Recently, I talked about censorship in a previous blog and how I feel China and Tencent are crawling ever so closer to have full dominance of the video game space. Well, you can imagine my shock (not really) when I heard that YouTube as allegedly being removing certain Chinese phrases that speak ill against the Chinese regime! The platform that was supposed to allow fair criticism is now allegedly removing comments that criticize China!
According to the Verge,
“YouTube is automatically deleting comments that contain certain Chinese-language phrases related to criticism of the country’s ruling Communist Party (CCP). The company confirmed to The Verge this was happening in error and that it’s working to fix the issue.“
“Upon review by our teams, we have confirmed this was an error in our enforcement systems and we are working to fix it as quickly as possible,” said a YouTube spokesperson. The company did not elaborate on how or why this error came to be, but said it was not the result of any change in its moderation policy.“
Now, we all know that’s bullshit in every possible way! The fact that the bug seems to specifically target the negative phrase that targets China’s Communist Party, for six whole months, ain’t an accident! This is what I’m worried about! YouTube has tried for years to break in the Chinese market and it seems that they’re willing to forsake freedom of speech for the big dollar! We gotta be more vigilant going forward! Who knows what other way have the Communist Party influenced YouTube that we don’t know yet!
Here’s the example that should illustrate my concern:
