That's not quite true. We'll ban serial trolls or spammers without notice, but otherwise we announce and explain the ban. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12972039.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13020206 and marked it off-topic.

HN is a small self-contained community of semi-anonymous strangers. If it instead aspired to be the social network for a whole country, full of real names and faces and street addresses, it would be deeply troubling to have government censors tracking the actions of every person on the site and shadow-banning anyone matching some undisclosed criteria (but keeping evidence of their comments for potential uses in later crack-down).

It wouldn't be deeply troubling, it is deeply troubling.

The Chinese government has been at it for many years, on WeChat, Weibo, Renren, Qzone, QQ, etc. Having lived in China for ~5 years, it sucks but it is absolutely better than nothing. It also is not remotely like being "blindfolded, speaking to a room you don't know is empty or not". I don't feel that way on HN either though I know getting shadow banned is a possibility.

The fact is, there is some censorship and surveillance in China, and Facebook can't do anything about it nor is it exerting any sort of pressure by staying out.

I understand that it is scary for us, westerners, to watch this unfold, but for the Chinese people, gaining access to a censored Facebook would be a step forward overall (right now, Facebook it is essentially 100% censored).

What you're basically describing is a free-speech version of war profiteering. Instead of profiting from enabling the physical destruction and submission of a people, you're profiting from enabling their silence.

There's a big difference between creating a morally neutral tool (like Facebook itself, which may be used for evil, such as in cases like cyberbullying) and creating a tool for an explicitly immoral purpose to be given to an entity which will obviously use it for immoral purposes.

What Facebook is doing is deeply unethical.

Would you maintain that it is unethical even if the large majority of the people directly affected by the censorship think otherwise?

Do you think Chinese people are thinking "I sure hope Facebook doesn't comply with the government so that I can keep not having access to it and therefore keep not being silenced by it. Ah also, I really just wish Baidu/Weibo/Wechat/etc. would close shop already because they are censorship enablers.". My bet is that very few people are and while they're probably unhappy with the censorship in general, they are happy to have access to some form of social media.

> Would you maintain that it is unethical even if the large majority of the people directly affected by the censorship think otherwise?

Yes. The principle of free speech is a fundamental American value and it should be upheld by American companies.

For them to sacrifice core values for access to a foreign market is unethical. I have no expectations that Facebook will be ethical, but the point of having values is that you stick to them. Otherwise they are just preferences.

If they don't take a stand in China then they won't take a stand in America either.

The Chinese people couldn't possibly care less whether they have access to Facebook or not, and the ones who do already have VPNs.

Well, in that case, we're at an impasse. I'm a consequentialist and care about the outcome more than the principles. I might agree with you in a world where American companies upholding "American values" exerts pressure on the Chinese government, but it doesn't.

The idea that Facebook has any chance to exert pressure on the Chinese government in the first place is not only imperialist but laughably unrealistic.

When South Africa had partheid, American companies disinvested themselves of the country. At that time, South Africans probably would have preferred to be able to buy Pepsi products. But economic isolation was the right thing to do.

If only they did that in WW2 as well.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_during_World_War_II

China is the second largest economy in the world after the US and expected to surpass it within a couple of years, not really comparable. Its government is also largely supported by the people it governs.

> gaining access to a censored Facebook would be a step forward overall (right now, Facebook is essentially 100% censored)

I don't think it's a step forward at all, because users won't ever know how much censorship their Facebook has. So they'll get the sensation of no censorship while being censored.

This is worse than not having access at all, which is at least an explicit censorship and makes citizens wonder, as opposed to something subtle and dishonest.

The majority of Chinese people know that social networks and the web in general are censored. Worse than that, it's considered common sense that publicly speaking up against the government is a risky thing to do, which results in self censorship and apathy towards politics. I don't think they would assume things to suddenly be different when using Facebook.

Building these tools for the Chinese government would give every other government grounds to demand that Facebook provide the same.

It’s a step down a slippery slope toward worldwide total surveillance and censorship.

These tools can and will be used against activists, members of minority political parties, dissidents, business rivals, etc.

When some African dictatorship jails some journalist’s whole family without charges, the engineers at Facebook who built the surveillance software will be complicit.

it can't happen here! /s

It is already starting to happen here.[1][2] Western leaders and the establishment media are all in a furor about 'fake news' being shared on social media, how it is a problem those platforms need to 'solve' in order to maintain public order and make sure citizens are getting the right information.

That's exactly the justification the Chinese government uses.

[1]

“Today we have fake sites, bots, trolls — things that regenerate themselves, reinforcing opinions with certain algorithms and we have to learn to deal with them.”

Merkel, 62, said the challenge for democrats was to “reach and inspire people — we must confront this phenomenon and if necessary, regulate it.”

She said she supported initiatives by her right-left coalition government to crack down on “hate speech” on social media in the face of what she said were “concerns about the stability of our familiar order”.

http://guardian.ng/news/merkel-warns-against-fake-news-drivi...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/nov/17/barack-obama-f...

