China's Internet Firewall is Good, Actually

Westerners: "Let us manipulate you using social media in the name of free speech!"

China: "No."

Westerners: "😠 authoritarianism!"

most of the comments seem to be from hexbear or lemmygrad and i wonder if anyone in the big instances can see any of it since they've defederated/banned both.

You mean blinx? They deleted their own account, of their own accord.

Nobody is deleting their comments aside from one removal by a mod, most of the deleted comments are from one of you racist libs getting bodied by sources and people that know what they are talking about and so deleted their account out of cowardice.

Like can you even read? It literally says deleted by creator

but you won't get censored for criticising the Government... I guess unless you are an American criticizing Israel

Or if you are a British journalist speaking out against genocide, in which case you get arrested on terrorism charges

Or if you are in Germany and hold a conference discussing said genocide, in which case the police raids you and shuts you down

Or if you are a European journalist documenting an inconvenient truth from the "wrong side", in which case you get your bank account seized and face criminal charges and are banned from entering the EU

Or if you are in the Baltics celebrating Europe's victory over the Nazis and singing songs the government doesn't like, in which case you get arrested, fined and possibly jailed

Freedom of speech in the West amounts to you being free to shout into the void, and only so long as it doesn't change anything or threaten the ruling establishment and its political agenda. As long as your speech is entirely ineffectual and can be ignored by those in power then you can scream as loud as you want. As soon as your speech is a real threat to the agenda of the ruling class you are quickly shut down and made an example of with extreme prejudice.

You are functionally not allowed to challenge the official government position in the West either. In European countries the government outright bans candidates from standing in elections if they are anti-EU or anti-NATO, and you are threatened with fines or even jail time for disagreeing with the official narrative on Ukraine conflict. On certain issues, namely those that actually matter, there is only one accepted position, and deviation results in you being branded a terrorist, traitor, Hamas sympathizer, Russian agent, etc.

The West is just as if not more authoritarian than China. China is just more honest about their censorship.

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.)

Isn't that why feddit.org only allows criticism of the occupation regime of west palestine if you precede it with "Israel has a right to defend itself"? At least they claim they fear governmental retribution

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:

1. Protect the rest of the users from bad behavior
2. Signal to the bad user that they are engaging in bad behavior.

Western moderation is meant to:

1. Protect the rest of users from a bad behavior
2. 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.

you won’t get censored for criticising the Government… I guess unless you are an American criticizing Israel (which is a newer thing, really.)

This is a pretty big "you won't get censored... unless you do."

And if we're inputting government censorship onto modding decisions by major social media -- which we absolutely should, as those companies are ran by a revolving door of politicos, all the owners openly play high-level politics, and the threat of regulation is ever-present -- there's all sorts of criticism of the U.S. government and its approved narratives that will get comments removed or accounts banned.

"Agent Knowwaynohow, we have a mission of the upmost importance. We're losing our battle against Liberal Democracy and we need your help. Take your youtube channel with less than 1200 views per video and start posting pro-China videos. This way we can combat the might of CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, OAN, Sky, NYT, Wapo, BBC, The Guardian, basically all of Western Media. Sure it's a multibillion dollar industry that spans the globe but we can beat it when you get 30k subscribers and your top video has 400k views. For your hard work on this we will pay you....with a cruise?"

I have 4 channels I don't use that have basically no content on them but are a decade old. Why do you think this shit matters?

At any point in time I might turn them into channels for any kind of content, you will only scream that it's propaganda if the content I start producing is about China though because you're a racist. If it's any other subject that suddenly appears on a 10 year old account you just won't care.

You think everything is something sinister instead of considering the fact that it's almost certainly not. Almost anyone here might do the same with old accounts they have, why is that a problem?

Sounds like he's receiving gifts in return for positive Chinese propaganda.

lmao why the fuck do you think this is necessary when there's literally hundreds of thousands of marxists who believe in the communist future that would do it for free? You don't seem to understand communists at all. You've so heavily bought into the koolaid of capitalism that you can't even wrap your head around the idea that communists don't need monetary incentives to do things to promote communism. "Everyone must be getting paid because getting paid is the only reason anyone does anything!" is the principle contradiction that makes you mis-analyse everything, it's one of many reasons why capitalists will certainly lose, your belief in capitalism makes you fundamentally misjudge reality. How can you ever hope to win if you can't analyse reality correctly?

You're chasing ghosts. Things that do not exist. Ethereal non-existent payments to do communist propaganda. While you're chasing these ghosts you're completely failing to counter the real thing going on - that there are hundreds of thousands of us willing to do it for free. You miss this completely and entirely fail to counter it because your belief in capitalism is so complete that you can only imagine someone needing to be paid to do this.

Ironically capitalists can't ever fix this. Your propaganda itself makes you this way. Your belief in capitalism makes you this way. If you didn't believe in the fact everyone needs monetary incentives to do anything then you wouldn't be capitalists at all. It fucking dooms you.

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

The westoid brain is so broken it thinks that the only way anyone can have a positive opinion of a country's government is if that government is paying them.

cry harder

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.

Well yeah the megacorpos are already doing that, unregulated by the government

The US government already does that. It controls US based social media. If you don't live in the US you should want your government to control the social media you use because at least that way you can have a say in that control via the (nominally) democratic control you exert over your own government. Either way someone controls it. By not having digital sovereignty your country is just handing the control over your information space to a foreign government which can then use it to shape your opinions and views to their advantage instead of yours.

no need to ask for it, the us is already doing it to you too.

you can rest easy.

Nick, sorry to hear about your brain worms, get well soon.

It's an .ml post.