I agree that it would be good to have more than one source for this story, and some independent confirmation. It's true that often these things turn out quite differently than was initially reported, and of course the correction never gets the same coverage.

On the other hand, many true stories also first circulate online in this format.

@dang is there any way the title could be a bit more clear that this is not a settled matter of fact? As it stands now, the submission's title summarizes the tweet and presents it as truth without any caveats, but in fact the tweet itself is simply hearsay ("Chinese social media users report" etc).

I know we're all expected to click through all links and make informed judgments, but like it or not, the title on HN is very powerful in guiding the conversation. Claims like this need an appropriate level of skepticism until corroborated...

I did that the way we usually do, by adding a question mark to the title.

Oh I must have missed it, thanks very much!

BTW, thanks for your relentless work here — much appreciated.

Yeah, this is bonkers. At one time I thought the collective HN BS detector was calibrated a bit better, but the willingness to accept this tweet at face value is troublesome. This is similar to the debacle recently where Apple was supposedly scanning for QR codes and opening canary URLs clandestinely, which turned out to be simple user error.

I'm flagging this submission, I encourage everybody to do the same. A tweet suggesting that "some users report" some ambiguous behavior is not news. Perhaps some corroboration will emerge and this tweet will eventually be proven correct, but the onus of proof should always be on those who are making the exceptional claims.

Well, although I tend to agree with the point you are making, in this case it is not completely out of the blue, single data point..

CCP is ruthless and has been repeatedly shown to have no qualms oppressing and killing people and abusing technology in similar ways. So the data point is not far fetched.

It would be good to have this either confirmed or proven false. Until then I find it a perfectly valid discussion.

$0.02

> in this case it is not completely out of the blue, single data point..

It kind of is a single data point with a vague "users report"

Also, extraordinary claims like this still require more than vague anecdotal proof. If this is on device, can we see the request packet that caused the video to be deleted? Can we see the decompiled code that allows for such a thing to happen?

Right, and the tweet even has the disclaimer "Not sure if it’s from the cloud or device level". If it's deleted from the cloud, which I consider more likely, it has nothing to do with Huawei phones.

Agreed - I think there should be a huge asterisk over the source of data. Twitter reports are not inherently accurate - they need 3rd party verification.

If this is true - it is a concerning but not surprising maneuver.

The author of the tweet is entirely aware she is spreading unproven rumors, just glancing through her articles she's penned it's mostly propaganda pieces meant to support more aggression towards China (note: she does not live in China).

Here's a few choice quotes:

"And then came the laughable claim in Xi’s speech that China does not ‘carry aggressive or hegemonic traits in its genes’"

"The idea that Trump’s ‘China virus’ rhetoric is xenophobic is puzzling. "

Humans are stupid, buddy, it doesn't matter what forum you're on. Same dumb meat sacks, same heuristics, bias, emotions. We're even dumber in groups. Thinking you're smarter than the rest is proof that you're not.

I’m glad someone said it. One random chap on twitter is hardly a reliable source.

This could be mostly rectified by having a free press in China. Another way to say it - the sole entity that could solve the problem of needing to rely on random internet claims about things happening in China is the Chinese government.

On the other hand, a lot of claims about China that are very easy to disprove - even with limited media freedom - are still widely believed in the West.

I'm thinking of two huge examples from recent times:

* The widespread belief that people in China have social credit scores.

* The belief that zero-CoVID was fake, and that CoVID was actually spreading like crazy in China, but was somehow covered up.

These are claims that can be disproven just by knowing people in China and asking them about their lives. Given how many millions of Chinese people live abroad, how many expats live in China, and how many cross-border connections there are in general, it's crazy that so many people still believe the above theories.

There's very little knowledge about China among the Western public, and there's a strong tendency towards conspiratorial interpretations of everything regarding China.

> This could be mostly rectified by having a free press in China

This should be mostly rectified by asking a ramdon Huawei phone user in China.

The reason this gets accepted is that we see no reason to think it's false. It's quite consistent with previous Chinese behavior.

We are all here reading the comments. There is always at least one comment investigating or questioning the authenticity. I love HN because of that discourse.

With stories like these where I have known bias, I always come to the comments before reading the article.

Wether or not they can actually do this is debatable, but I wouldn't be surprised they did this if they could. I don't immediately accept it, but in terms of technology it seems plausible.

Fact is this could be very well be real in today China, a country known for her extrem level of censorship.