Google deletes "communist bandits" from comments on Youtube - <AUTHOR> https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/19190975?hl=en <comment><USER2> 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).

<comment><USER2> I made this a collapsed stub comment to collect replies, since we don't want to distract the top of the thread too much.

<comment><USER3> The "more" pagination button appears to only be visible on the first page of comments....you need to update the URL manually to get to comment pages 3+

<comment><USER2> Oh! The second page was crashing. It should be fixed now. Eesh; I'm sorry.

There's a bug that we haven't fixed yet, the workaround for which is to restart the server after renaming an account. I must have forgotten to do that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 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.

<comment><USER5> Here are some numbers to keep you up at night, they are very scary:

Google controls 91.89% of the search market [1]

G controls 68% of the browser market [2]

G's android is on 84% of phones operating systems [3]

G has 73% of the search advertising market [4]

[1] [https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market- share](https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share) [2] [https://www.statista.com/statistics/544400/market-share- of-i...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/544400/market-share-of-internet- browsers-desktop/) [3] [https://beta.trimread.com/articles/16433](https://beta.trimread.com/articles/16433) [4] [https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-gaining-google- search-a...](https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-gaining-google-search- advertising-market-share/)

<comment><USER6> At risk of nitpicking, why do say "controls" rather than e.g. "services" or "handles"? When you say "controls" it's like you're saying Google has some kind of monopoly power that makes it hard to switch. And yet anyone can easily switch to e.g. DuckDuckGo. If that's a monopoly, it's not quite the kind of a monopoly we should generally be worried about.

Browsers would be a different issue. In that case, there are network effects like about what standards are supported and how, which make it difficult to launch a competing browser, even with technological superiority, and in that case, it would be reasonable to worry about too much market share.

<comment><USER7> This is the perennial discussion on HN as HN'ers get popularity confused with monopoly. I get the anti-Google sentiment but outside of the Play services agreements that Google got dinged for with Android manufacturers, they're not being anti-competitive.

If Google were to block search results to DuckDuckGo for example, that would be monopolistic and warrant antitrust action. As it is now, Google isn't blocking competition, consumers are choosing to use Google despite the privacy-oriented preferences here on HN.

<comment><USER8> They do deliberately slow their sites on Firefox, as has been discussed in many past hn articles. YouTube for example. Pardon my lack of references, you should confirm for yourself with a hn search in case I am mistaken

<comment><USER9> In addition to this, their use of reCaptcha makes using a non-chrome browser a significantly worse experience on several sites.

<comment><USER10> This is my biggest issue. I tried using Firefox exclusively for a period of time but experienced a 10x increase in the number of reCaptcha manual verifications I had to complete. Going to the same sites on Chrome has no reCaptcha.

For me, this is blatant anti-competitive practice and should be punished.

<comment><USER11> I've used both firefox (dev edition) and chrome pretty evenly for a long time (work stuff in chrome, personal in ff), and I haven't noticed any more reCaptchas in firefox than I get in chrome. If you just started using firefox, I could see the extra captchas being due to having "too clean" of a browser, or a different browser that was never used before tripping some sort of anti malware or suspicious login system.

All just speculation, but I haven't noticed the same issue.

<comment><USER12> This is exactly it. Modern recaptcha is "reputation" based. So if it fingerprint matches you against a known profile, you never see the captcha. One could argue that a residential ip block combined with a common browser should be sufficient to filter most bot traffic, but it's not exactly in googles interest to worry about non-chrome user experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 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?

<comment><USER14> The solution is to realize "hate speech" is mostly subjective and revert back to the clear rules that we had last decade before the current political climate of gratuitous outrage.

<comment><USER15> I think part of the issue is the power of comments like yours that pretends there's a simple solution.

In some conversations bad actors can gain more power in a debate using misleading information than a good actor can by using the truth.

Most conversations, such as this one about free speech, are so complex that it's tough for a 'good actor' to offer solutions. They may discuss the pros / cons of each side, talk about where further research is needed, talk about experts that are more informed, etc. They can still offer solutions but they shouldn't be pretending an unconfident solution is complete if they really are a good actor.

Bad actors, on the other hand, can simplify the complexities. They can provide confident solutions to complex problems and do so without worrying about the information they don't know or about misleading others.

Fortunately bad actors are often weeded out in discussions, but in conversations that abuse humans fear we become more demanding of answers. Explaining to fearful people "it's complex" isn't satisfying so we become more susceptible to lies / misinformation spread by bad actors. Conversations abusing this fear / anger is where there is an argument about whether misinformation should be limited.

<comment><USER16> > In some conversations bad actors can gain more power in a debate using > misleading information than a good actor can by using the truth.

Can "actors" be neatly divided into "good" and "bad"? Who decides who is a "good actor" and who is a "bad actor"? Your judgement of who is "good" and "bad" may well differ from mine.

<comment><USER17> > Your judgement of who is "good" and "bad" may well differ from mine.

One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

<comment><USER18> Usually that only works if you ignore the definition of terrorism.

<comment><USER19> What is the definition?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> 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.

<comment><USER21> Actually it's super-easy; barely an inconvenience.

Most Western customers really do not care. Like, really-really. The default attitude is "Well, China has its rules and the Western nations have theirs. They can get along." Leaks between rulesets are relatively rare in the sea of regular day-to-day operations.

And honestly, I don't think the CCP's goals are as far different from the goals of, say, the US government's as some believe. The countries are trading buddies. They're both empires with a number of citizens that is too-big-a- number-to-visualize-in-one's-head. If they ever came into direct conflict, these differences would start to put Western-headquartered countries in difficult positions, but that's not the current state of things.

<comment><USER20> I think that attitude of customers is changing as we speak. Before, sure, it was easy to ignore the ramblings of how the CCP was upset at something and a western company just gives into them.

Now, anti-CCP sentiment is growing. I think western people are starting to realize how different we actually are. The CCP will be blamed for the pandemic (which is mostly correct), and you will see a massive decoupling here in the next couple of years.

This is the first real anti-globalization movement in about 80 years. Who knows where it will end.

