[lancesells]

This is even more strange than the NBA tweet that started all of the controversy at the beginning of the year.

Censoring messages about an arm of a government where YouTube is banned has me wondering what is going on behind closed doors.

[dcolkitt]

I love a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy. But isn't the most likely explanation that individual YouTube moderators have been bought off, rather than this being a policy directed by senior Google management?

How hard would be for Chinese intelligence to recruit YouTube moderators, and offer them a briefcase filled with unmarked bitcoin in exchange for deleting the comments that they flagged?

[koheripbal]

> How hard would be for Chinese intelligence to recruit YouTube moderators

I think it's much simpler than that. There are also just millions upon millions of very nationalistic Chinese citizens (living globally) that would happily abuse the mod button.

There are Google employees... in China... that know exactly how the company works and how to game the system. Maybe they need to be "pressured" by the Chinese gov't - but I wonder if that's even necessary.

Social media is rife with people who will advocate for their country for free and without being asked to.

[yorwba]

> abuse the mod button

If someone insults them in the comments and they report it, are they even abusing the system or are they using the reporting mechanism as intended?

[throwaway_pdp09]

I guess they're using it as intended there. But if they're using it because they don't like factual anti-china criticism, that's abuse.

[shadowgovt]

It depends. YouTube's comment section doesn't have a particular editorial purpose, the closest thing it has to a mission is letting people comment on each other's videos for some vague sense of "community."

That's not an objective fact-oriented mission, and a moderation system that allows users to flag and kill comments that make them feel bad is still satisfying the constraints of the design.

[mcqueenjordan]

I'm sympathetic to this line of thinking, even though I don't necessarily like the direction the rhetoric leads. Google offices in America also employ a great number (and proportion) of Chinese nationals.

[jtms]

Isn't bitcoin, by its very nature, "marked"? Perhaps you should change your conspiracy to use Monero or other privacy focused coins as the medium of bribery. :-)

[catalogia]

> I love a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy. But isn't the most likely explanation that individual YouTube moderators have been bought off,

Isn't that also a 'conspiracy theory'? What does this term mean to you?

[sushid]

This is an aside but your description of "a briefcase filled with unmarked bitcoin" is hilarious.

More topically, this was automated so it's not like a few bad actors who manually delete comments were to blame.