YouTube Automatically Censored Phrases Inconvenient for Chinese Government
Some comments that were critical of the Chinese government began to disappear from YouTube. This is all the more surprising because the service is not available in China anyway.
For a long time now, YouTube has been battling offensive video comments not through moderators, but through a set of filters that detect specific words or phrases. However, platform's users suspect that these actions are politically motivated, as recently, comments critical towards the Chinese government have been removed automatically (within 15 seconds or less). The use of the phrases "communist bandits" and "50 cents party" (a term referring to the ruling party paying 50 Chinese "cents" for a comment in favour of the country's policy) causes the statements of Internet users to be removed almost immediately after they are published.
YouTube's spokesperson responding to these allegations stated that there must have been an error and someone accidentally added the above words to the filter system. We have also heard assurances that this is not a change in the platform's policy to a pro-Chinese one and will be investigated within the company.
Such actions arouse public disgust, especially since YouTube is not available in China anyway, so it is surprising that an attempt to moderate such content for Western audience would be made.
A Chinese Affair
Google has been under the watchful eye of many Internet users and websites for some time now, because previous actions of the American giant have already indicated that it does not want to get on the bad side of Xi Jinping's government. Last October, users reported on Google forums about problems with disappearing comments. When, in 2018, an information was leaked that the company was creating a special web browser called Dragonfly (which ultimately did not see the light of day), which would be in line with Chinese censorship, there were comments that Americans want to sneak into the graces of the communist government in order to expand their business into one of the largest markets in the world. Since then, an opinion started emerging that Google is trying to maximize its profits at the expense of freedom of speech and morality.