<comment><USER21> Hopefully not where the last anti-globalization movement did (isolationism, fascism, and a world war).

<comment><USER20> Obviously. I think the CCP has been given a pass the past 15 years. It's high time they conform to the western liberal democratic model of government.

I really hope it doesn't get ugly, but it could. We are so different than them, I just don't see how we go back to business as usual after this mess.

<comment><USER22> Actually even longer than 15 years, the US has all-too-generously allowed the CCP to continue to exist ever since we benevolently allowed their army to fight ours to a standstill on the Korean peninsula in 1953.

<comment><USER21> It's not really an "allow" kind of deal; a nation's options are limited dealing with the most populous nation on the planet.

Lots of options end in nose-cutting to spite faces, and the winning move starts to look like "don't play" real quick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> 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.

<comment><USER24> Wow.

No Wikipedia articles on him either, and reports of people getting permanently banned from Wikipedia for trying to create that article, or even mentioning him in another.

<comment><USER25> Wow.

It's almost like the missions of popular websites fall in line with protecting individuals against government-sponsored attacks on whistleblowers.

Witness protection isn't some flashy thing in movies. It's real and society benefits from it.

<comment><USER24> 1\. I imagine state actors have better information than Wikipedia editors.

2\. Leaving that aside, why permanently ban those who make such contributions to Wikipedia?

<comment><USER26> 1\. State actors also have a long and established history of abuses of power. We should not defer to what they have to say on issues related to their possible abuses.

2\. Propensity for creating such a page is a strong indication of extremely poor judgement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> 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.

<comment><USER28> It's more complex than that. Imagine that you are a US company operating in Germany that provides German citizens with an incredible amount of information that wouldn't otherwise be available. You have thousands of people working in Germany. Occasionally, the Nazis ask you to censor things, If you don't, your entire team is at risk and will all loose their employment and citizens of Germany will loose access to an incredible amount of information and services. It's not cut and dry.

<comment><USER29> >It's not cut and dry.

Yeah, it actually is. You tell the Nazi's to fuck off and if they kick you out, they kick you out.

<comment><USER30> And then a number of your former staff and their families are kidnapped and sent into work/death camps

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> 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.

<comment><USER32> > We know China runs slave camps near the NK border

We don't, actually.

> slavery is typically demonized here in America

No it's not, it's just hidden so liberals (including republicans) don't have to think about it. It's the prison industrial complex.

> 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.

Anything you read in the western media about China or North Korea should be second-guessed and double-checked against eastern media, usually chinese language, for facts. The so-called "free press" is really a coordinated operation run by a few media companies in the interests of the capitalist class. People supposedly iced by Kim Jong Un have been magically resurrected many times. Western media tries to put all the blame of the coronavirus deaths in the US on China "not coming forward" when they had months and months to prepare. The US has entire media structures like "Radio Free Asia" to spread anti-China propaganda.

<comment><USER33> so you think it's smart to look for "facts" in Chinese media with all their censorship? What a ridiculous idea, there are no facts there, only things their government wants people to see.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> 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.

<comment><USER35> What if "共匪" is presented graphically? Do the sniffers have the image recognition to flag those too?

<comment><USER36> Generic corporate spam filters can OCR for spam text in pictures and have been able to do that for many years, I would assume Google can too.

<comment><USER35> Very interesting. I wonder what would happen if you put in some special noise from adversarial AI methods today. Would be a real arms race of detection vs evasion.

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

<comment><USER37> Just tried it on a video about WHO and Bruce Alyward. It's still up after 6 minutes. Either we're inundating their censor bot, it's been shadowbanned, or Google has stopped under the flak. I'll keep checking later.

<comment><USER38> Try looking at your comment in an Incognito window and sort by new. You'll still see your own comment if you're logged in, but you won't see it otherwise. I just tried this.

<comment><USER37> It's still up after two hours: [https://imgur.com/a/9x0Yvyc](https://imgur.com/a/9x0Yvyc)

I just tested it via two methods:

1) VPN'ed into work with Firefox in Private Mode (I posted from Brave)

2) Had a friend test it. He's on Chrome from a different city.

<comment><USER38> Interesting. What's the content of the video? Link?

<comment><USER37> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n0j93sOCcg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n0j93sOCcg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem)

<comment><USER40> Except YouTube is blocked in China, so no one really should be trying to solve this to begin with...

<comment><USER41> people read/write chinese outside of China though...

<comment><USER42> Why do we have to kowtow to them or even the Chinese government?

If someone says "Fuck the US government", we allow that on Youtube, don't we?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> wow, three "google bans/deletes" on the frontpage today. Its never too early to start ditching everything google.

<comment><USER44> I like how there are a bunch of comments in those other threads insisting Google doesn't do anything moderation that's "political".

<comment><USER45> One fascinating thing about being Very Online in the past 10-20 years is watching the messages of astroturfing campaigns slowly leak into public sentiment. I'm sure the same thing happens with other forms of media, primarily cable television. But as an example, with the whole 50 Cent Army, a few people have heard convincing arguments from them and turned into unwitting (or otherwise) propagators of the same rhetoric.

<comment><USER46> Carl Jung: "People don't have ideas. Ideas have people."

<comment><USER45> That dude was right on. The concept that's helped me the most in my personal growth has been that of the Jungian shadow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> exo-pla-net 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.

<comment><USER47> Who decides what is intelligent, well-reasoned critique?

Those in power have an incentive to categorize anything that threatens them as "hate speech" or "obscene" or "threatening to the social order".

<comment> exo-pla-net There are two parties that decide what constitutes an intelligent, well- reasoned critique.

The first party is the owner(s) of a platform. For any owner, there is incentive to preserve power, but there is also incentive to not act as an oppressive villain.

The owner sometimes has ideals beyond power, such as cultivating free communication to build ideas for a better world.

But even the most callous, iron-fisted dictator can sniff the danger in being overly oppressive. They also sometimes recognize that unstifled communication serves as a competitive advantage.

As a consequence, free speech is less fragile than it seems. There are even whiffs of it in China itself: [https://www.cecc.gov/freedom-of-expression-in- china-a-privil...](https://www.cecc.gov/freedom-of-expression-in-china-a- privilege-not-a-right)

The second party that decides what constitutes an intelligent, well-reasoned critique are the viewers of and contributors to a platform.

