Nationality as your "mark of evil"

Posted Apr 10, 2024 11:54 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Nationality as your "mark of evil" by dullfire
Parent article: Tridge returns to rsync

> 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".