Nationality as your "mark of evil"

Posted Apr 10, 2024 10:33 UTC (Wed) by roc (subscriber, #30627)
In reply to: Nationality as your "mark of evil" by farnz
Parent article: Tridge returns to rsync

I see reports that Tencent owns 38% of Discord, e.g. https://eightify.app/media/fact-checking-discord-s-ties-t.... I wouldn't call that a "small amount". 38% in the hands of one entity is enough to have significant influence. I would be surprised if Chinese entities own a comparable amount of Alphabet. (That would be a $740B investment.)

It's possible that those reports are wrong, or that Discord is set up in such a way that Tencent has no influence they could abuse so there's nothing to worry about. Nevertheless it is reasonable to worry about it.

Nationality as your "mark of evil"

Posted Apr 10, 2024 11:36 UTC (Wed) by dullfire (guest, #111432) [Link] (4 responses)

I think this has wander far off-topic. A certain party's screaming of "what about X, or Y, or Z!" is a strawman/whataboutism hybrid. The claims "refute" a point not said by the original poster, and accuses parties nobody talked about of doing things not originally said.

luna originally compared matrix to discord.

Matrix is a federated, open protocol, with multiple server implementations. It also has multiple client implementations. There are multiple opensource &| libre implementations of both client and server.

Discord is a proprietary protocol. It is solely under the control of Discord inc.

Matrix therefore *can not* have any single entity (regardless of who you are concerned about) make unilateral changes that would negatively impact the whole. Meanwhile, as the entity solely in control of discord, Discord Inc COULD unilaterally take any negative action.

luna also pointed out that a company beholden to the Chinese government has a notable about of shares in discord, and thus likely had some influence.

Then we had an LWN editor point out that this was not "polite and respectful", and that it was "nationalism" (At this point I STRONGLY encourage everyone to go lookup that word. It doesn't mean that). There has been no further elaborations on what the editor meant. However at this point I must point out I find the editors' message extremely concerning. Assuming that the editor meant the comment as they said it (if they did not, it would be wonderful if they added clarification), one of the following would have to be taken as not "polite and respectful"

- Requesting someone make a change to the communications platforms a project uses.
- Accusing an communications platform of adding ads.
- Suggesting influence from China(specifically China) is not desirable.
- Suggesting influence from any particular nation is not desirable.
- Suggesting influence from any group is not desirable.
- Suggesting influence from any person(s) is not desirable.

(The last four cover the said part of what luna said, but in progressively more less of a double-standard and more generic/universal)

I must say that ANY of these being true would greatly cripple any free/libre project governance talk on LWN. This is because it effectly says "there is a class of entities commenters are not allowed to cast in anything but the best light". Which means any conversation about, say, who should be debian project leader when multiple people are running... risks not being able to mention why you think person X shouldn't be DPL in a non malicious/hostile way(e.g. if someone wanted to say "X's skill set is best used elsewhere, and a poor fit for DPL", that might contravene the rules).

So I am going to hope/assume that the editor meant something other than what was written.

Finally, as I started with. This thread has veered far off the topic of "what community member would like for their interactions with the rsync project", and should likely be taken elsewhere.

Nationality as your "mark of evil"

Posted Apr 10, 2024 11:53 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Specifically what I see as problematic is the assertion that the presence of Chinese investors (regardless of their influence on the company) is bad. Taken as a guiding principle, this asserts that the Linux kernel cannot be trusted, because Huawei has influence over the kernel, and they're a Chinese company, too.

Given that you don't trust the Chinese government (personal decision), it's important to point out why the presence of a Chinese company with some influence is problematic with more than just "I don't like Chinese people having influence" - point to something that Discord (or whatever company you're talking about directly - not its owners, not other Chinese companies, but the company that we're discussing) has done that's problematic and that it's done for the Chinese government.

Otherwise, this all comes down to "my biases say that Chinese people are untrustworthy because they're Chinese, but that similar behaviour by the US and its allies is OK because I'm OK with Americans", and not a genuine cause for concern.