We have pitchforks, and pitchforks have sharp ends, but they can be dulled by overuse. Furthermore, the citizen's militia grows weary when called upon too often.

And thus, when the rallying cry is sounded for the non-event of a crude slur being censored, we're eroding our own power. We're jumping the gun, which should fire only when _we_ think an intelligent, well-reasoned critique has been suppressed.

Making a slippery slope argument is betraying a lack of understanding about the above complex dynamic.

<comment><USER47> I disagree, since I think all speech* is equally protected speech, including a crude slur. The reason for that is because it is far too easy for the powers that be to use claims of "only cleaning out the trash" to censor legitimate thoughts and expressions. Throughout history humans have proven incapable of making the right call on where to draw that line, so the only option is to draw it at all.

To refute your points: the owner of the platform has all the power in this relationship, since there are essentially zero repercussions for them over- censoring discussions. Most of the users of a platform won't know, won't care, or will accept the "just censoring the evil speech" argument. The audience itself is also not infallible, since there is a such thing as the tyranny of the majority.

*: of course, there is the point where speech itself requires harming another to create, such as child pornography or snuff films. But that is not what is at issue here or anywhere in modern discourse.

<comment> exo-pla-net You posit a false dilemma:

* Accept suppression of intelligent dissent.

* Allow all speech, including unintelligent and hateful speech.

This is evidently false, given:

1) Intelligent, well-reasoned dissent against a platform is permitted on virtually all large platforms on the internet, and this has been the case for decades.

2) Virtually all large platforms censor unintelligent, hateful speech.

Your nightmare scenario of intelligent speech disappearing due to censorship of small-minded vulgarity simply hasn't happened.

Quite the opposite, intelligent speech does disappear when small-minded vulgarity _isn 't_ censored. See voat or 4chan or the thousands of other poorly censored, poorly moderated places on the internet. Productive, intelligent communication does not happen in public forums without censorship.

Concerning what-ifs and slippery slopes, call me when someone with a well- reasoned argument is being suppressed by a large platform. All I've ever seen is hate and misinformation being pushed down the drain, and good riddance.

Censoring kids spamming "communist bandit" isn't a problem, not in this universe.

Censoring a professor critiquing communism as a viable form of government _would_ be a problem, but that's neither here nor there.

Meanwhile, legitimate problems in the free speech domain are draconian copyright laws, suppressing science and creativity, and espionage laws, suppressing whistleblowers such as Snowden.

If we've decided that free speech shall be our crusade, and we're in the US, our limited time and resources should be focused on these real, ongoing, and broad-reaching problems.

<comment><USER47> So-called "unintelligent" speech is still speech, and therefore should be protected. "Unintelligent" people have the same human rights as anyone else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> 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"

<comment><USER49> Western companies don't talk about values, Western governments do. The past few decades have seen an aggressive destruction in the power of Western governments to subdue them to Corporate power. The US is a prime example where the Republican party's only policy platform (not even exaggerating) is "tax cuts are the solution to every problem".

The US government specifically has been declawed and dismembered by the current administration to the point of uselessness. The only time it's willing to assert power is to enable the corrupt dealings of political appointees and lobbyists.

<comment><USER29> >Western companies don't talk about values, Western governments do.

This is completely wrong.

Every other ad on TV in the US is preaching about how much Walmart/Amazon/Pepsi/etc. care about the environment/LGBT rights/safe working conditions/etc.

Western companies talk about their supposed values _all the time_, they're just mostly full of shit when they do.

<comment><USER49> I'm talking specifically about values in an international context. Google won't try to enforce free speech values it loves when operating in China. They will abide with warantless searches there if need be.

The US government though has more power to resist such demands acting as a sovereign equal to the Chinese State.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> 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?

<comment><USER51> Viral noticing is fed by widespread predispositions, which change over time like fashion.

There is a critical mass of people paying attention to censorship in general, and recently a critical mass of people attentive to the evils of the CCP.

Also, seems to have been at least since 2012

[https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2012/jun/all-blocked- keywords-...](https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2012/jun/all-blocked-keywords- according-google)

<comment><USER52> > Also, seems to have been at least since 2012

[https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2012/jun/all-blocked- keywords-...](https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2012/jun/all-blocked-keywords- according-google)

You're misrepresenting that link. It's not a list of things that Google censors, but a list of things that Google wanted people to know are blocked by the Great Firewall (i.e. Google calling attention to censorship, not censoring themselves).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Interesting - the support ticket at Google is from 11/10/2019, and doesn't look like anything has changed since?

</comment><comment><USER54> 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.

<comment><USER55> This site will shadow ban comments they disagree with, even if it's not trolling or abusive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> 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.

</comment><comment><USER57> 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...

</comment><comment><USER58> I vote for 1989年4月 as a replacement. It's just a harmless date.

<comment><USER59> Yes, posting the date for 2 months before Tiananmen Square is clearly going to rile the Chinese.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Just tried it, and after 30 seconds it was deleted

<comment><USER61> I hope your youtube account isn't linked to a gmail account you consider important.

<comment><USER62> This is the first time I am seriously considering leaving Gmail. Seems like a royal pain in the ass to switch though, since you don't "own" your email handle like you would a domain.

<comment><USER63> It's not so bad if you have a domain tied to the gmail account. I use email@example.com but point my MX records to use gmail for it. So switching for me basically means re-pointing to another mail service.

The only reason I use them is their spam filters are excellent. Otherwise I wouldn't.

Switching would be laborious if you're using @gmail, probably a case of looking at each unique domain name you've received an email from, logging in and switching addresses. Could be relatively methodical about it by taking a backup and then working down your inbox and deleting the emails from those recipients until you have nothing left. Could be a day job.

There is an option in gmail to forward your emails to another address if you wanted to do it over time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> 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.

</comment><comment><USER65> They are also deleting comments containing 五毛 which refers to China's army of censors.

</comment><comment><USER35> 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.

