[cityhomesteader]

Europe has been rewriting the rules of the internet for a while. It's amazing how europe/EU is getting a pass when it comes to censorship. Not to mention what our corporations and our media have been doing.

The problems with the internet isn't china. It's our media and our government but for some odd reason, all I hear is "china/beijing".

Is beijing the reason why there is so much censorship? Is beijing the reason why google search is so terrible? Is it beijing why there is so much censorship of the social media and the rest of the internet in the west? Of course not. The real reason is News Corp, NYTimes, WashingtonPost, The Atlantic along with corporate america and their stooges in the government.

Try googling anything. Half of the frontpage is now links to nytimes, washingtonpost, cnn and rest of the media.

I remember googling for yanny vs laurel not too long ago. Do you know what the top result was? A nytimes article. It wasn't the original instagram post. It wasn't the reddit post that made it go viral. It was a nytimes post. And almost all the results on the first page of google were links to news companies. I've been using google search since the late 90s. It's pathetic what google search has become. Youtube is going down the same path.

I'd take the atlantic a bit more seriously if they did an article about themselves or the rest of the media in regards to the rewriting of the rules of the internet. The biggest supporters of censorship and destruction of the internet is the media in the west.

[comex]

The NYTimes article on yanny/laurel [1] was quite good, though: it included a tool with a slider that applied a pitch shift and frequency gain to the sound clip in order to bias it towards either "yanny" or "laurel". This let people hear both words even if their brain could only hear one of the interpretations of the original clip, and it was interesting to experiment with how much shift was needed to make it cross over. (Personally, I beat them to it :) – when I first heard of the clip, I uploaded a quick YouTube video for some people that just pitch shifted the original up and down, which is enough to make the interpretation cross over. But the interactive slider is better.) There was also a spectrogram visualization. Besides that, the main article had a thorough explanation of the origins of the clip, quotes from several different researchers about how the illusion worked, and other bits of relevant context. All in all, I'd call it high-quality reporting, and I don't see any problem with it ranking high on Google.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/science/yanny-laurel.html

[wwweston]

> It's our media and our government but for some odd reason, all I hear is "china/beijing".

That's interesting. It sounds like there might kind of cognitive/perceptual phenomenon here, where one person might hear "the EU is just as bad as China when it comes to internet freedoms" and another might hear "the EU wants consumer data protection."

I imagine there's some research and maybe even a model about how these kinds of perceptual differences happen, but the primary way of getting awareness out would probably be for some large media outlets to write something enlightening about that for their audience.

[camgunz]

This is whataboutism. Nothing the West does compares to China's firewall and blanket surveillance, even if we stipulate we live in a corporatocracy and include the private surveillance of Facebook, Google, et al (which would make for an unfair comparison). I'm no apologist for the West's behavior or any of the things you point out, but let's not try and minimize the human rights violations China's committing -- and actually proud of, for what it's worth.

[jexah]

I think the point was something like JP's "clean your room before you try to change the world".

Let's fix our system before we go grand-standing about China.

[fouric]

Don't forget the "social credit" system that explicitly penalizes any citizen who disagrees with any government policy.

[Mistletoe]

[flagged]

[cityhomesteader]

[flagged]

[TeMPOraL]

Mentioning "whataboutism" should IMO be labelled as logical fallacy. Not once have I seen it used as a valid counterargument. Instead, it's always the same pattern: person A states a problem, person B points out that it's non-problem distracting attention from the core of the issue, and then person B gets accused of "whataboutism"...

[dang]

It has become a reflex cliché that signals the death of a thread.

[AnimalMuppet]

You did whataboutism; JohnJamesRambo brought in the term (as did camgunz).

> I don't really care about what happens in china. I'm just sick of "our" media distracting from what really affects me with nonsense about china.

HN runs plenty of articles about tech companies knowing way too much about us. It runs plenty of articles about government surveillance in the US (and the rest of the West). We talk about those things a lot, and we care about them a lot. But we can talk about other things, too, and this article is about China. How about letting those of us who care talk about China, rather than trying to derail the conversation? There will be another article about the stuff you care about tomorrow, if not sooner. Feel free to join in the discussion on that one when it comes.

> I would really be interested on what your agenda is.

Maybe the agenda is to be able to have a conversation about a topic, without the conversation getting hijacked?

> It's funny how the two replies to my comment is about whataboutism.

That's because this article is about China, not about the US or Europe. What you did is exactly whataboutism.

[furgooswft13]

GP was not complaining about HN, but the media companies that report on Chinese censorship while at the same time stoking moral panics, proliferating biased hitpieces on people and entities spreading ideas they dislike, and practically begging tech companies and western governments to censor and regulate the internet.

That is the whataboutism at hand here: "Yes we want to censor, ban, and shame you for our own reasons, but hey...look over there at China! Scary!"

[cityhomesteader]

> You did whataboutism; JohnJamesRambo brought in the term (as did camgunz).

No I didn't. If I did, I would be excusing china's behavior. But I'm not. What I am saying is that china isn't rewriting the rules, I'm saying the US and EU are rewriting the rules of the internet. Maybe china can rewrite the rules within their "intra"net, but that isn't affecting me or anyone else around the world. EU's vote tomorrow,

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/internet-luminaries-ri...

has far greater impact on the internet than anything china could do.

> Maybe the agenda is to be able to have a conversation about a topic, without the conversation getting hijacked?

But my point was on topic. I was rejecting the notion that china is rewriting the rules of the internet.

But for some odd reason, anytime someone disagrees with the clickbaiting media, a few accounts start accusing you of whataboutism or even russian botting. The "whataboutism" response has already been exposed as a standard brigading technique by political groups/media on reddit, facebook and most of social media. It's 2015/2016 that nobody uses anymore because it's been exposed as propaganda. It's shocking to see it on hacker news, but we are always late to the party I guess.

> That's because this article is about China, not about the US or Europe. What you did is exactly whataboutism.

No. The article is about the rules of the internet. The bit about china is just propaganda to distract from the EU vote tomorrow. The fact that I disagreed with the major point of the article isn't whataboutism. It's the truth. The threat to the internet isn't from china, who are pretty much confined to their own national intranet. The threat is from corporations, the media and the wealthy who want to control the internet.

You know the people supporting and voting for more censorship and control tomorrow.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/internet-luminaries-ri...

[AnimalMuppet]

> No. The article is about the rules of the internet. The bit about china is just propaganda to distract from the EU vote tomorrow.

The article is almost totally about China and the rules of the internet. The only way you can say "the bit about China is just propaganda" is to say that the whole article is just propaganda. I suspect that you actually believe that, but I think you're wrong.

China wants to totally change the rules of the internet. The EU is also wanting to change the rules, in a less total but more immediate way. We can and should talk about both those things, rather than saying that China is "just propaganda to distract us".

By all means, talk about the EU. Really. But China is also a danger, and we need to also talk about that danger.