It's not just for home use. China is also exporting their surveillance and social credit technology to Venezuela, Cuba, NK, and even Australia. On the home fro

It's not just for home use. China is also exporting their surveillance and social credit technology to Venezuela, Cuba, NK, and even Australia. On the home front, we have AI recognizers and pattern matching being applied to YouTube videos and comments to prohibit certain words or certain messages because they're "wrongthink." We also let political opponents/activists report on certain words, certain messages, and the use of certain kinds of language. How is that any different from what China is doing, in principle? It's not. It just covers a smaller fraction of the population and culture, for now. Granted, some of the people targeted by these activities are unpleasant and bad people. Not all of them are, however. The organizations and people who do this targeting (through AI recognizers and pattern matching and through taking reports from social media) are problematic for the US in that, 1) no one elected them to do this, 2) the people who control the mechanisms and rules overwhelmingly belong to one political party, and 3) for all that there is little concern demonstrated by those who have the power, over how such power can be abused. Yet, it's already openly acknowledged that the use of and control over such media does have significant political ramifications. Many in China recognize that the power over social media is one-sided, but they don't mind because they consider Uyghur terrorist organizations and people like Falun Gong to be shady troublemakers at best or evil at worst. We in the US and the rest of the west recognize that such unchecked power results in abuses. It's easier to criticize the flaws and quirks of another society, but much harder to recognize when the same exists in our own.