</comment><comment><USER66> Why would Google do this, though? They seem to have mostly ceded the Chinese market.

<comment><USER67> Because the Chinese market is huge. Because freedom of speech in the Western world is an individual liberty which platforms such as YouTube do not need to guarantee, whereas censorship in China is an absolute requirement they must abide by. The payoffs are asymmetric. If we had legislation in the EU or in the US that _demanded_ that YouTube _not_ tamper with users' comments, then they'd have to choose between one side and the other. As it is, they're not legislated as a utility, so they have editorial oversight.

<comment><USER68> That doesn't really answer the question of that other user.

Google largely has largely taken being excluded from China in stride, the other user is wondering why they would do this now.

<comment><USER67> As another user posted, there's a long list of terms dating back to 2012, so this isn't recent. Even the post referred to dates from the end of 2019, so it isn't exactly novel.

Google might well accept being excluded from China, but I'm assuming that the prospect of being allowed to re-enter that market is periodically dangled in front of them by the ruling party in China, and that consequentially Google has an ongoing motive to somewhat abide by the PRC's rules.

Also, Google may be excluded from China, but Google also has a lot to lose if relations with China deteriorate, for example, if China somehow interferes with the primacy of Android there and therefore causes a massive dent in platform numbers.

<comment><USER68> I get that but that's just conjecture right?

As far as China disconnecting from Android or forking it... that seems inevitable. Deleting some comment's wont change that.

<comment><USER67> Or they could do something awful to Chrome.

Point is, the longer Google can postpone any such occupancies, the longer they can delay a drop in their stock market price (because surely such an event would have a negative effect on their stock, both for rational reasons [such as less telemetry data] and irrational [day traders] reasons).

And yes, of course this is pure conjecture. I'm not Larry Page in disguise spilling the beans of Alphabet's Boardroom musings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> 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](https://lbry.com/get)

Web-version: [https://lbry.tv](https://lbry.tv)

Tech documentation: [https://lbry.tech](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 :)

</comment><comment><USER70> 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.

</comment><comment><USER71> 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.

<comment><USER72> Maybe if HN got a couple billion more users...

<comment><USER71> Why does that matter?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> >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.

</comment><comment><USER73> "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?

</comment><comment><USER74> 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?

<comment><USER75> To be honest, I think that many, if not most, of israeli and diaspors Jews (and quite a lot of religious, too) would be banned from YouTube for antisemitism if they voiced their opinions on Hasidim there.

<comment><USER76> To my knowledge YouTube does not ban content that is antisemitic. There is some evidence that antisemitism when couple to anything Nazi will be banned (video wise), but there is no blanket prohibition against antisemitism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> 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.

</comment><comment><USER51> 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-...](https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2012/jun/all-blocked-keywords- according-google)

<comment><AUTHOR> Learned something new today, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Very unfortunate - should be able to critique anything and not be censored.

</comment><comment><USER78> 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'.

</comment><comment><USER79> [https://translate.google.com](https://translate.google.com):

"共匪" => "Gangster"

Interesting

</comment><comment><USER80> 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...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/12/us/politics/youtube-terrorism- anwar-al-awlaki.html)

</comment><comment><USER81> Hopefully something like DTube ([https://d.tube/](https://d.tube/)) is able to disrupt the Youtube market soon. This google censorship stuff is getting ridiculous.

<comment><USER82> Got excited for a moment, then I read the "About" section and closed my browser tab at "crypto decentralized".

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> "This question is locked and replying has been disabled."

See, they pulled a sneaky on ya

</comment><comment><USER84> I wonder if Google Play Books pulls down works with that phrase included within.

</comment><comment><USER85> 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 \- ...

</comment><comment><USER86> 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.

</comment><comment><USER87> "This question is locked and replying has been disabled."

</comment><comment><USER88> 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.

</comment><comment><USER89> Never forget Dehomag:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehomag](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehomag)

</comment><comment><USER90> Stop using youtube, better more decentralized versions exist in the form on lbry.tv or peertube. Why keep planting trees in their walled garden?

</comment><comment><USER91> Tried and was deleted after 30 seconds (3rd refresh)

</comment><comment><USER92> 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

</comment><comment><USER93> 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.

</comment><comment><USER94> 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.

</comment><comment><USER95> "Then they came for me..."

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

</comment><comment><USER96> 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?

</comment><comment><USER97> 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.

</comment><comment><USER98> Just tried this on one of my own youtube videos. Got deleted after only a couple of minutes.

</comment><comment><USER99> 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.

<comment><USER100> Youtube doesn't censor most pejoratives in comments, as you can tell by reading any of the comments.

<comment><USER101> I think you are reading things into the comment your replying to that aren't there.

<comment><USER100> It is either the case that the parent likes to add random facts into conversations such as "the word communist contains 9 letters" which has nothing to do with the conversation, or the parent clearly felt that the phrase being perjorative was tied to it being censored.

Let us assume the parent was being on topic and relevant. Therefore they seem to indicate the censoring was due to it being perjorative. As most other perjoratives are not typically censored (per my comment), that would imply that the "Communist Bandit" perjorative is somehow special.

Is it special because it's somehow especially worse than other perjoratives, or is it special because it offends a foreign state's political party?

<comment><USER101> I guess we're on a tangent now but maybe it's an interesting exercise.

>the parent clearly felt that the phrase being perjorative was tied to it being censored.

How do you come to this conclusion? In my view the comment is not implying anything at all, it is merely translating (not only using a direct translation but also conveying the implications of the phrase "communist bandit"). The word "pejorative" adds to the translation. There is nothing in the original comment that says anything about censorship at all.

<comment><USER100> So then the parent was adding in random fun facts for our benefit?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> 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)

</comment><comment><USER103> 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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9AvUuEPgvA)

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

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

<comment><USER72> Subtle creeping influence is often more effective is the long term than just an all once take over

</comment></comment><comment><USER104> Some interesting background on wikipedia:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_bandit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_bandit)

<comment><USER105> I was just about to post this:

Communist bandit (Chinese: 共匪; pinyin: gòngfěi) is an anti-communist insult directed to the Chinese Communist Party. The term originated from the Nationalist Government in 1927.

