China’s firewall plays a crucial role in shaping the country’s digital landscape, preventing foreign intervention, and maintaining national security. While often criticized in the West, the firewall provides China with the ability to control information flow, shield its population from foreign influence, and protect domestic media.
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People when talking about EU banning US social media and fostering domestically-based networks: hell yeah 😎😎😎
When China does it: evil commies! Brainwashed! Chinese people are too stupid to see they’re being manipulated!
Damm you russian spies controlling social media and influencing the result of our election.
So let’s regulate this shitty space controlled by big corporations? … MY FREEZE PEACH!!!
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Oh shit this blew up, lol. Haven’t seen the video, but protectionism is necessary if you want to develop your own industry and not have it undermined by a country that has hegemonic control over said industry, so control on the internet is a good thing. Same with not allowing said hostile foreign actors to sow dissent unrestricted.
Finally watched this, it’s very good, highly recommend it.
No thanks I dont need the government controlling the information i consume.
Well yeah the megacorpos are already doing that, unregulated by the government
We totally love them for it. /s
The US corporate-survellance state already does. If you’re living in New Zealand, according to here, your country’s entire social media infrastructure is US owned and controlled.
This is completely different. Even though there are big US websites we’re still free to travel to any site on the web. Thats not the case in China.
You might not need that but the US has spent the last several years proving conclusively that some people absolutely fucking do need someone controlling the information they consume
Exactly. What the fuck is wrong with everyone in this thread?
Doesn’t matter if China is doing it, doesn’t matter if the US is doing it. Censorship is evil. Full stop.
If you guys are so sure youre right about stuff why do you delete people’s messages you disagree with? It just makes reading the thread later on annoying lol
Press ctrl+f and search for “removed by mod” and “deleted by creator” in this thread. There’s 4 of the former, and 41 of the latter.
Mods just need to remove the blatantly fascist/racist shit, the rest of them will can just be bullied into deleting their comments lol
Most were deleted by creator, a handful were removed by mod for good reason.
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I see non-Chinese criticism of the Chinese controlled internet centered more around control of domestic information than I do about preventing the foreign garbage. We hear a lot about Chinese netizens having ing to use coded language to discuss topics like criticism of leadership, or concern about social issues, or their contributions as will be removed.
Western internet is full of crap, and manipulation, but you won’t get censored for criticising the Government… I guess unless you are an American criticizing Israel (which is a newer thing, really.)
but you won’t get censored for criticising the Government…
You absolutely will. The fact that the censership will be carried through the proxy of a private media conglomerate doesn’t change the end result.
The self censorship that exists on the Chinese internet is a matter of moderation scale and techniques. It doesn’t exist in the West because Western companies have the incentive to keep you interacting with their products.
In China moderation is meant to:
- Protect the rest of the users from bad behavior
- Signal to the bad user that they are engaging in bad behavior.
Western moderation is meant to:
- Protect the rest of users from a bad behavior
- Keep bad users engaged in order to drive ad revenues.
1 and 2 are inherently at tensions with one another. Thus you have the problem where 1 is diluted by 2 leading to a much more limited set of what is considered bad, and an ever changing and political understanding of it based on the whims of the ownership and their relation to the party in power. Facebook changes its moderation policies based on presidential administration.
2 also leads to non-deterministic systems of gating users into fake interaction or limiting their reach to other similarly bad users.
Another reason is cultural / social. Praise is often used ironicly in China, they have a very fine line between legitimate praise and what in the West would be considered saccharine or gassing someone up. In China when you overly praise someone it’s read as a criticism of the person for what you’re praising them for. So typically censorship structures do not take into account sentiment unlike in the West esp. because Chinese is more of a figurative language than English. There is a lot of context lost in communicating text only and audio only Chinese due to how the language is constructed. In essence they prefer to police topic not types of speech (e.g. hate speech, criticism, etc).
The last reason this happens is a lot of the Chinese Internet’s moderation policies are based on the fact that their level of public social acceptability is much more constricted think PG not even PG-13. In that sense the codified language works to create a space where you’re able to have conversations on things that would “rock the boat” without getting everyone hot and bothered. Unlike the Western Internet where social media companies want these clashes to happen because they drive more engagement and thus more revenue.
For example instead of posting about censorship and getting into an internet pile on where nothing happens and nobody learns anything because they’re talking past each-other why not just post a picture of a river crab wearing 3 watches. Anyone who cares knows what that means and they know that arguing about it online isn’t actually the way to change anything in China. Everyone having a take while barely understanding the thing they have a take on is only beneficial to Western capitalists running internet companies that act as treats. Higher education is affordable in China, you can actually go learn about censorship at an accredited program. Surprisingly because Chinese citizens on average are protected by their government from being wrung dry for all their profit potential by their capitalist class they have time/energy to do these things.
I have never been in China, so I can’t pretend to have certainty on the topic.
It seems naive to believe that the Chinese firewall acts purely as a benign protector of the assaulted Chinese citizen. Chinese people are not like stupid children in need of protection, they are smart and strong.
It seems naive to believe that the Chinese firewall acts purely as a benign protector of the assaulted Chinese citizen. Chinese people are not like stupid children in need of protection, they are smart and strong.
