Right now Tiktok is suppressing any content related to the LA protests, they adopted new terms to avoid this censorship by saying they are 'music festivals'
It reminds me of the play on words they do in Chinese's social media to avoid this kind of censorship
>It reminds me of the play on words they do in Chinese's social media to avoid this kind of censorship
A new way of speaking which removes nuance and is formed entirely of acceptable concepts and terminology as determined by the regime. We could call it newspeak.
If you see "Trust and Safety" it is actually a partnership between major tech companies. It provides guidance on how their TOS / community standards should be defined. Twitter was also a member until Elon bought it out. This is where things like policies on misinformation come from (or anything in general really). Every major social media company you can imagine is part of it, Discord, Reddit, Meta, Apple, etc.
The part that always concerns me is things like this are ripe for abuse. Whoever controls the partnership potentially controls all major platforms. They'll say you dont have to follow it to the letter, but that doesn't mean some wont.
This is also why when reddit changes internal rules Discord follows suit.
I am interested in this subject because I've seen Facebook become hostile over the years on specific types of remarks. I actually quit Facebook over its AI moderation, I made a harmless meme / joke comment and it flagged me, and when I appealed, it flagged me. Meanwhile others post much worse and I get dinged for making meme references that harm no one, my what? 50 friends on facebook will read it and not get my reference?
I've also seen other platforms shift their policies (a reddit comment section today is a night and day difference from a reddit thread in say 2010).
I think the model actually cares about where you post though, or at least there's some kind of location based standard.
I've used Reddit for ages, but recently received two 'account suspensions' both which misrepresented my remarks, one in which the appeal was ignored, the other in which the response to the appeal was a false claim that the remark was a threat.
But both happened very soon after I participated in discussions in /r/ukpolitics. I especially think they want to get rid of discussion concerning the proscription of Palestine Action. I don't think it's somebody from there following my comment feed and reporting things but instead something actually automated and part of Reddit itself, because it was rather fast.
It's not "centralized control" in the same way that a closed market with a few players not caring to compete on price isn't a "conspiracy" to keep prices high. Nobody is coordinating, corresponding or otherwise conspiring but everyone is smart enough to know what's good for them.
From what I can tell (I have a coworker I get lunch with who works in the Risk & Policy side of TNS at a tech major), it's not necessarily a "here's the top-down orders of what our new policy will be" as much as:
1) the people in this sub-industry role attend conferences and network and make friends and build professional relationships (for job referrals if there are layoffs at one tech co but hiring in the same area at different tech co)
2) at conferences, in group chats (w/ friends made at other companies in previous roles or friends from said conferences), common news events, developments in the field, and trends are discussed and ideas bounced off each other, which means even if there's no top-down order, there's sort of an averaging-effect and consensus building and battle-testing of ideas and approaches
3) there's a revolving door of people who work at one company in this area developing real-utility experience that translates well to working at another, so people move about and policy ideas cross-pollinate and spread. if you plucked someone off the street, even if it helped ideologically diversify the pool, they would truly be less effective as they ramped up and learned.
You don't actually need anything nefarious to happen, just an insular, small community with similar educational backgrounds, shared values, etc. Not a lot of Repubs from Alabama decide to attend Barnard and study _relevant_humanities_field_slash_law_ and then join tech to try to fight injustice/CSAM/bias/misinfo/election interference at the right time during ZIRP and then build the resume to then continue to land those roles.
These people are all doing what they think is right, they just aren't a super diverse group ideologically and there are social channels that tend to create more cross-brand homogeneity.
And even if you disagree with their moderation policy, there are huge, non-controversial areas you never see or think of that they are fighting everyday too (anti-terrorism, anti-suicide, connecting victims to resources, anti-CSAM, etc).
Probably the same way in physics departments, String Theorists hire other String Theorists and over time it grows and grows and grows. Or how economists all arrive at modern monetary theory.
This is what Max Weber calls Moral Detachment. These people are not in direct contact with people who suffer. And so their intentions will always be mistrusted. Costs of which will mount with time and manifest in all kinds of shocks and surprises.