This is direct censorship on behalf of the Chinese Government.

<comment><USER88> It's an insult but also a historical fact. KMT was listed a observer party in COMINTERN and Chiang Kai Shek himself was nominated as president of COMINTERN China branch. So in a sense KMT was the real Communist deal and CCP was a copycat version.

COMINTERN even ordered CCP to join force with KMT to form "united front", Mao himself was forced to join KMT. And it turned out to be a bloodshed purge by the KMT. Afterwards The CCP failed to hold its insurgent territories, CCP vows to kickout the Soviet consultants and cut links with COMINTERN and became independent, thus began the famous "Long March". THe term "bandit" was invented at that time.

<comment><USER106> Wasn't it was an enemy-of-my-enemy alliance that occurred in the context of the Japanese invasion, and both sides were planning on picking up their civil war where they left off, after the Japanese had been removed?

<comment><USER52> No, the First United Front was formed in 1924, the purge of Communists by the Nationalists started with the Shanghai massacre 1927 and the Long March began in 1934, before the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER107> Man I love the fact that the upvotes continue to increase.

</comment><comment><USER108> Tried it myself. Can confirm. 15 seconds on the dot.

</comment><comment><USER109> 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.

</comment><comment><USER110> Reddit has been doing this for a while now.

</comment><comment><USER111> Just leaving this here: [https://xn--b6qv5b.com](https://共匪.com)

</comment><comment><USER112> This is mainly algo-driven through the report functionality, right?

Does Google even have any sort of significant oversight?

</comment><comment><USER113> the date on this is 11/10/19, why wasn't this posted till now?

</comment><comment><USER114> What next? Winnie-the-Pooh?

</comment><comment><USER115> 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

</comment><comment><USER116> I just commented on a few of my videos & it's still there?

</comment><comment><USER117> 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.

</comment><comment><USER118> Why is this news?

</comment><comment><USER119> 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_bandit)

</comment><comment><USER120> 共匪

</comment><comment><USER121> Every damn day, I see more and more reasons why google should be hit with anti-trust.

</comment><comment><USER122> 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.

</comment><comment><USER123> 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.

<comment><USER124> How do you justify being a citizen of your country? (not sure what country that is, but most of them have done bad things in the past). It's possible to be a part of a large organization and not agree with its every action.

<comment><USER123> I have much less mobility as a US citizen to move to another country than I have as a software engineer. Almost any Google employee could have an offer somewhere else within 3 weeks of starting their search.

<comment><USER125> You couldn't move to Canada easily?

<comment><USER126> Compared to most other western countries, sure, Canada is on the easier side.

However, even with that in mind, it is still a very difficult and complicated process, with tons of hard limitations that can put a complete stop to the whole thing due to something trivial, like not having a degree. And even with that barrier of hard requirements cleared, it is still a pretty draconian experience.

Having gone through a similar thing myself (not with Canada, but I ended up coincidentally reading a lot about Canadian immigration laws), I can assure you, it is way more difficult than getting any job, even if you are a successful Google engineer, and by a far margin.

I am pretty sure that any person who went through an immigration process to another country can attest to that. And I am talking purely about the legal- paper-stuff aspect of immigration to another country, not things like getting adapted to your new country or anything like that.

<comment><USER127> > Compared to most other western countries, sure, Canada is on the easier > side.

Our process isn't that easy; we have an immigration system that the GOP would _like to have_.

There are points awarded based on your education and training, variated against the demand for those skills in Canada. If you are being imported by an employer they must go to considerable lengths to prove that they attempted to find an existing Canadian to fill that role. And so on.

And it can be all avoided by paying approximately $800,000 to what is effectively an escrow: you get it back after a few years, less inflation.

<comment><USER126> >Our process isn't that easy

That was the whole point of my comment. Out of all western countries, Canada is definitely one of the easiest. But even with that in mind, it is still extremely difficult.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER128> 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.

</comment><comment><USER129> 共匪

</comment><comment><USER130> 共匪

</comment><comment><USER131> 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.

<comment><USER132> I'm not sure I understand your point. It makes sense that people in Taiwan would use political rhetoric that aligns with their perspective.

The issue is whether societies without political censorship should support their businesses adopting it. _Who_ uses any _specific_ rhetoric (that should be categorically protected) is not salient to the debate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER133> Can someone help me? Who are the communist bandits? Are they people who oppose the Communist government in China?

<comment><USER134> It goes all the way back to Chiang Kai-shek and Nationalist China. It's an old-fashioned way to insult the Maoists and promote the idea that Taiwan was (and still is) in the right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER135> 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](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.

<comment><USER136> Some users tend to flag stories about China and censorship because they generate a lot of nationalistic and hot headed comments and very little actual intelligent discussion. Just look at the comments attached to this submission.

<comment><USER135> The submission I linked is _not_ flagged (at least as far as I can see from my account?). Either there's some non-intuitive stuff going on with the way submissions stay on the front page, or HN soft-nuked it. Either way I think we deserve an explanation and a clear understanding of the underlying rules.

<comment><USER137> It takes some amount of people flagging it before it shows up as [flagged] but flagging submissions affect rankings before it reaches that point. On top of that "Ask HN" posts also have some modifier on them that makes them drop quicker, these two effects seem to be cumulative, explaining why it dropped so quickly

<comment><USER138> In addition, I believe HN deranks submissions with a high comment-to-vote ratio, also as a signal of controversy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER139> 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

</comment><comment><USER140> 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.

</comment><comment><USER141> >Anti-Chinese communist party hero

Yeah, most definitely a YouTube user.

</comment><comment><USER142> 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.

<comment><USER143> What could be more American than selling out your values in the name of making more money?

</comment></comment><comment><USER144> N/A

</comment><comment><USER145> 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.

<comment><USER146> As an American that's a pretty easy choice you're asking me to make.

</comment></comment><comment><USER147> shame on Google

</comment><comment><USER148> 共匪

Does Hacker news?

</comment><comment><USER149> 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.