I can empathize with this sentiment but it is very self centered in a way. It basically comes down to "I hope Facebook doesn't build censorship tools because it might lead to my government using them, too bad for those >1B Chinese people who won't gain access to Facebook". I can accept that but please, get off the moral high horse (not you specifically).

What's the use of Chinese people getting access to Facebook if it's no better for speech than Weibo, WeChat or any of the other Chinese social network? I don't see any benefit at all here for the public. Not the Chinese public. Not the global public. The only benefits I see are for governments who wish to control and surveil their citizens, and Facebook. The governments get a nice automatic dissent control toolkit, and Facebook gets a nice payday from being able to enter the Chinese market.

I might sound like I'm being a bit hyperbolic, but I find it deeply scary that Facebook is applying its considerable engineering talent towards building censorship and monitoring at scale. Facebook has some of the smartest engineers in the industry as well computing power that only the richest governments can match, and they have a good shot at cracking the problem of doing efficient censorship at scale. China manages to scale its censorship by employing more and more people to censor. If Facebook builds a plug-in system that allows governments to censor automatically, then every country could censor like China, at a fraction of the cost.

The likelihood that Facebook or any other corporation cares about public good more than its own and its shareholders' bottom line is ludicrous. I'm not commenting on whether that's right. I'm saying that's how the system is built to work.

Why is Facebook so much better than the dozens of native Chinese social networks?

I think that's beside the point and couldn't answer because I don't use Facebook. I was trying to make the larger point that foreign companies refusing to comply with the Chinese censors is not necessarily a good thing for the people of China because it results in total and complete ban. I doubt that Facebook would be hugely successful in China but it would encourage competition and serve as an alternative.

There is a third option: that 1B Chinese are given uncensored access to FB.

By implementing censorship FB will make such option even less likely to happen in future.

That's inconceivable under any foreseeable circumstances.

The Chinese people are better off without a censored Facebook. Facebook itself is better off without censorship.

While we are using numbers to establish our cred, I lived in China for 9 years, and i also found the metaphor of "blindfolded, speaking to a room you don't know is empty or not" to not describe the situation accurately. But the reason is only that Chinese internet authorities haven't yet perfected their craft, and are absolutely willing to leave people in the dark and do whatever it takes to control the Chinese "intranet".

>, gaining access to a censored Facebook would be a step forward overall

Why? Because it's Facebook? Because it's american? Wechat is a better system, but censored. There is nothing to gain with yet another censored system.

If nothing else, more choice and competition. It also has a large user base outside of China, which the Chinese social networks do not. WeChat is great and I use it a lot.

And yet, naive western people are registering for wechat in their packloads, uploading all their personal data for commie chairmen to see

Having been a child of the Carnation Revolution, I don't really see it as a step forward.

We all know what China is going to use this for. And it's not going to be for fighting spam.

Sure, I didn't mean to compare it in that way. My issue was with the hyperbole: "you are left blindfolded, speaking to a room you don't know is empty or not". Social networks in China are nothing like that: censorship is relatively rare and predictable.

And shadowbanning has already a bad reputation because of the problems it causes on sites like HN¹. And those are small sites that won't send the secret police into your home at night, and used solely to fight spam - the problems are exclusively because of false positives. It's not hard to imagine a nightmare once governments start doing it.

1 - The complaints here on HN stopped. Are you sure it's still used?

I don't think its the same at all.

If I post on HN I have an understanding that the post is going to be on HN's system, and subject to the moderation of the site owner.

I have the same assumption of Facebook or any other online social service.

What's happening in this circumstance is that another actor is going to be in the middle, with Facebook's cooperation and consent, and not mine.

That Facebook has found a way to wash their hands of what they're doing here doesn't make it OK. That they're finding a way to remove themselves from censoring the posts directly shows that they know it's wrong.

Shadow-banning in HN works differently in that users can choose to see shadow-banned comments. If I ever felt that a user was being censored then I could (a) read the censored material, and (b) tell the user that they were being shadow-banned. This has never happened so far, I see no evidence that HN is shadow-banning as a form of political control.

You can't tell a user he's shadowbanned because posts by shadowbanned users do not have a reply button.

You can vouch for dead comments, they become visible and reply-able.

I can email or contact the other user offline.

I think banning a spammer and removing a truthful post because the government did not like it are clearly different things.

You are right, however a secondary issue with much larger implications is the punishment (prison, labor camps, whatever) of people that the shadow-ban app finds spreading such prohibited information.

You might be just talking to yourself on HN, but aren't likely to go to jail for it. (Not impossible, but not likely).

Every society, community had ban (shadow ban) for certain type of speech.

Didn't someone get beat up on youtube for voting for the one who shall not be named recently in US?

Every society or community has bans, but the good kind have public or at least explicit bans rather than shadowbans.

Yes it does, and it's evil when HN does it too.