Worth looking at why the Church (which has survived much longer than govts, businesses, science/tech orgs) emphasizes direct contact with suffering, through things like Pastoral Care. This is not an accident. They have learnt that lesson the hard way again and again through out history.
>These people are all doing what they think is right, they just aren't a super diverse group ideologically and there are social channels that tend to create more cross-brand homogeneity.
Exactly. Nothing intentionally nefarious is happening. Unintentionally nefarious things are happening all the time as a result of subsets of industries becoming insular circle jerks of like minded individuals. You see this in everything, it's not just for RightSpeak enforcers at FAANG.
It's just there's a lot more consequences for the rest of us bunch people at Meta do it to influence public discourse than when some business gets run off a cliff because the MBAs had too many sigmas or whatever.
Keep in mind the government pumps tens of thousands of enlisted through military intelligence analyst programs every year. These people are trained to sit in a cubicle for 8 hours a day reading mostly garbage and making objective summaries.
So a lot of highly trained intelligence analysts hit the market every year (I personally know about half a dozen). It's just going to be natural that some of the more experienced intelligence analysts are going to be sought out for these content moderation positions, especially now that foreign and nation-state actors are present.
I am pretty skeptical more of the more "deep-state"/"thought-police" concerns. Obviously these people are going to be biased towards collecting intelligence and collaborating with the government. But the CIA would almost certainly rather keep any media manipulation campaigns clandestine and in-house rather than trust former analysts to do their bidding.
If they give a proscribed terrorist organization an actual platform WITHOUT pushback then they are biased.
CNN or NYT will bring Israeli government and IDF spox but also ask hard questions about civilian casualties (and Israelis get annoyed by that) and/or bring in a spox on the Palestinian or activist side.
Yet MintPress does the opposite by providing fawning coverage for them and other movements that were previously allied with the Assad government.
PBS has interviewed the Houthis via Frontline, yet also made sure to also push harsh and tough questions about their atrocities. MintPress didn't.
> Is this article incorrect in itself
I do not trust it. At some point you need to also validate whether your source is credible or not. And MintPress simply is not a credible source.
Edit:
Cannot reply below, so I will say this about the BBC - they try to be unbiased where possible and have reported on Houthi war crimes such as child soldiers on multiple occasions.
A credible news source is a source that tries to reduce it's bias where possible and rectify by giving multiple different sides a voice
Terrorist designations are local to each country and the language you are using is UK language. Which countries rules do you want to enforce here in your censorship?
> CNN or NYT will bring Israeli government and IDF spox but also ask hard questions about civilian casualties
> I do not trust it. At some point you need to also validate whether your source is credible or not. And MintPress simply is not a credible source.
"I do not trust it" is the worst response. Find a reason to say it is incorrect rather than these double standard censorship claims. Or just downvote it and move on.
The nature of Chinese censorship makes it difficult to provide hard numbers, but it really is worse. America's handling of censorship is certainly not the best, and it has gotten worse recently, but it is not on the level of China.
At least the Chinese have the courtesy to be obvious about it. The American and European powers pretend we’re free and open societies while actively undermining public speech that it doesn’t like.
Your links (at least the ones I could translate) seem to describe a system very similar to a Credit Score like you have in Western economies. At least it seems very different from the propagandized version of a score that tracks your every action and determines "how good of a citizen are you".
You're completely right, it is very similar to the western style credit score, and is often either accidentally or deliberately misrepresented. That being said, it covers behaviors not covered by western credit scores that does have elements of tracking "how good of a citizen are you".
I think this article from Beijing University does a great job of highlighting some of the issues.
I agree that the American understanding of the Social Credit System is flawed, but to suggest it doesn't exist is an extreme overreach.
Furthermore, it clearly is a system that is important to the CCP and has an effect.
From the Baidu page:
建立社会信用体系是保持国民经济持续、稳定增长的需要
Establishing a social credit system is necessary to maintain sustained and stable growth of the national economy
Certainly Mainland China does need a credit system, and undoubtedly the Social Credit System will and has helped in that regard, but it does have legitimate flaws with regards to privacy.