Yeah it’s equally naive to believe that the Chinese firewall acts purely as a hostile censor, Chinese people aren’t uneducated, oppressed, impoverished individuals, they are accomplished, politically active, and well to do. The Chinese people have comparatively derived a larger individual and collective benefit from their government than Americans have in the last 50 years.
If you read actual comparisons of “censorship regimes” there are tons of commonalities that are just ignored by Westerners and their Chinese counterparts are made out to be uniquely evil and beyond the pale. For every news article you read about how the National Security Police invites a satirist to “drink tea” you’re ignoring all of the times the FBI does the exact same thing, and uses various psychological tactics to escalate into a position of legal authority to get around their limited authority to collect evidence.
You know why it’s “soooo hard” for the cops to arrest rich people even if they know where they are? It’s because the tactic of escalatory arrest (an arrest that happens without a warrant as the result of an “investigation”) doesn’t work on rich people, they have gates, intercoms, staff, and know their rights. They aren’t easily cajoled into the position of opening their home to a cop, or allowing a cop access to their body. Isn’t is very strange that these very technical legal distinctions aren’t told explicitly to the “freedom loving people” of America? Meanwhile the agents of “evil Chinese government” don’t need to play games like this, because the cards are all on the table.
People in other countries get “dissapeared”, but when ICE or the Department of Corrections shuffles prisoners around for political purposes such as Mahmoud Khalil. People in other countries are “political prisoners” but in America we have the WGAD which is a nice rhetorical trick so that the government can “honestly label” it’s political prisoners (upon a opaque and deliberatley difficult review process only undertaken by those who actually want to go through it for the benefit of being labeled a political prisoner. WGAD has not authority to enforce anything.
People in other countries get thrown in jail because of political corruption, in the US saying such a thing is insulting the honor of the judiciary as a whole, a judiciary that allows the same practices the jailed Stephen Donzinger for the crime of taking on a legal case against Chevron in Ecuador. Furthermore it’s processes are abused to provide legal procedural punishments for missteps in engaging with the system such as the contempt charges the Donzinger case. Donzinger is still disbarred and cannot leave the country, despite winning all of his appeals. All at the behest of a corporation that doesn’t want to create a precedent that it must pay for poisoning people.
The reality here is that you’re not actively comparing things, you are just going on hunches or whims, and if you take a look that’s how a lot of information you receive is actually structured. That is what allows labels like “authoritarian” to have a spooky evil weight. In essence the US has simplify codified the abuse into law, which is how it gets around these icky little moments of “Are we the baddies?” the reply is a thought terminating cliche of “No we’re all just following legal orders, in the freest country in the World”. China doesn’t need to Nuremburg because it’s goal of social cohesion ensures that people understand how and why things are happening to them.
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Saying that like he didn’t mention in the video that he spent a long time in China
Of course seeing how far China has come in person would turn him into a commie lmao
China doesn’t have to pay people for propaganda, just existing and investing in their infrastructure makes them visibly better than the US and the vast majority of our lackey nations
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I am once again inviting libs to xiaohongshu to see the uyghur culture featured front and center when you search for it. The language, the music, the art, the script, the stories. Did you know there is a made for tv puppet show of nasreddin hoca’s stories, known there as Afanti? You can see for yourself, from the comfort of the couch what the Uyghur culture, that is supposedly being erased, features. In a chinese app. Thats predominantly for chinese people. Go look for yourself.
The pollution is the direct result of other countries outsourcing their manufacturing to exploit chinese labor for increased profits, and they’re rapidly reducing that pollution with the infrastructure investments I mentioned. The censorship is clearly necessary, as evidenced by the US getting absolutely bodied by relatively simple online disinfo campaigns. And the ethnic cleansing is fictional, fucking duh. Uighurs are directly represented in the ruling party, their language is present in official documents and on their currency. Xinjiang is literally open to foreign tourism right now, you could go there yourself and learn better in person.
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There is no evidence at all for anything even remotely resembling an ethnic cleansing going on in China. If you don’t have the spine for admitting you were duped the next best thing would be to shut the fuck up entirely.
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Lol pure projection, try harder
Just fyi this is the ML instance and it’s full of tankies - in case you’re confused by how many people suddenly seem fervently culty about China.
There’s nothing “culty” about it you’re just being corrected by people who are better educated on the topic than you are
The only group I know of who is as good at ignoring the wealth of evidence to the contrary of their beliefs are MAGA. Your arguments are a lot more complex, I’ll give you that, but it doesn’t make you any less wrong.
No WMDs in Iraq, no genocide in China. Stay stupid patriot!
See that’s the difference between you and me - I’m under no illusions about either country.
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cry harder
They cried so hard that they deleted their month old account 🤷
🙄🙄🙄
Also in my all feed from a hexbear com.
“the ability to control information flow”
Yay! What a feature! Tell me what I’m allowed to know, O lord.
no need to ask for it, the us is already doing it to you too.
you can rest easy.
How does that make the great firewall a good thing?
keeps your propaganda out
Keep deepthroating that boot.
only US boots over here on my continent. come over, they seem to be of your taste.
You’re allowed to know that bleach can’t cure covid
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Fyi propaganda can be factually correct, calling something propaganda does fuck all to prove it wrong
It’s an .ml post.
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