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What's the use of Chinese people getting access to Facebook if it's no better for speech than Weibo, WeChat or any of the other Chinese social network? I don't
by quanticle 10y ago
What's the use of Chinese people getting access to Facebook if it's no better for speech than Weibo, WeChat or any of the other Chinese social network? I don't see any benefit at all here for the public. Not the Chinese public. Not the global public. The only benefits I see are for governments who wish to control and surveil their citizens, and Facebook. The governments get a nice automatic dissent control toolkit, and Facebook gets a nice payday from being able to enter the Chinese market.
I might sound like I'm being a bit hyperbolic, but I find it deeply scary that Facebook is applying its considerable engineering talent towards building censorship and monitoring at scale. Facebook has some of the smartest engineers in the industry as well computing power that only the richest governments can match, and they have a good shot at cracking the problem of doing efficient censorship at scale. China manages to scale its censorship by employing more and more people to censor. If Facebook builds a plug-in system that allows governments to censor automatically, then every country could censor like China, at a fraction of the cost.
- PakG1 10y agoThe likelihood that Facebook or any other corporation cares about public good more than its own and its shareholders' bottom line is ludicrous. I'm not commenting on whether that's right. I'm saying that's how the system is built to work.