Its goals extend beyond ensuring creditworthiness to
社会信用体系具有揭示功能，能够扬善惩恶，提高经济效率；
The social credit system has a revealing function, can promote good and punish evil, and improve economic efficiency;
And its integration with the National Healthcare Security Administration, and other government and private entities extend its reach far beyond what the Western credit systems do.
there's a paper that compares both when it comes to promoting organized political action (which is the only type of censorship that is not morally justifiable under any semblance of democracy) and both countries scored the same low points.
both got high passing grades on allowing meaningless complaining about government.
Here is a list of items that matter for an American. It is much worse if you are from Hong Kong or Taiwan.
1. Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter (basically all major American social media platforms) are not accessible without a VPN. Some major VPN providers have also been banned as well. The counter argument is that many Huawei products are also banned. But I actively use Harmony OS on my Huawei smart watch. I can view Bilibili content, XiaoHongShu, QQ, and other platforms on any device without issue.
2. State media propaganda. My first time seeing state movies was shocking how in your face the propaganda was. It is completely blatant. From talking with locals about it, they recognize it as propaganda (although the Chinese word for propaganda doesn't have the same negative connotation as in English). I haven't watched state sponsored news to get a feel for their bias, but from the amount I have seen they are certainly selectively with their content. Everything focuses and the achievements Xi JinPing has recently achieved. The idea of a media outlet reporting on something silly the president has done is absurd.
3. The surveillance infrastructure in China surpasses even the UK. The number of cameras almost looks like a gag. Once again, the nature of how opaque the government is means it is difficult to say with any degree of certainty what they use the data for, but they certainly collect a lot.
speech is heavily, heavily restricted in the united states, in particular on American social media platforms.
there are a massive number of subjects which cannot be spoken about on social media without risking massive deboosting and the blacklisting of your accounts.
this censorship is directed by "former" CIA agents working at all major American social media companies. In other words, this is direct government censorship of private citizens' speech.
What is “deboosting”? If I own a social media site wouldn’t you argue that I should be able to control what content I “boost” in the first place? Am I forced to compulsory “boost” your content? In which case wouldn’t that mean I am “censoring” the PoV of the social media company?
Can you share the topic contents that are subject to your accusations? If you’re able to share them here without fear of government reprisal then I would argue that’s not censorship.
A current example would be Tiktok artificially boosting ice related challenges.
Why? Because it makes searching for immigration and customs enforcement content much more difficult to find. It lower the social temperature and stops it from metaphorically boiling over.
Is crowding out content censorship? Who knows. If tilting feeds in one direction and away from another has the same effect and isn't censorship because of a definitional technicality, does it really matter?
> If I own a social media site wouldn’t you argue that I should be able to control what content I “boost” in the first place? Am I forced to compulsory “boost” your content? In which case wouldn’t that mean I am “censoring” the PoV of the social media company?
That sounds cool as long as you forfeit your Section 230 rights since at that point you’re more of a newspaper than a social network.
Yes, I know all social networks do this currently which is why they should all lose their Section 230 rights.
>If you’re able to share them here without fear of government reprisal then I would argue that’s not censorship
I mean, the definition of censorship is far larger than just that, and what you're talking about is it's more extreme form.
Moreso you ignore all the modern subtlety and nuance of modern censorship. The government doesn't need to attack you directly, they just tell the large companies that contract with the government they can't do business with companies that do certain things. Or they tell payment processors that businesses that are 'high risk' need to be audited more and will invite more government intervention in which the payment processors just drop said businesses.
I mean, if you were on a corner protesting, then the government came in and closed the roads and routed all traffic around you so no one saw you, it would be really sus, right?
I think we are starting to see that under the current administration, yes. But the question was - does it rise to the level that Chinese have? I argue no.
I also worry about some sort of policy where a site “must” carry content. That has its own risks as well, which should be obvious.
In China, dissent is caged because it still has teeth. In the US, free speech is allowed because the teeth are all gone. We parade the animal about, saying, "Look, we still have free speech", but it has no ability to bite.
I don't know what's worse, being trapped in a cage or de-fanged and let loose. I've only ever lived without teeth, so the idea of biting sounds almost beautiful.
The last time it had teeth was the 60s into the 70s with the protests for Civil Rights and against the Vietnam War.