Nationality as your "mark of evil"

Posted Apr 10, 2024 11:54 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> A certain party's screaming of "what about X, or Y, or Z!" is a strawman/whataboutism hybrid.

It's not "whataboutism" to point out the hystrionics are nearly entirely one-sided, elevating _potential_ problems of one convenient boogeyman with the _demonstrated actions_ of others (notably including their own).

China doesn't have to exercise subtle super secret control over Discord (or Tiktok) to get access to non-Chinese persons' data; they can do what everyone else does and just buy it on the nearly completely unregulated market of data brokers.

> Discord is a proprietary protocol. It is solely under the control of Discord inc.

This, not the ownership structure, is the _real_ problem of Discord.

Nationality as your "mark of evil"

Posted Apr 10, 2024 13:35 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

As an aside, the substitution rule is a good way to tell if what you're talking about is bias, or actual threat. Take an entity you trust (e.g. the Canadian government), and substitute them for the entity you distrust (e.g. the Chinese government); does your suggestion still sound bad to you?

So, applying that to WeChat censoring some topics outside China at the request of the Chinese government; if WeChat were to censor some topics outside of Canada at the request of the Canadian government, this is still bad. Substituting Canada for China hasn't flipped it from "boogeyman" to "good action", so it's probably not bias.

On the other hand "some proportion of Discord shares are owned by Canadians, and you can't trust the Canadian government to not lean on Canadians to get them to do bad things" doesn't sound sensible if you think the Canadian government is well-run, and makes it clear that the original statement around Chinese instead of Canadians is probably just coming from a place of bias.

Similarly, "Discord ToS has this clause that permits bad things" doesn't have any nationalities in it at all, and is a good reason to distrust Discord. As is "Discord's client is proprietary, and I can't audit it for bad behaviour as a result".

Nationality as your "mark of evil"

Posted Apr 10, 2024 15:27 UTC (Wed) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link]

First of all, I'd like to apologize for making a mess of things. I've been part of the LWN community for a very long time, and hadn't quite internalized how other folks would respond to a comment from me as an editor vs. all the other times I've joined in discussions. Lesson learned there.

To the point about nationalism, yes - that was a poorly chosen word. What I should've said, aside from "nothing", was that we have a global audience. Calling out one investor's nationality ("Chinese investors") as a negative seemed like something that might alienate some of our readers. I had hoped to stave off the discussion that I instead sparked. My apologies again, I hope we can end this thread / topic of discussion here.

Nationality as your "mark of evil"

Posted Apr 10, 2024 12:56 UTC (Wed) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link] (1 responses)

> I see reports that Tencent owns 38% of Discord, e.g. [redacted to avoid helping its SEO]

That looks like a completely unreliable source. Eightify is an "AI YouTube Summary with ChatGPT" tool, and it has published about 5000 articles in /media in the past few weeks, so I bet they're also AI-generated and therefore garbage. The "resources" it cites are largely irrelevant - perhaps it picked them up because they mention e.g. "growing discord between China and the United States" and it's too dumb to realise that's not about Discord.

They probably got the number from https://youtu.be/uvNkdAggUGU?t=555 (linked further down the page in what's presented as a separate article), but that video cites no source, and its fearmongering tone doesn't engender much trust in its accuracy. Maybe the video's author read something like https://seekingalpha.com/article/4371548-tencents-dreams-... which says Tencent owns 38% of DouYu (a Chinese video streaming service) and "~2%" of Discord, and got the numbers mixed up because they both start with D, or something. (That article also cites no source, though at least I think it was written by a human). I can't find any more reliable sources for the 38%.

Since Discord is a private company, it doesn't have to disclose who its investors are, and it has chosen not to, so I wouldn't believe any number you read on the internet. (And especially not any from AI-generated articles.)

Nationality as your "mark of evil"

Posted Apr 10, 2024 16:16 UTC (Wed) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]

Yes, I think you're right. Thanks for pointing that out.