</comment><comment><USER147> SHAME on Google

</comment><comment><USER150> All youtube comments should end with 'Communists Bandits'. Digital civil disobedience.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthago_delenda_est](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthago_delenda_est)

</comment><comment><USER151> 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.

<comment><USER132> Yeah, it's stunning that someone who's experienced motivated authoritarian repression is arguing in favor of the CCP's bullshit regime-preservation distortions on speech, thought and discourse.

You know who the global leaders of disappearing citizens they disagree with are?

Automated filters on a global communication platform instituted for bullshit, regime-appeasing reasons are not going to solve community-driven hate in localities.

Anyone motivated to hate you will invent as many slurs as they need. Warping our institutions to play whack-a-mole against bad actors is shooting ourselves in the foot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER152> 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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Declaration_on_European_Conscience_and_Communism)

</comment><comment><USER27> Tested and verified. It was deleted right away. I didn't even right anything harsh.

</comment><comment><USER153> 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.

</comment><comment><USER154> 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/](https://xkcd.com/1357/)

</comment><comment><USER155> 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!

</comment><comment><USER156> 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.

</comment><comment><USER157> The US government should do something about Google, the sooner the better.

<comment><USER67> This may not be the Federal Government you want to legislate over Google...

<comment><USER157> Dude, I am from Europe. I don't care what government does it just that somebody does something. In fact, I think the Trump administration is probably perfectly suited to do this.

<comment><USER67> Dude, I'm in Europe too. If you think the Trump administration is "perfectly suited" to do anything... well, that's your opinion and you're entitled to it. I certainly don't agree with you about that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER149> 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.

<comment><USER67> Implying that "the Left" and the Communist Party of China are in any way comparable by referring to them collectively demonstrated a remarkable lack of political insight and a remarkable degree of intellectual dishonesty.

<comment><USER149> On the contrary, but I welcome you to try to make a case instead of an easy claim that an international movement isn't.

BTW: the downvotes without arguments already proved my point.

<comment><USER158> Welcome to ycommienator, a site for entrepreneurs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER159> And the support page is locked, so Google is also censoring people from trying to understand the rules they are expected to follow.

</comment><comment><USER160> 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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221264)</comment>


Infamous Software Bugs - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/the-5-most-infamous-software-bugs-in-history/ <comment><USER2> Every software engineer should be aware of the RISKS digest (aka USENET's comp.risks).

The mailing list and digest just celebrated it's 30th birthday in August. There's an incredible wealth of history here regarding bugs, related issues, and the overall risks of our dependency on computers in society.

RISKS broke most of the major stories of the day including the Morris Worm, the AT&T Long Distance collapse, the Mars Climate Orbiter unit error, the Mars Pathfinder priority lockup, the Therac-25, the first email spam, the Pentium FDIV bug, and thousands of other interesting, amusing, and/or scary bugs.

[http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/](http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/)

<comment><USER3> I had never heard of that, thank you so much for many cozy winter reading sessions.

<comment><USER2> This is one of my favorite nuggets in the digest, it's from November 1988. It's Clifford Stoll writing at 3:45 am about his discovery of the Morris Worm. The Morris Worm was literally the first internet virus captured in the wild.

[http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/7.69.html#subj1](http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/7.69.html#subj1)

Warning - this one email will lead you to multiple rabbit holes (Stoll, _The Cuckoo 's Egg_, Robert Morris, etc).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Stoll](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Stoll)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm)

<comment><USER4> The Cuckoo's Egg is a really fun read!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well...I'd say that [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25) has become much more notorious than the Arianne launch; but it's also a UX fault, not a straight-out software error.

<comment><USER6> Yep, also I would say that Heartbleed is definitely deserving of a place.

<comment><USER7> I agree, Heartbleed is a big miss. Before reading the article, the two that came to mind were Y2K and Heartbleed. Notwithstanding all the recent security breeches (e.g., Ashley Madison, Sony) that could be attributed to "bugs".

<comment><USER8> If you're limiting it to the "The 5 Most Infamous Software Bugs in History," Heartbleed is definitely out. It just happened to be recent, so it has an outsized place in people's minds. Including it would sort of be like those foolish "Top 100 bands of all time" lists that have the Beatles at #1, followed by 85 bands from the last 15 years.

As others have noted, the big miss is the Therac-25 bug, which is pretty commonly taught in Software Engineering/Computer Science classes _the_ example of how intangible software can kill people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Knight Trading's 10 million dollars per minute bug is a good one too:

[http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/08/02/knight-capital- says-t...](http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/08/02/knight-capital-says-trading- mishap-cost-it-440-million/?_r=0)

</comment><comment><USER10> I'd add the Morris Worm to the list, probably one of the most influential ones: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm)

<comment><USER11> Which was written by one of the Y Combinator founders (Robert Tappan Morris)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > a 64 bits variable can have a value of −9.223.372.036.854.775.808 to > 9.223.372.036.854.775.807 (that's almost an infinity of options)

 _almost_ ;-)

<comment><USER13> 9 quintillion rounds to infinity.

<comment><USER14> Just shy :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would add Therac-25[1] and the 500 mile email[2] to that list.

[1]: [http://www.ccnr.org/fatal_dose.html](http://www.ccnr.org/fatal_dose.html) [2]: [http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html](http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html)

<comment><USER16> The 500-mile email was a configuration error. The software was working exactly as intended.

<comment><USER15> I would say that setting any missing configuration value to zero is a bug.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> See also _COMPUTER-RELATED HORROR STORIES, FOLKLORE, AND ANECDOTES_ :

[http://wiretap.area.com/Gopher/Library/Techdoc/Lore/rumor.ne...](http://wiretap.area.com/Gopher/Library/Techdoc/Lore/rumor.net)

</comment><comment><USER18> I came across this recently, really interesting list with further links

Software Horror Stories : [http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~nachumd/verify/horror.html](http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~nachumd/verify/horror.html)

<comment><USER19> It's a shame the list ends in 2004. I imagine the last decade's worth of software-related horror would be quite interesting

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I would add Knight capital thingy on top: [http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/09/technology/knight- expensive-...](http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/09/technology/knight-expensive- computer-bug/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Wait a second, it says they had to destroy mass climate orbiter because the development and underlying software used different metric system ?