But angry crowds can still remind them that the threat exists -- witness Josh Hawley fleeing the capital when the angry mob broke through (the irony being that the mob was in service of his boss, Trump).
It seem by all account imaginably worse in China, particularly in Xinjiang. I might also call to attention the disappearance from western social media of a prominent Chinese maker. I'm also unaware of anyone in the US being sent to prison for political speech online.
What exactly did he say online that got him accused of espionage? I seem to remember the issue being that he was accused of conspiring with Manning to release classified documents, and possibly gaining unauthorized access to congressional records via an exploit in the systems access controls. I don't like the idea of the US government hounding journalists who work with leakers, but Assange was always tiptoeing up to and possibly just past laws unrelated to speech. I not a simple and straightforward case and does not prove that the US is like China in terms of censorship. You can be jailed in China for simply talking about the Tienanmen Square massacre or implying Taiwanese sovereignty, nothing comparable happens in the US.
This is a really disingenuous comment. I have correctly pointed out that Assage, who was not a US person or residing in the US and not jailed int he US was credibly accused of illegally accessing government data. I have also noted that I do not like the US government prosecuting journalists, which is the opposite of what you are claiming that I am saying.
This is wholly different from locking someone up for political speech. The US factually is not disappearing citizens for political speech.
That statement is still incorrect. China censors directly and heavily, eg "pooh bear"
In the US you are still very much free to insult the president, etc but if you post things deemed to be pro-terrorist or against what the Government wants to promote on social media, it won't go anywhere. Firearms or vaping content during the Biden admin as an example.
The current admin has heavily gutted the federal funding and workforce that backed these efforts and issued bulletins to private industry, but I suspect there is still pressure from pseudo-government "advocates".
Right now Tiktok is suppressing any content related to the LA protests, they adopted new terms to avoid this censorship by saying they are 'music festivals'
It reminds me of the play on words they do in Chinese's social media to avoid this kind of censorship
>It reminds me of the play on words they do in Chinese's social media to avoid this kind of censorship
A new way of speaking which removes nuance and is formed entirely of acceptable concepts and terminology as determined by the regime. We could call it newspeak.
Seems double-plus ungood to me.
>Originally published: MintPress News
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MintPress_News
If you see "Trust and Safety" it is actually a partnership between major tech companies. It provides guidance on how their TOS / community standards should be defined. Twitter was also a member until Elon bought it out. This is where things like policies on misinformation come from (or anything in general really). Every major social media company you can imagine is part of it, Discord, Reddit, Meta, Apple, etc.
The part that always concerns me is things like this are ripe for abuse. Whoever controls the partnership potentially controls all major platforms. They'll say you dont have to follow it to the letter, but that doesn't mean some wont.
This is also why when reddit changes internal rules Discord follows suit.
I am interested in this subject because I've seen Facebook become hostile over the years on specific types of remarks. I actually quit Facebook over its AI moderation, I made a harmless meme / joke comment and it flagged me, and when I appealed, it flagged me. Meanwhile others post much worse and I get dinged for making meme references that harm no one, my what? 50 friends on facebook will read it and not get my reference?
I've also seen other platforms shift their policies (a reddit comment section today is a night and day difference from a reddit thread in say 2010).
Digital Trust & Safety Partnership website here:
https://dtspartnership.org/
I think the model actually cares about where you post though, or at least there's some kind of location based standard.
I've used Reddit for ages, but recently received two 'account suspensions' both which misrepresented my remarks, one in which the appeal was ignored, the other in which the response to the appeal was a false claim that the remark was a threat.
But both happened very soon after I participated in discussions in /r/ukpolitics. I especially think they want to get rid of discussion concerning the proscription of Palestine Action. I don't think it's somebody from there following my comment feed and reporting things but instead something actually automated and part of Reddit itself, because it was rather fast.
> /r/ukpolitics
Found your problem.
Yes, but there's a reason I thought a foreign perspective could be useful to them.
does "a partnership between major tech companies" mean "centralized control"?
That's my question after learning about DTS.
It's not "centralized control" in the same way that a closed market with a few players not caring to compete on price isn't a "conspiracy" to keep prices high. Nobody is coordinating, corresponding or otherwise conspiring but everyone is smart enough to know what's good for them.
