Something just happened which is potentially very disturbing. I just tried to post something on a YT video and got a message "Comment failed to post". I had never had this happen before but at first I thought this was just an innocuous glitch. So I refreshed the page and tried again but got the same thing. A third try yielded the same. The video is titled "WTA suspends tennis tournaments in China over Peng Shuai's safety concerns | Latest English News". It is about the WTA's recent decision to suspend all tournaments from being held in China because of the treatment of one of their players, Shuai Peng, who is from China. The WTA is the Womens Tennis Association. The YT channel is an Indian one called WION which presents news from an Indian perspective.
In case you havent heard, Ms. Peng made a post on her social media about being sexually assaulted by a former top CCP (Chinese Communist Party) official. The Chinese government quickly scrubbed the post but not before it circulated widely in China and Ms. Peng has not been heard from directly since. The rest of the world quickly got informed about it thru social media and other WTA members made posts in social media condemning what happened to Ms. Peng and expressed concerns for her safety. These included very prominent players, like Serena Williams, Naomi Osaka and many others. The head of the WTA, Steve Simon, made several attempts to correspond directly w Ms. Peng thru all the contact info he had for her but has been unable to contact her.
Here is my attempted post in its entirety.
Kudos to the WTA! Hopefully the ATP will do likewise. If only the NBA had the integrity and guts to do this.
Pretty tame, right? No foul or incendiary language, no hate speech, etc. Not even political at all. Just voicing a heartfelt opinion re: a human rights issue.
Now, it's still possible that this is just some glitch but I have commented on YT videos hundreds if not thousands of times and this is the first time I've seen this. From viewing videos on other YT channels, I know that YT routinely demonetizes and sometimes even removes content critical of the CCP. Also, there are bot and "wumao" accts w posts ridiculing the WTA's action which were allowed to post. Some of these are pretty hateful and what many today would call "racist" (towards India). So it looks pretty suspicious. The motive here for YT would be to not anger the Chinese gov't so that they could potentially make boatloads of money from the Chinese market. But let me point out that currently YT is banned in China.
In the last several years, I've been taking note of things going on in and re: China. Many times I have felt like speaking out about many of these things here but so far have refrained from doing so. I think I will start doing this now.
Edit: After I posted this, I find that I am now able to successfully make my post on this video and a lot of "wumao" and Chinese bot comments have been removed. Still very disturbing but at least someone at YT knows to do the right things at least sometimes. I will continue to check this video to see if my post remains up.
Edit 2: After reflection, I feel I should have posted this in the "Hot Topics" forum. What do you think?
In case you havent heard, Ms. Peng made a post on her social media about being sexually assaulted by a former top CCP (Chinese Communist Party) official. The Chinese government quickly scrubbed the post but not before it circulated widely in China and Ms. Peng has not been heard from directly since. The rest of the world quickly got informed about it thru social media and other WTA members made posts in social media condemning what happened to Ms. Peng and expressed concerns for her safety. These included very prominent players, like Serena Williams, Naomi Osaka and many others. The head of the WTA, Steve Simon, made several attempts to correspond directly w Ms. Peng thru all the contact info he had for her but has been unable to contact her.
Here is my attempted post in its entirety.
Kudos to the WTA! Hopefully the ATP will do likewise. If only the NBA had the integrity and guts to do this.
Pretty tame, right? No foul or incendiary language, no hate speech, etc. Not even political at all. Just voicing a heartfelt opinion re: a human rights issue.
Now, it's still possible that this is just some glitch but I have commented on YT videos hundreds if not thousands of times and this is the first time I've seen this. From viewing videos on other YT channels, I know that YT routinely demonetizes and sometimes even removes content critical of the CCP. Also, there are bot and "wumao" accts w posts ridiculing the WTA's action which were allowed to post. Some of these are pretty hateful and what many today would call "racist" (towards India). So it looks pretty suspicious. The motive here for YT would be to not anger the Chinese gov't so that they could potentially make boatloads of money from the Chinese market. But let me point out that currently YT is banned in China.
In the last several years, I've been taking note of things going on in and re: China. Many times I have felt like speaking out about many of these things here but so far have refrained from doing so. I think I will start doing this now.
Edit: After I posted this, I find that I am now able to successfully make my post on this video and a lot of "wumao" and Chinese bot comments have been removed. Still very disturbing but at least someone at YT knows to do the right things at least sometimes. I will continue to check this video to see if my post remains up.
Edit 2: After reflection, I feel I should have posted this in the "Hot Topics" forum. What do you think?
Comment