There had been multiple previous threads on this on hackernews which show that YouTube is indeed deleting
comments with certain chinese keywords which are mostly
used in anti-CCP context.
Furthermore YouTube comment are full of spam and YouTube doesn't delete them, so why is it that if they contain certain Chinese keywords (in Chinese) they do delete them?
> Furthermore YouTube comment are full of spam and YouTube doesn't delete them, so why is it that if they contain certain Chinese keywords (in Chinese) they do delete them?
I think this just shows their spam filtering is not perfect. They delete lots of spam, in both English and Chinese, but some slip through.
Your comment seems to imply that the ONLY comments that are being deleted are the ones with the Chinese keywords. That is certainly not true. It tries to delete all spam, but the spam detection has both false negatives and false positives. That doesn't necessarily mean there is a conspiracy (doesn't mean there isn't, but provides no evidence that there is)
> I think this just shows their spam filtering is not perfect.
Excuse my bluntness here, but that is a very lazy excuse. A lot of comments are repeated, utter trash that span multiple channels and videos from known bad actors. Sure no spam filtering is perfect but in this case it's obvious YT has gone out of their way to handle that data differently.
That's one of the many core dangers of disrespecting free speech for the sake of prohibiting "hate speech". It's a very, very short step for a government to persecute criticism of themselves on the basis of "hate speech".
That doesn’t make any sense. An opinion cannot be hate speech, that’s a categorization error and not at all how hate speech works.
It’s the other way around: an expressed hateful opinion may be considered hate speech by the law or someone. And an opinion may be considered hateful. But the other way doesn’t make any sense.
"All <n-word>s need to go back to Africa." (clearly and overly hateful)
"All black people need to go back to Africa." (still hateful)
"All African-Americans need to go back to Africa." (All words are accepted, but the notion is still rather hateful)
No matter what words one uses it could be considered hate speech by today's definition. Disclaimer: I do not nor do I advocate using racial slurs, the stub in here was just to prove a point.
There's no "legal" definition of hate speech according to the US federal government, but the most accepted that I've found is "any form of expression through which speakers intend to vilify, humiliate, or incite hatred against a group or a class of persons".
Another one: "I hate onions". Now, replace onions with a derogatory name for another group. We can't prohibit negative words on account they can be used to express negative opinions about other groups of humans.
In the case of communist bandits, it's a criticism of a political ideology, and in particular here one party. Criticism of political parties and ideologies is completely fine, even when expressing insults to them. Expressing threats of violence or other crimes isn't permitted or moral, but expressing dislike or disrespect is perfectly valid. Can anyone say they've never expressed disrespect to any ideology or political party in their life?
No, "communist bandits" obviously refers to a group of people, not ideology. Furthermore, while you could argue it's about some particular organisation, it's often being used to refer to chinese citizens in general.
Is the word "fascism" used to refer to current citizens of a particular country, which don't have anything to do with the stuff we hate fascism for? Because the word "communism" is - the comments in question don't attack "communist ideology"; they are derogatory comments aimed at one particular nation.
The point is that those two words are (in China) associated with being against the CCP. It’s kindof similar to “black lives matter”. To some, it’s a symbol of hate (with re. to the police). To others, it’s a symbol of fighting back.
Even if you assume those comments are written by Chinese trying to fight for their rights - and I doubt it is the case - there's still a fundamental difference: #blacklivesmatter was a tag that accompanied actual content. Here, there's nothing but the "tag", copy/pasted all over the place without adding any value.
They deleted you comment if it contained one of multiple "words" (compound words, short phrases).
It's like censoring someone commenting "It's FBI sponsored" or "Russian propaganda". Sometimes a view words in a context can say as much as a long sentence.
Also in Chinese thinks are a bit more complicated due to how different glyph can be combined and/or used in conjuncture. So I wouldn't be surprised if there is a situation where commenting with a single Chinese glyph is saying as much as a long sentence!
> Also in Chinese thinks are a bit more complicated due to how different glyph can be combined and/or used in conjuncture. So I wouldn't be surprised if there is a situation where commenting with a single Chinese glyph is saying as much as a long sentence!
Chinese characters aren't magic. Putting two characters next to each other isn't fundamentally different from putting "Russian" and "propaganda" next to each other. You could write a sentence with just a single-character word, but that's not going to be more expressive than a single word in any other language.
Furthermore YouTube comment are full of spam and YouTube doesn't delete them, so why is it that if they contain certain Chinese keywords (in Chinese) they do delete them?