Partners are big tech and government (or government staffed and funded 3rd parties).
From what I can tell (I have a coworker I get lunch with who works in the Risk & Policy side of TNS at a tech major), it's not necessarily a "here's the top-down orders of what our new policy will be" as much as:
1) the people in this sub-industry role attend conferences and network and make friends and build professional relationships (for job referrals if there are layoffs at one tech co but hiring in the same area at different tech co)
2) at conferences, in group chats (w/ friends made at other companies in previous roles or friends from said conferences), common news events, developments in the field, and trends are discussed and ideas bounced off each other, which means even if there's no top-down order, there's sort of an averaging-effect and consensus building and battle-testing of ideas and approaches
3) there's a revolving door of people who work at one company in this area developing real-utility experience that translates well to working at another, so people move about and policy ideas cross-pollinate and spread. if you plucked someone off the street, even if it helped ideologically diversify the pool, they would truly be less effective as they ramped up and learned.
You don't actually need anything nefarious to happen, just an insular, small community with similar educational backgrounds, shared values, etc. Not a lot of Repubs from Alabama decide to attend Barnard and study _relevant_humanities_field_slash_law_ and then join tech to try to fight injustice/CSAM/bias/misinfo/election interference at the right time during ZIRP and then build the resume to then continue to land those roles.
These people are all doing what they think is right, they just aren't a super diverse group ideologically and there are social channels that tend to create more cross-brand homogeneity.
And even if you disagree with their moderation policy, there are huge, non-controversial areas you never see or think of that they are fighting everyday too (anti-terrorism, anti-suicide, connecting victims to resources, anti-CSAM, etc).
Probably the same way in physics departments, String Theorists hire other String Theorists and over time it grows and grows and grows. Or how economists all arrive at modern monetary theory.
This is what Max Weber calls Moral Detachment. These people are not in direct contact with people who suffer. And so their intentions will always be mistrusted. Costs of which will mount with time and manifest in all kinds of shocks and surprises.
Worth looking at why the Church (which has survived much longer than govts, businesses, science/tech orgs) emphasizes direct contact with suffering, through things like Pastoral Care. This is not an accident. They have learnt that lesson the hard way again and again through out history.
So you're saying it actually is a cabal?
Same as it ever was.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JournoList
GameJournoPros during GamerGate.
Not sure what the "Trust and Safety" people use to coordinate. My guess is Discord.
it's obviously a cabal
If it's a cabal then everything is a cabal.
>These people are all doing what they think is right, they just aren't a super diverse group ideologically and there are social channels that tend to create more cross-brand homogeneity.
Exactly. Nothing intentionally nefarious is happening. Unintentionally nefarious things are happening all the time as a result of subsets of industries becoming insular circle jerks of like minded individuals. You see this in everything, it's not just for RightSpeak enforcers at FAANG.
It's just there's a lot more consequences for the rest of us bunch people at Meta do it to influence public discourse than when some business gets run off a cliff because the MBAs had too many sigmas or whatever.
Keep in mind the government pumps tens of thousands of enlisted through military intelligence analyst programs every year. These people are trained to sit in a cubicle for 8 hours a day reading mostly garbage and making objective summaries.
So a lot of highly trained intelligence analysts hit the market every year (I personally know about half a dozen). It's just going to be natural that some of the more experienced intelligence analysts are going to be sought out for these content moderation positions, especially now that foreign and nation-state actors are present.
I am pretty skeptical more of the more "deep-state"/"thought-police" concerns. Obviously these people are going to be biased towards collecting intelligence and collaborating with the government. But the CIA would almost certainly rather keep any media manipulation campaigns clandestine and in-house rather than trust former analysts to do their bidding.
>These people are trained to sit in a cubicle for 8 hours a day reading mostly garbage and making objective summaries.
You just described the entire Cyber Mission Force, lol.
Even the article itself gives people a pause in order to avoid being blacklisted.
It basically says that they are watching you so you will self censor.
(2022)
Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32191637
Meta has basically been taken over by US and Israeli intelligence agencies.
It was always in their hands.
I remember when this was dismissed as a right-wing conspiracy theory.
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Is this article incorrect in itself? I am confused about your objection.
