One of the phrases YouTube is censoring is “五毛 (wumao),” which roughly translates to “50-cent party,” a derogatory term aimed at online censors who the Chinese government pays to direct conversations away from criticism of the ruling party. According to The Verge, what YouTube isn’t doing is deleting the English translations of those phrases nor their Romanized equivalents.  

YouTube may have added 五毛 and the other banned Chinese phrase, “共匪 (communist bandit)” to its automated content filter system, which scans comments for spam and offensive text. The system deletes comments that include the phrases within 15 seconds, even if someone uses them in a positive context. In recent months, the company has been relying more heavily on those tools due to the coronavirus pandemic.   

#YouTube “automatically” deletes a comment in Chinese, “Gongfei”, which means “communist bandit”, in 15 seconds.
This person tested 3 times, same result. #油管 15秒內自動刪除「共匪」留言，網友連試三次皆如此。
他們找了個比李飛飛更厲害的AI專家？ pic.twitter.com/MLCeko0SIY

— Jennifer Zeng 曾錚 (@jenniferatntd) May 13, 2020

Whatever way the error made its way into YouTube, Google has been slow to address it. A YouTube support page spotted by The Verge suggests the platform has been censoring specific Chinese phrases as far back as October 2019. More recently, human rights activist Jennifer Zeng documented the behavior in May. On Monday, Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey tweeted about the situation as well. 

The episode is likely to reignite criticism of the things Google — and more broadly big tech in general — has done to accommodate China’s ruling party. Last year, several companies, including Apple and Blizzard, came under scrutiny for bowing to pressure from the Chinese government when it came to the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.