Apparently tweeting the 996.icu website from the official Twitter Android/iOS clients causes it to refuse to send at all. You don't even need to be in China to see the result, because it blacklists the link globally. It allows the link on web and 3rd party clients, though.[1]

[1] https://twitter.com/copiesofcopies/status/111403968059961344...

Have just tested. I get "Failed to send tweet" if sending from Android client, and I leave in the page preview when composing the tweet.

- It works fine from web interface, problem is specific to Android - The problem doesn't show up for "123.icu" so it seems specific to 996.icu

What's your phone maker?

Nokia (recent, it's really a Chinese company). Also I'm in Vietnam.

Why would Twitter censor something like that?

Edit: if this is a glitch from trying to combat bots Tweeting the URL, that just means you can trigger automatic censorship of any URL with a bot farm.

Just tested myself and the official client refuses to send. Third-party clients are unaffected, good thing I still use one really.

Not to defend twitter, but could this be an anti-spam measure?

This is very unlikely because it seems to be something that happens in the official client rather than server-side. Spammers are unlikely to use official clients and blocking them there doesn't make any sense.

Having said that, if they were intentionally trying to block this then using their anti-spam mechanisms would be an obvious way of doing so, so I think it's definitely a possibility that this is some accidental side-effect of something else rather than a simple intentional block.

An anti spam feature should not links typed by real humans on purpose. Lots of popular links are shared on twitter and don't get blocked via anti spam. This seems like something deliberate, even if the global part of the impact is a deployment error.

I've been saying this for years: censorship, like many things, has been privatized. Things like the First Amendment in the US are inadequate for the modern age, because the majority of our discourse touches multiple intermediary businesses on its way between individuals.

There is no "just herpderp yourself" when communication and publication in our digital society involves information coming in contact with a handful of middlemen who can tamper.

Hmm, mass communication wasn't easy back in the time the First Amendment was written and the problem was "we don't have enough free communication". You could just as well argue that it wouldn't exist if written today.

There were never practical limits on 1:1 communication even in the worst dictatorship because you can't have a policeman in every house. The first amendment was always about public discourse.

You can't have a policeman in every house, but you can have an Amazon Alexa.

I think the privatization of surveillance is much scarier than the privatization of censorship. To escape the latter, I can just visit my local library, whereas the former is growing at such alarming rates that it might just make that impossible very soon. The chilling effects are real.

This is exactly the problem.

Imagine if every single law on the books is enforced 100% of the time. No leeway, no margin for discretion.

No country does that, they just set examples of people who break draconian laws, which is effective as long as you don't count all the people trying to leave the country.

> There were never practical limits on 1:1 communication even in the worst dictatorship because you can't have a policeman in every house

You underestimate the ability of cultures to self-censor and convince free-thinkers to leave.

Plenty of people in North Korea are afraid to speak out, for fear their neighbors will rat them out. Same goes for speaking against royalty in public in Thailand.

That said, I do think the First Amendment was born out of practicality. Censoring speech, even in the internet age, is not a good growth strategy when your competitors censor less. People will do their best to get to the most free place.

Bingo. Liberalism is ill-equipped to promote free expression in any meaningful sense, because the principles it presumably holds sacred play second fiddle to the central tenant of the philosophy: private property.

Most "live free or die" types wouldn't tell someone struggling against government repression, "If you don't like it, why don't you just leave your country?" Yet they do this all the time on corporate communications channels, some of which have populations bigger than most real-world states. It may seem histrionic to complain about much free-market censorship now, but the vise will tighten as firms consolidate and anything threatening to the bottom line will become increasingly difficult to disseminate to a wider population.

I think there's a case to be made that public discourse regularly happens on private property and that private organizations that provide public forums as a service must respect speech rights.

Of course, I would prefer an amendment to guarantee this, but it's less tenuous than other precedents.

There is an old court case, Marsh v Alabama, where the Supreme Court indicated that the more a private property owner opens their space for public use the more the public's constitutional rights matter.

I assume you mean libertarianism, not liberalism? While some liberals might have libertarian views (and vice-versa) they are very different concepts.

> Yet they do this all the time on corporate communications channels, some of which have populations bigger than most real-world states.

Yup -- and a quick reminder (for the people in the back) that Google unilaterally controls what more than 3 billion people find when they search for information. This is a larger impact than any government in the history of humanity -- and unlike any other government in the history of humanity, Google has no constitution or laws which require it to be accountable to its citizens (or users, in this case).

You might argue that some regimes like China or the USSR only had theoretical protections for their citizens (with abuses by the government being commonplace and unpunished), but Google has no such protections to even pretend to follow. And like most independent nation-states, Google feels no pressure to obey other nations' laws if it's inconvenient for them.

> I assume you mean libertarianism, not liberalism?

They probably meant liberalism. 'Liberalism' has multiple meanings. To my knowledge, the US is unique in equating 'liberal' with 'the left'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism_by_country

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism_in_the_United_State...