There is a lot of reporting on Meta's collaboration with IDF in restricting content:
https://theintercept.com/2024/10/21/instagram-israel-palesti...
https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
> has consistently interviewed Houthi leadership.
Why should we ban someone who interviews leaders of news making groups?
I don't like Netanyahu, and he is wanted for international war crimes, but I don't advocate banning news sources that interview him.
If they give a proscribed terrorist organization an actual platform WITHOUT pushback then they are biased.
CNN or NYT will bring Israeli government and IDF spox but also ask hard questions about civilian casualties (and Israelis get annoyed by that) and/or bring in a spox on the Palestinian or activist side.
Yet MintPress does the opposite by providing fawning coverage for them and other movements that were previously allied with the Assad government.
PBS has interviewed the Houthis via Frontline, yet also made sure to also push harsh and tough questions about their atrocities. MintPress didn't.
> Is this article incorrect in itself
I do not trust it. At some point you need to also validate whether your source is credible or not. And MintPress simply is not a credible source.
Edit:
Cannot reply below, so I will say this about the BBC - they try to be unbiased where possible and have reported on Houthi war crimes such as child soldiers on multiple occasions.
A credible news source is a source that tries to reduce it's bias where possible and rectify by giving multiple different sides a voice
Otherwise, it's an agenda-driven platform.
> proscribed terroist organization
Terrorist designations are local to each country and the language you are using is UK language. Which countries rules do you want to enforce here in your censorship?
> CNN or NYT will bring Israeli government and IDF spox but also ask hard questions about civilian casualties
Also do we have to ban BBC News from here for interview Houthis? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuOH00weB24
> I do not trust it. At some point you need to also validate whether your source is credible or not. And MintPress simply is not a credible source.
"I do not trust it" is the worst response. Find a reason to say it is incorrect rather than these double standard censorship claims. Or just downvote it and move on.
Wasn't that reasonable though, considering what came after?
Obviously there's some deal with the Turks so that we'll tolerate their guys running it, but you know they're terrorists and murderers, right?
My cousin doesn't buy it when I tell him the United States has more aggressively censored media than China.
The nature of Chinese censorship makes it difficult to provide hard numbers, but it really is worse. America's handling of censorship is certainly not the best, and it has gotten worse recently, but it is not on the level of China.
At least the Chinese have the courtesy to be obvious about it. The American and European powers pretend we’re free and open societies while actively undermining public speech that it doesn’t like.
You think they're obvious about it intentionally?
Isn’t that the entire point of their system, the social score lets you know exactly what’s going on?
On a scale from credit score to being debanked, where does China's social score rank on the Western oubliette spectrum?
I’m not here to rank societies.
Social scores aren't real.
The social score is not real. That is western propaganda in action.
What are you referring to?
gov.cn page on social credit system plan https://www.ndrc.gov.cn/xxgk/zcfb/tz/202406/P020240604321155...
gov.cn page on social credit system suggested changes/opinions https://www.gov.cn/zhengce/202503/content_7016535.htm
baidu page on social credit system https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%A4%BE%E4%BC%9A%E4%BF%A1%E7%...
Are you making the distinction that its name is actually the social credit system and not social score? Or that the system isn't fully in place yet.
Or perhaps are you suggesting that gov.cn and baidu are part of the deep state's propaganda plan against China.
Your links (at least the ones I could translate) seem to describe a system very similar to a Credit Score like you have in Western economies. At least it seems very different from the propagandized version of a score that tracks your every action and determines "how good of a citizen are you".
You're completely right, it is very similar to the western style credit score, and is often either accidentally or deliberately misrepresented. That being said, it covers behaviors not covered by western credit scores that does have elements of tracking "how good of a citizen are you".
I think this article from Beijing University does a great job of highlighting some of the issues.
Web page:
https://fzzfyjy.cupl.edu.cn/info/1035/11343.htm
Pdf: https://www.law.pku.edu.cn/docs/20210927092933450384.pdf
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
I think this answers all your questions? It has no real effect (many people don’t have one). But, I’m not sure what your question really is.
The American propaganda definition (which may vary) is incorrect because the system doesn’t really exist.