It's bit hard to digest. ( Although just checked wikipedia, it also says so ) How can a high performance organisation like NASA could make such a simple yet fatal mistake ?

Wikipedia page of Mars Climate Orbiter says that NASA was informed about this discrepancy by two people, but the "concerns" were dismissed.

What am I getting wrong here ? These are not the "concerns" you simply dismiss in a space mission. Could there be another story to this ?

<comment><USER22> So I went ahead and read the MCO Mishap Phase 1 report (linked here: [http://www.icics.ubc.ca/~cics525/handouts/handout_MCO_report...](http://www.icics.ubc.ca/~cics525/handouts/handout_MCO_report_4pp.pdf)) and I'm having a hard time finding something that backs up the wiki summary of two navigators raising concerns and having them dismissed.

The report does go ahead and state all sorts of organizational (and otherwise 'soft' issues) that contributed to the end failure.

The report notes that earlier deviations between measured and modeled results were noted, however, they were hampered by limited data (in the sense that they couldn't measure what they wanted). It is implied (though not stated) in the report that in the absence of appropriate data, the operations navigation team attempted to contain/mitigate the deviations instead of 'solving' it.

The report also notes substantial organizational issues. Different navigation teams were used in development and operations, and there were insufficient knowledge transfer during hand-off that hampered the operations navigation team ability to notice these issues. Communications between the main operations team and the ops nav team were not effective. They were apparently spatially separate teams. In addition, model-measurement conflicts which were brought up were solved via e-mail instead of over formal processes. The report suggests that systemic use of formal processes may have allowed teams to uncover the problem earlier in time.

And of course, the report also states that insufficient verification/validation of the supplied software was not completed. The entire section on verification/validation (MCO Contributing Cause No. 8) is just a giant cringe fest.

The implication is that the MCO project was just... not run well.

<comment><USER21> First - Great job finding this report. Thank you for that.

So had a look at the report.

There was one more problem actually. This machine, the MCO, had asymmetrical solar panels which would cause solar pressure ( force by sunlight ) to create a very mild spin ( angular momentum ). Now this angular momentum had to be desaturated time to time in order to keep this machine stable. Now, one module called SM_FORCES calculate this adjustment and feeds to AMD ( Angular Momentum Desaturation ). Now, this SM_FORCES & AMD uses different unit system, which was ignored by whoever wrote this connecting piece of program. Due to this error desaturation was not enough ( or more ) and it kept building over the period of 9 months.

Now, I notice that NASA has a separate team to navigate this machine to mars. There data showed this angular momentum adjustment event occurred 10-15 times more than expected. It was like a man walking with one leg shorter than another. It's a 9 months journey from mars to earth. They must have seen the first sign to inconsistency with in first few weeks only, just guessing though.

In this report, out of 8 possible contributing causes, at-least 3 are attributed to navigation team. I think success of such mission depends not only on meticulous planning but also on thinking on the feet ability of the team. ( Any Apollo 13 fans? :) )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Given that the performance of the Patriot missile was much over-hyped in the first Gulf war, should #3 be on there? Do we know that the missile would have intercepted the Scud if launched?

<comment><USER24> The Israeli army wrote a report about the error and a patch was uploaded into the US systems the day after the attack. Bad timing I guess. After day, the Patriots never missed their target and didn't need to be rebooted.

"e. Two weeks before the incident, Army officials received Israeli data indicating some loss in accuracy after the system had been running for 8 consecutive hours. Consequently, Army officials modified the software to improve the system's accuracy. However, the modified software did not reach Dhahran until February 26, 1991--the day after the Scud incident."

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Of the recent ones the Debian OpenSSL bug with the not so "random" number generator.

</comment><comment><USER26> Small copy/paste error on the php section:

There are two ways to run a PHP app on nanobox. You can eitherconfigure the generic ruby engine, or use a framework specific engine.

</comment><comment><USER27> Goddamn Wordpress brought to its knees in a few minutes.

<comment><USER3> The 6 Most Infamous Software Bugs in History

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Great article, but IMO it missed one of the most important bugs of all, the one with the Hubble Telescope and its mirror

<comment><USER29> How does that qualify as a software bug? Perkin-Elmer's custom null corrector was misaligned so the mirror was figured into the wrong shape. Edit: if anything, it was an organizational failure—PE chose to ignore other measurements that showed the mirror was the wrong shape.

[http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/1991000...](http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19910003124.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> If I wasn't one myself, I would say that the human is the biggest bug of all.

</comment><comment><USER31> Ha, I've never seen that BSOD clip before. They handled it really well.

</comment><comment><USER32> Ping of death wasn't big enough?

</comment><comment><USER32> No ping of death reference?

</comment><comment><USER33> no mention of Windows 3.1 calculator's 3.11 - 3.1 bug?

</comment><comment><USER34> You yanks and your aversion to the metric system...

<comment><USER35> The scapegoat for what was clearly an organizational failure. Why was the system using multiple units of measure. Did it pass navigation tests prior to launch? Was the test flawed?

<comment><USER36> I think OP was making a subtle joke about titling it "5 bugs" but providing metric 5 aka 6 in the article to cause a buffer overflow in the article itself. Which the buffer overflow in the article the 7th bug. Personally I think a recursion fail would have made a funny additional article bug, but buffer overflows are funny in their own way too. Or a picket fence / off by one error would have been funny like iterating from 1-5 to output the bug list where the bugs are enumerated beginning at zero... so why didn't we see bug 0 and the crash at bug 5 would have been pretty funny.

The story is normie clickbait anyway, and most of the bugs aren't mismatches between the source code and the (possibly non-existent) unit testing infrastructure, they're just cultural examples of blaming the lowest social status individual involved, that usually being a programmer. There was a programmer involved, someone in management screwed up and doesn't feel like taking the blame, therefore its the programmer's fault. In the olden days they'd just have blamed the closest (insert ethnic group here) or (insert religious group here), nothing really to be proud of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> There are a lot of bugs more infamous than this...

this page is bullshit.