On the other hand, switching to private communications has never been easier, at least for person-to-person chat. (Signal, etc.)

The question here was public discourse (or mass media if you will).

Securing a private channel is a very different problem altogether.

There is some overlap because articles can reach a wide audience via forwarding. It would be used more if there weren't easier ways to do it.

Unfortunately this would also mean spreading the sort of crap as debunked on Snopes.

This form of communication is brand new. If you don't have the right to free speech now you never had it.

To block the 996 Github presence on Github would mean to block Github, as Github is served via HTTPS. That's not viable as Github is far too useful to block (IIRC it and StackOverflow were blocked a couple of years ago but then unblocked due to uproar from the tech industry).

To block Github 966 pages specifically means the domestic browsers are pre-filtering URL requests before they're made. And that means these domestic browsers are pre-filtering all URL requests, HTTPS or not, VPN or not.

Perhaps all forms on pages loaded by these browsers are also being eavesdropped.

Safe to say any secure experience under these browsers is compromised.

I really wonder if someone could start a GitHub repo mirroring, e.g., news articles that are censored by various governments. Could be a nice way of making censorship difficult.

http://lite.cnn.io/ would be a great candidate site for easy publishing to Github in some sort of markdown.

Of course I imagine there would be license problems.

Yeah. It wouldn't even just be news--historical documents could also be helpful.

Reminds me of NPM been blocked in China so CNPM appears to mirror nodejs packages.

CNPM is now better known as https://npm.taobao.org/

What's there to prevent private organizations censorships?

Too useful to block is a concept China doesn’t acknowledge. Too troublesome to not block is how it operates.

Unabashed orientalism. China blocks as a means of self preservation.

IIRC from a previous discussion on HN, those browsers are essentially a VPN with a MITM proxy, and obviously trust the company's own certificates.

I believe that proxy does have other more benevolent uses than censorship, which is why people use those browsers in the first place.

doesnt china MITM https connections?

They don't. They "blacklist" block by ip-address. At least that was what seemed to be going on the last time I was there.

It was fairly easy to bypass; I did it with a SSH-tunnel other people do it with VPN. It seem like a completely normal thing (amongst Chinese and certainly expats) to have a VPN.

I am pretty sure since this 996-protest movement concerns tech workers that it will spread with no problem.

Also it will probably get resolved in some manner since working 996 obviously is beyond peak productivity.

SSH-tunnel will quickly degrade in throughput if you use it to breach the GFW. Some kind of traffic analysis I think. You need other tools to bypass GFW consistently.

I remember watching a TV show on dr.dk through SSH in China. Not because the GFW blocked dr.dk but because dr.dk didn't allow foreign IP-addresses to watch some of their shows.

For what it's worth, I just tried opening the supposedly blocked site using Wechat, in China, on a Chinese phone (xiaomi) with a Chinese mobile plan (China unicom) and it works fine. Not sure if that's because it was never actually blocked or because they realized blocking it was a bad move and rolled it back.

The block has been (mostly? I guess) lifted. If national news paper[0] joined the discussion, nobody dare to keep the blockage. Especially they (the web browsers) was lying about the reason of block.

[0] http://paper.people.com.cn/rmrb/html/2019-04/11/nw.D110000re... (Chinese)

It turned out many web browsers still blocking it. See this video published at Apr 12, 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GohinJAkPPU

I just tried in wechat this url https://github.com/996icu/996.ICU, it's OK now instead of the warning "harmful" just couple days ago.

Actually, the major official propaganda People's Daily newspaper urged authorities to review working hours in the industry.

Usually, if the official opinion is negative about this campaign it will never show on any propaganda.

I cannot find the original newspaper online, but there are several mentions from some websites:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system

https://qz.com/1589309/996-icu-github-hosts-chinese-tech-wor...

This is what you get when you have an authoritarian government in bed with big corporations and the lines have been blurred between them.

Let’s get to the root cause.

I would take away something different.

In a healthy software "marketplace", there would be plenty of browser competition and such blocking would be totally ineffective. It wouldn't matter if companies had the power to censor the internet or not because people could just switch.

That's not how it works. In a truly free marketplace, eventually one, two or three winners would emerge over time and they would have an order of magnitude more capital than the rest of the players. Using that capital they can be light years ahead in terms of capabilities due to compounding effect which allows them to make some uncomfortable changes (like tracking or enforcing sister products or building walled gardens) while continue to maintain monopoly. A switch is available to customers in theory but can never be exercised without significant loss in terms of experience and/or direct money for the customer. In other words, no truly free market is actually healthy from this perspective. This is a mathematically provable by modelling events as pure random chances and players starting all equally. Eventually system will evolve to have handful of players accumulating exponential gains and resources enforcing Pareto's principle.

well. i have a huawei phone, which open link using its own browser. I have not found a way to use other broswer as default. I bet most of Chinese phone does the same.

for wechat, it open link in its own broswer too.

I could change phone and delete wechat. but do it cost too much.