I agree that the American understanding of the Social Credit System is flawed, but to suggest it doesn't exist is an extreme overreach.
Furthermore, it clearly is a system that is important to the CCP and has an effect.
From the Baidu page:
建立社会信用体系是保持国民经济持续、稳定增长的需要
Establishing a social credit system is necessary to maintain sustained and stable growth of the national economy
Certainly Mainland China does need a credit system, and undoubtedly the Social Credit System will and has helped in that regard, but it does have legitimate flaws with regards to privacy.
Its goals extend beyond ensuring creditworthiness to
社会信用体系具有揭示功能，能够扬善惩恶，提高经济效率；
The social credit system has a revealing function, can promote good and punish evil, and improve economic efficiency;
And its integration with the National Healthcare Security Administration, and other government and private entities extend its reach far beyond what the Western credit systems do.
i only think of it wrt to this guy: https://china-journal.org/2019/05/27/chinese-mma-fighter-xu-...
who couldnt easily get to his next fights against tai chi frauds because the social credit score prevented him from flying or bussing and whathaveyou
I think they cultivate the image of having a panopticon to say to citizens "don't even try", but in reality the censors can't see everything
there's a paper that compares both when it comes to promoting organized political action (which is the only type of censorship that is not morally justifiable under any semblance of democracy) and both countries scored the same low points.
both got high passing grades on allowing meaningless complaining about government.
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Here is a list of items that matter for an American. It is much worse if you are from Hong Kong or Taiwan.
1. Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter (basically all major American social media platforms) are not accessible without a VPN. Some major VPN providers have also been banned as well. The counter argument is that many Huawei products are also banned. But I actively use Harmony OS on my Huawei smart watch. I can view Bilibili content, XiaoHongShu, QQ, and other platforms on any device without issue.
2. State media propaganda. My first time seeing state movies was shocking how in your face the propaganda was. It is completely blatant. From talking with locals about it, they recognize it as propaganda (although the Chinese word for propaganda doesn't have the same negative connotation as in English). I haven't watched state sponsored news to get a feel for their bias, but from the amount I have seen they are certainly selectively with their content. Everything focuses and the achievements Xi JinPing has recently achieved. The idea of a media outlet reporting on something silly the president has done is absurd.
3. The surveillance infrastructure in China surpasses even the UK. The number of cameras almost looks like a gag. Once again, the nature of how opaque the government is means it is difficult to say with any degree of certainty what they use the data for, but they certainly collect a lot.
Plane tickets to China are relatively cheap right now. LAX to PEK round trip for $750. Take a trip and see for yourself.
somehow i'm not convinced by your argument
My understanding was in the US, they can openly criticize the government
You are saying that is inaccurate? Or you are talking about a different type of censorship?
speech is heavily, heavily restricted in the united states, in particular on American social media platforms.
there are a massive number of subjects which cannot be spoken about on social media without risking massive deboosting and the blacklisting of your accounts.
this censorship is directed by "former" CIA agents working at all major American social media companies. In other words, this is direct government censorship of private citizens' speech.
We're literally on a social media platform right now criticizing the US with publicly available information about US intelligence.
What content are you worried would blacklist your account?
What is “deboosting”? If I own a social media site wouldn’t you argue that I should be able to control what content I “boost” in the first place? Am I forced to compulsory “boost” your content? In which case wouldn’t that mean I am “censoring” the PoV of the social media company?
Can you share the topic contents that are subject to your accusations? If you’re able to share them here without fear of government reprisal then I would argue that’s not censorship.
A current example would be Tiktok artificially boosting ice related challenges.
Why? Because it makes searching for immigration and customs enforcement content much more difficult to find. It lower the social temperature and stops it from metaphorically boiling over.
Is crowding out content censorship? Who knows. If tilting feeds in one direction and away from another has the same effect and isn't censorship because of a definitional technicality, does it really matter?
> If I own a social media site wouldn’t you argue that I should be able to control what content I “boost” in the first place? Am I forced to compulsory “boost” your content? In which case wouldn’t that mean I am “censoring” the PoV of the social media company?
That sounds cool as long as you forfeit your Section 230 rights since at that point you’re more of a newspaper than a social network.