<comment><USER38> It was arguably a weak article for HN, but instead of commenting like this, you'd do much better to tell us about some of the more infamous bugs. Then we'd all learn something—or at least some of us would—which is why people come here.</comment></comment>


Firefox 49 released - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/20/firefox-49-arrives-with-reader-mode-improvements-offline-viewing-on-android-and-removes-firefox-hello/ <comment><USER2> Happy they finally got rid of Firefox Hello!

</comment><comment><USER3> still no Widevine EME support on Linux? for those who are unaware, you still can't watch Netflix on Firefox on Linux because of this.

<comment><USER4> This was listed as a key feature of this release in the beta notes up until yesterday.

Did they just remove it from the notes, or from the release?

<comment><USER5> "Beginning in version 47, Firefox desktop also supports the Google Widevine CDM"

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable- drm](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-drm)

<comment><USER4> I think it is now auto-configured to detect if it is installed. Or at least that was supposed to be one of the features of this release.

[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-49-Widevine- Linux)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


An update about the new Chrome bookmarks manager - <AUTHOR> https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/mhIX5LB23As

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm certainly happy about this (at least for now) reversion. It is frustrating when a product you use loses functionality in the name of progress.

For me, the basic functionality was folder selection to save the new bookmark into, which no longer seemed to work in the last release.

<comment><USER2> It did actually, but it was just not very clear and took a number of clicks to do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Typing the name of the folder you wanted as a search did not work, or at least the behaviour was erratic.

You needed to use the mouse to drill through to find the dir you wanted.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, this was the biggest annoyance for me as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good that Google reverted it back and don't bring it back - keep it optional. I am just moving away from IE11 (as Edge won't come to Win7) and Chrome is a good alternative and the bookmark functionality was fine. If there would be Servo build for Win7, I would use it.

<comment><USER5> I asked this question ( Why no Edge for Win 7) to one of the developers concerned with Edge development during BUILD Tour.

He told me that Edge is built on the Universal Windows Apps Platform which is going to be launched with Win 10. So because of its dependency, it won't be possible for edge to run on Win 7. The good thing about this is that MS is using the same platform that they will give to developers, to build Edge.

So people shouldn't hope that at some point Edge will come to Linux or Max OSX.

<comment><USER6> The other good thing is that Windows 10 is a free upgrade, so if users want the new browser there isn't a purchase barrier stopping them.

Doesn't apply to enterprise licensees, but enterprises aren't known for upgrading to new browser versions even when they're available, so no huge loss there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm sure I'm in the minority here but personally I wish I could opt into Google keeping my bookmarks online and letting me search all the bookmarks including their content AND all my history and its content forever! I'll use incognito mode when I don't want something up there and they already have an online UI to delete stuff from my search history for those few times I forget.

I'm sure other wouldn't like that feature but I'd love it!

<comment><USER8> I've been wanting this since day one. I was so excited when i first heard about "Google Bookmarks", and then let down each day when Google seemingly did nothing about integrating Bookmarks into Chrome.

I've pretty much given up on having a good quality, insanely well integrated _(very important imo)_, bookmarking process for Chrome. /shrug

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> For me, problem with old bookmarks manager is that I have to make my own categories to store all items there.

It's much easier to just make bookmark without much thinking, knowing that later I can find it by keywords search. This way I'm not affraid that these bookmarks could grow as hard-to-lookup categories jungle.

Would be cool if they added tags feature, in case I want to group items.

<comment><USER10> You might want to look into Pocket if you don't know it already (getpocket.com). If it's still not satisfying your needs, you'll probably be interested in the product we launched recently. (cf profile)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Now hopefully they will do the same thing for Google maps

</comment><comment><USER12> I guess I'm the exception, I thought the old new bookmark system was nice enough.

</comment><comment><USER13> It felt like an overwrought demo of material design. Glad to see it gone-- bookmarks are like files in a filesystem. This was the appeal of the old-style bookmarks at least to me.

</comment><comment><USER14> chrome://flags/#enhanced-bookmarks-experiment = False did the trick for versions with the "new" nice looking but feature lacking bookmark manager.

</comment><comment><USER15> Can anyone describe what happened to the chrome bookmarks manager?

I've been happily off in Firefox land, I have no idea what this hubub is about.

<comment><USER16> They redesigned the bookmark manager with a very Android-ish looking interface, where bookmark folders were represented as "blocks", similar to the Windows 8 start screen. It suffered from a few problems:

* Massive decrease in information density compared to the tree & list widgets of the "old style" bookmark manager.

* Clunky interactions. I'm pretty damn good with a computer, and I regularly ended up with bookmarks in the wrong place.

* The new interface required more clicks to get where you were going, and more clicks to perform common tasks.

Visually, the new style was more aligned with Android interfaces, but it suffered from significant UX flaws.

<comment><USER15> Thank you for the overview. Now looking at that separate "extension" that has the new behavior... I see what people are complaining about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> oh, my god! The old bookmark system do not works for me. The synchronization is broken for long(Only affect some users include me). There has many people complained about the problem but Google never fix it.

Bookmarks in folders not syncing properly - Google Product Forums [https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/9ftiKp...](https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/9ftiKpBmuZ8)

</comment><comment><USER18> As a heavy bookmarks user, I'm happy they reverted to the more practical old solution

</comment><comment><USER19> Classic UI mistake, increased the amount of clicks and then suffered the user rage.</comment>


Show HN: Broadcast markdown live - <AUTHOR> https://broadcasting.glitch.me/?ref=hn <comment><AUTHOR> I built this with socket.io, on glitch.com!

Github: [https://github.com/jajoosam/broadcast](https://github.com/jajoosam/broadcast)

<comment><USER2> I don't understand how I broadcast with it. Is there documentation?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can broadcast at [https://broadcasting.glitch.me/cast](https://broadcasting.glitch.me/cast) \- there's a link on the page which tells you that

<comment><USER2> I guess I don't understand what "broadcast" means in terms of the application. It might be because I have never used it and did not write the code. How is it like broadcasting on Youtube?

<comment><AUTHOR> Simply put, the markdown you type on /cast will be streamed live on the homepage</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>