
Chinese people who show sympathy for HK protests risk getting doxxed by friends - baylearn
https://qz.com/1696522/chinese-supporters-of-hong-kong-protests-face-doxxing/
======
mrosett
This is dreadful. It seems more widespread than anything I've heard about in
the US, but chillingly I fear the difference is only in degree, not kind.
Plenty of Americans have been shamed and persecuted for holding "unacceptable"
views, including views that were widely accepted not so long ago. Ideally
articles like this will scare us away from wandering further down that path,
but I'm not optimistic.

~~~
chillwaves
> "unacceptable" views

Outside of racism, sexism and homophobia, I'm not sure what you are referring
to. Any examples?

Climate change denial too. Sure. My point is these views generate real harm to
society. How do we progress if large segments of society considers other
segments genetically inferior, worthy of extermination?

Religion is another.

Did I miss any? What view was recently acceptable but is no longer?

~~~
op9a0wii
Here are some:

\- Called racist and sexist if you disapprove of affirmative action in schools
or the workplace (which by the way, polls consistently have shown the majority
of Americans disapprove of AA)

\- Called transphobic if you don't want transgender women competing in sports
with biological women, because of the unfair advantage

\- Called homophobic if you think gay pride parades are not a good idea (even
if you're not anti-gay, you just think parades in general are disruptive to
cities and streets, and also don't want almost-naked leathered men walking
around your neighborhood)

\- Called sexist if you suggest that rape victims should go to the police as
soon as possible after, rather than wait months or years later. Or that
perhaps universities shouldn't be acting like courts without due process, and
cases should go to the police instead.

\- And do you remember when Firefox's CEO was forced to resign because he
donated to an anti-gay marriage prop (that actually won with >50% of the
vote?) I mean, maybe the guy was just for civil unions instead, who knows what
his reasoning was.

None of these views would make someone actually racist or sexist but they are
unacceptable to say publicly in left-leaning places like Silicon Valley.

~~~
NotSammyHagar
Parades don't hurt anything - violent parades might be said to be harmful but
gay pride parades aren't violent. You'll have to come up with a good reason to
justify a claim that gay pride parades hurt anything. There's a complex line
separating racists and independent thinkers who have some uncommon view, that
difference between "people are mean to me and I can't express my minority
opinions safely" and "my horrible beliefs should just be accepted". Saying gay
parades are a bad idea is close to claiming that allowing gay people
(tolerating their existence) is a bad idea as I see it. There are gay people.
They don't hurt anything. There are women programmers, they don't hurt
anything and encouraging more women to become programmers should help us make
better software that is germane to more situations.

Today no one can reasonably claim that there was any good by laws prohibiting
black and white people from marrying or having children. Yet until recently
(say 1970s) this was a very common view! Probably in my southern state it was
a view into the 1990s. Claiming that polls show the majority of people oppose
AA isn't adequate to argue either direction.

~~~
dTal
>There are women programmers, they don't hurt anything and encouraging more
women to become programmers should help us make better software that is
germane to more situations.

That is neither the stated reason for affirmative action, nor supported by any
evidence that I am aware of. Code is code. Affirmative action is usually
framed as a fairness issue, not a pragmatic one.

Be wary of pretending that ideological issues are pragmatic ones to convince
people - it tends to backfire when the facts decide not to play ball. As a
slightly silly but plausible example, what if it turned out that same-sex
software teams consistently wrote better code than mixed sex? You can no
longer say "they don't hurt anything". You'd have cornered yourself.

Personally I'm of the view that most ideological arguments _can_ in fact be
boiled down to pragmatic ones. But people are not usually fully conscious of
the pragmatic observations throughout their lives that have fed into their
ideologies, and so - while they sense that they hold their views for a good
reason - they often get the reason wrong. Better to admit that you're not sure
why you believe something than to make stuff up.

------
dirtyid
Doxxing / humanflesh search typically gets filtered by the great firewall
because it promotes "activism", occasionally it's also weaponized. That said
this isn't exactly a novel phenomenon, HK protestors has been doxxing police
family for the last few months but of course that doesn't get much coverage
here [1]. It's only remarkable in the sense that China (supposedly) isn't
cracking down on it, implying state endorsement. I wonder if there's actual
change in GFW policy, humanflesh doxxes usually get deleted after a period of
time based on specific triggers (reach X critical shares, influence real life
activity), is that not happening now or is this just business as usual?

[1] [https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-and-
crime/article/30...](https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-and-
crime/article/3024762/hong-kong-privacy-watchdog-refers-600-cases-doxxing)

~~~
ozzmotik
For anyone else like me who is unfamiliar with the concept of human flesh
search:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_flesh_search_engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_flesh_search_engine)

Learned something new and interesting today!

~~~
codeisawesome
Jeez what a name for the concept. I guess you’d just call it “human search
engine” or “low tech search”... or even “crowdsourced search”...

~~~
uranusjr
It’s more of an unfortunate misinterpretation IMO. The translation is quite
literal, but does not imply the same concept in Chinese as in English.

The 人肉 part originally means human as in “the human calculator” or similar
expressions. A “human search engine” (or more colloquially here in Taiwan, a
human Google) is someone super good at finding information most can’t, and
that expression is then turned into the verb.

------
hoi
Likewise police in Hong Kong are also being Doxxed.
[https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-and-
crime/article/30...](https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-and-
crime/article/3024762/hong-kong-privacy-watchdog-refers-600-cases-doxxing)

------
AFascistWorld
In a society of extreme conformity, those who dare to not comply are seen as
insulting to the rest.

~~~
PavlovsCat
I would say to those who identified with aggressors have to project what broke
them on those who resist it.

Being silent is support, and people like Stephen Hawking would know _nobody_
who think it's perfectly acceptable in polite society to be obedient and
quiet. Alan Turing might have recognized the murderous cowardice inherent in
it, too. One wouldn't know from those making selfies with the dead, and I wish
the dead could speak, and scream "begone, I never knew you" where applicable.

All it takes is for supposedly good people to do nothing. We understand that
that is true about things that are static and behind glass, with the same
little effort with which we pretend it's not true for things that are ongoing
and ask for our position. We join in condemning tyrants of the past, and
praising their victims in the past -- but how we (fail to) act in the present
is what descides if that incense is sweet or reeks to high heaven.

> _You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day, some great
> opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great
> principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it
> because you are afraid... You refuse to do it because you want to live
> longer... You 're afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that
> you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you're
> afraid someone will stab you, or shoot at you or bomb your house; so you
> refuse to take the stand._

> _Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you 're just as dead at
> 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but
> the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit._

\-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

I know that some people don't like to hear that. I don't like those people.

------
Leary
What legal remedies can those who were doxxed pursue?

~~~
mrosett
In China for supporting protests against the (puppet) government of Hong Kong?
I have a guess...

~~~
Leary
I was wondering for those who reside outside China, a lot of students, for
example.