Yes, I know all social networks do this currently which is why they should all lose their Section 230 rights.
>If you’re able to share them here without fear of government reprisal then I would argue that’s not censorship
I mean, the definition of censorship is far larger than just that, and what you're talking about is it's more extreme form.
Moreso you ignore all the modern subtlety and nuance of modern censorship. The government doesn't need to attack you directly, they just tell the large companies that contract with the government they can't do business with companies that do certain things. Or they tell payment processors that businesses that are 'high risk' need to be audited more and will invite more government intervention in which the payment processors just drop said businesses.
I mean, if you were on a corner protesting, then the government came in and closed the roads and routed all traffic around you so no one saw you, it would be really sus, right?
I think we are starting to see that under the current administration, yes. But the question was - does it rise to the level that Chinese have? I argue no.
I also worry about some sort of policy where a site “must” carry content. That has its own risks as well, which should be obvious.
You can about some things. Others (most recently anything too anti Israel) will get you deported, debanked, etc.
The saddest part of US censorship is it isn’t even pro American. It’s pro American billionaires who are disproportionately pro Israel.
Say something bad about Israel in your public social media.
In China, dissent is caged because it still has teeth. In the US, free speech is allowed because the teeth are all gone. We parade the animal about, saying, "Look, we still have free speech", but it has no ability to bite.
I don't know what's worse, being trapped in a cage or de-fanged and let loose. I've only ever lived without teeth, so the idea of biting sounds almost beautiful.
The last time it had teeth was the 60s into the 70s with the protests for Civil Rights and against the Vietnam War.
But angry crowds can still remind them that the threat exists -- witness Josh Hawley fleeing the capital when the angry mob broke through (the irony being that the mob was in service of his boss, Trump).
Really? Who do you think douyin hires to perform content moderation for example?
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3714013
Also, don’t forget to obtain your icp license from the government before establishing a website in the mainland!
And he's right, one shouldn't buy into crap.
we're 20 years into social media 1984 and Americans still want to believe that it's unimaginably worse in China.
It seem by all account imaginably worse in China, particularly in Xinjiang. I might also call to attention the disappearance from western social media of a prominent Chinese maker. I'm also unaware of anyone in the US being sent to prison for political speech online.
Julian Assange might disagree with that.
What exactly did he say online that got him accused of espionage? I seem to remember the issue being that he was accused of conspiring with Manning to release classified documents, and possibly gaining unauthorized access to congressional records via an exploit in the systems access controls. I don't like the idea of the US government hounding journalists who work with leakers, but Assange was always tiptoeing up to and possibly just past laws unrelated to speech. I not a simple and straightforward case and does not prove that the US is like China in terms of censorship. You can be jailed in China for simply talking about the Tienanmen Square massacre or implying Taiwanese sovereignty, nothing comparable happens in the US.
When China throws people into prison, it's authoritarianism. When America does it, it's for FREEDOM!!!!
This is you in a nutshell.
This is a really disingenuous comment. I have correctly pointed out that Assage, who was not a US person or residing in the US and not jailed int he US was credibly accused of illegally accessing government data. I have also noted that I do not like the US government prosecuting journalists, which is the opposite of what you are claiming that I am saying.
This is wholly different from locking someone up for political speech. The US factually is not disappearing citizens for political speech.
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So what you're saying is "my cousin has viewpoints grounded in reality"?
That statement is still incorrect. China censors directly and heavily, eg "pooh bear"
In the US you are still very much free to insult the president, etc but if you post things deemed to be pro-terrorist or against what the Government wants to promote on social media, it won't go anywhere. Firearms or vaping content during the Biden admin as an example.
The current admin has heavily gutted the federal funding and workforce that backed these efforts and issued bulletins to private industry, but I suspect there is still pressure from pseudo-government "advocates".
You can buy Winnie the Pooh merchandise in every mall in China.
You can't use Winnie the Pooh as code to agitate against the government.
But here "Winnie the Pooh" is just calling Xi a lazy authoritarian.
That's an insult, not "agitat[ing] against the government"
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And let me guess, you think the USA is currently more fascist than Nazi Germany?
Yes, read what they did to Muslims in middle east.