
It would be interesting if someone from China could comment on censorship in China. Is there a fraction of people who agrees with it or is almost it universally disapproved of?<p>Some of these arguments for censorship made in this article sound eerily similar to how we justify censorship in the West.<p>> Our role was to make sure that low-level content moderators could find "harmful and dangerous content" as soon as possible.<p>Without context this could apply to any Western social media platform. Of course in the West its companies not politicians who call the shots, but the language to justify the actions is certainly similar.<p>I'm not trying to equate Western censorship to Chinese censorship, but in the West it's certainly fair to say many people are happy and even welcoming of censorship – is the same in China?
It's becoming tougher to work for ethical companies, specially in Tech. If it's not the company itself, it's the shares of its mother company in another one.
“When I was at ByteDance, we received multiple requests from the bases to develop an algorithm that could automatically detect when a Douyin user spoke Uyghur, and then cut off the livestream session...<p>...every audio clip would be automatically transcribed into text, allowing algorithms to compare the notes with a long and constantly-updated list of sensitive words, dates and names, as well as Natural Language Processing models. Algorithms would then analyze whether the content was risky enough to require individual monitoring.<p>If a user mentioned a sensitive term, a content moderator would receive the original video clip and the transcript showing where the term appeared. If the moderator deemed the speech sensitive or inappropriate, they would shut down the ongoing livestreaming session and even suspend or delete the account.”
"We didn't have enough Uyghur language data points in our system, and the most popular livestream rooms were already closely monitored."<p>This deeply saddened me. They reason why the Uyghur dialect wasn't banned wasn't for ethical reasons, but base operational ones.<p>It's like when the bloody Franco dictatorship forbade the Catalan dialect decades ago.
If you want to know where American governance is headed, look to China's regime for a foretaste. Big Tech and its ideological and political allies are taking us there, inch by inch.
Sure, and I helped build Palantir's license-plate-reading, immigrant-processing, and drone-targeting machines. Everyone in the Bay Area is fine with that. No one cares. To an average affluent Bay Area engineer, illegal immigrants and people getting blown up half a world away are extremely abstract concerns. The real sources of pain in a Bay Area engineer's life are their inability to sip lattes through a mask and Planet Granite in Sunnyvale being closed. Meanwhile, my inbox is blowing up with inquiries from companies and I have my pick of lucrative jobs.
Surprise, Chinese websites enforce political censorship within China? I am not sure what is news here. Are we going to pretend the NSA doesn’t integrate with PRISM to make lists of its own?<p>Because they are beholden to the government, corporate control over the public square has us all fucked. Today people cheer Big Tech’s ability to censor distasteful politics from the public square. Tomorrow, when “content moderation” makes civil disobedience impossible to publicize, we will lament the lack of decentralized social media.<p>In other words, centralized social media cements moves towards authoritarianism, but makes it very difficult to move back in the other direction, especially if attempted via the most tried and true methods in history.<p>The revolution won’t be televised. You won’t find it on Twitter or Douyin either. So why did anyone expect anything different? Unless the people can take back control of the public square from the corporations, democracy will crack.<p>Edit: consider responding with something coherent rather than downvoting and moving on