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.
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.)
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.
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.
Your German example is legit, but you are completely dismissing their cultural guilt related to WWII; there are signs of them shifting. Your Balics example show possible Goverent overreach, but you are completely dismissing the existential threat of Russia.
You are also trying to be subtle in shifting to mainstream media, when the thread was about internet control and social media.
You are playing very loose with context. There are reasons to distrust all the Governments, which is why an uncensored internet is of value.
So you’re just Motte and Bailying from “the West doesn’t censer criticism” to “our censership is justified! How can you expect Germany not to suppress critism of genocide, don’t you know that they did the holocaust?”
Great, tell me when you find one
Yeah so your argument boils down to it’s okay to dismiss the Chinese context because they’re categorically evil, but the Western governments have “good reasons” because they’re categorically good.
Surprise surprise it’s just chauvinism.
So censorship is bad unless it’s good. Got it.
This is you abandoning your own values the moment someone in authority tells you there’s an implacable horde of scary foreigners who we can’t beat without taking away your rights.
They have no guilt, else they would not be supporting another genocide or giving money and weapons to help Nazis kill Russians again. Their pretense of feeling guilt is purely performative and self-aggrandizing. The only signs are of them getting worse, more self-righteous, more racist, more authoritarian toward any dissenters, more detached from reality.
Is their deranged paranoia supposed to justify their revisionist history portraying SS butchers as the good guys and the liberators of the death camps as the bad guys?
Where have i mentioned mainstream media? And why are you shifting the goalposts? The topic was freedom of speech, regardless on which media. And social media has replaced mainstream media for most people nowadays anyway.
Yes, social media is being censored and controlled across Europe and the broader West. Let’s not even mention how often Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter have banned anti-imperialist channels, deleted pro-Palestinian or pro-Russian content. The governments themselves are legally persecuting social media based news outlets, forcing them to shut down
Both in Britain and in Germany you can get arrested and prosecuted for social media posts. There have been plenty such cases.
In Germany you get sued and even arrested for simply insulting politicians on social media. It is enough to simply call a politician stupid (what else can you call someone who doesn’t know what doing a 360° turn means?) and you can get charged and taken to court. One particularly ghoulish politician has levied over 2000 defamation charges at people for insulting her.
Help Nazis kill Russians? Wtf… I thought you would mentiom Israel as those are literal Nazis but Ukraine literally got hit with huge Propaganda since 2014 and just got attacked by Russia.
Why the fuck should a country being attacked also be the offender and Nazi?
Did Russians flee from their countries because they got attacked by Ukraine? No, they left because the countries leader arrests you or puts you on the battlefield without caring if you are disabled, as disabled people got this letter too (but I believe they corrected that issue). Ukraine people also don’t nearly look like Nazis when I see them in my country and their stories also dont allign with the Russian Propaganda. I mean, with both Russians and Ukraines I can talk face to face and see real opinion.
In WWII, Nazis did attack other countries and started to tell their everyone they got attacked first… oh, wait… didnt Putin do that? Holy shot just do your own non-biased research without being an instant love fanboy of any authoritarian country. (China is still somewhat cool)
The Nazi regime in Kiev which came to power in a US orchestrated coup attacked Russian speaking regions of Ukraine and has pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing since 2014. Sources here: https://lemmy.ml/post/26654686
I tried to follow the sources but even the sources just lack so many things to be trustworthy at all.
Yes those who speak russian in ukraine (many in eastern ukraine) had to flee
Those are ones that had to flee from the nazis probably
No, nuland did that
Damn, you really are not interested in really understanding the first message. I meant Russians from Russia. Seems like you doge topics that speek against your fandom.
You’re such a troll lol
You got me, I guess. Of course I understand liberalspeak, even if I hate it.
I wish they wouldn’t talk in that weaselly liar way, its mentally taxing to constantly have to interpret their cowardly attempts at hiding their inner white supremacist into english.
Sounds like a dunning kruger effect, if you think you can easily understand it and categorize.
I admit that many western news page hide something to steer the user into something. But thats every news page or article page.
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
Not sure who you would blame for feddit blocking that ME topic, but you can criticize anything else that you want now.
“That ME topic” is a full-blown genocide and fuck you for trying to hide it behind some nicer sounding phrase.
I am blaming the g*rman government for their draconian crackdown on anti-genocide propaganda but also the mods for giving in a priori! Like nothing had even happened and they’re already self-censoring. So I don’t know why you’re saying “Aside from that bit of genocidal censorship, you can talk about anything else”, because that censorhip of genocide is not going to be the end.
Also “you can criticise anything else” is wrong, because if you’re critical of their lack of evidence for what they claim to be an “Uyghur genocide” you get pretty much insta-banned. But thats not due to the government rather than the feddit mods marinating themselves in NED propaganda and not interacting with anything outside their information bubble.
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:
Western moderation is meant to:
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.
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.
You? I like you.
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.
Lots of politics but you won’t get pulled for calling Donnie a moron, nor for calling Joe a demented crank. Try seriously criticizing the CCP on Weibo.
“Serious critism”
The US government banned tiktok for the explicit purpose of censoring information about the holocaust they’re committing in Gaza
Calling someone a moron is not seriously criticizing them. It’s impotent shouting, which is why it’s tolerated.
And if we’re going to get into the finer points of what domestic criticism is or isn’t tolerated in China, we’ll need some evidence.
mfs will post this calling it “freedom” or “political participation” or “democracy”.