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Of course that was not done at the behest of the US Government. Criticism of the US, US politicians and Government officials is rampant on Western social media.

Of course that was not done at the behest of the US Government. Criticism of the US, US politicians and Government officials is rampant on Western social media. The US Government doesn't try to censor this. Meanwhile, Chinese tech companies are beholden to the whims of China's CCP leaders. China's internet is completely controlled by the CCP. There is zero moral equivalence between the US Government and China.

baddox 7y ago
Do you think it’s possible that the US government has enough control over public opinion/attention that they simply don’t need to explicitly censor in most cases? Who remembers PRISM? Did the government censor it? Or did we just conveniently forget?
- CountSessine 7y ago
  Sorry; again, no equivalence.
- Thorrez 7y ago
  I still see discussion of PRISM on HN. And of course if anyone forgets details, they can check the Wikipedia page. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=prism&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- alasdair_ 7y ago
  Anyone who would like to learn more about PRISM is welcome to search for it or look at (for example) the wikipedia page. Now, if someone in China would like to learn more about the massacre in Tiananmen Square, would they be easily able to visit (say) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protes... to read more about it?
  - baddox 7y ago
    Of course, that’s precisely my point. You can easily read about PRISM, and yet the government wasn’t held responsible and presumably didn’t change its actions, so it appears that censorship simply wasn’t necessary.
- SmirkingRevenge 7y ago
  > Do you think it’s possible that the US government has enough control over public opinion/attention that they simply don’t need to explicitly censor in most cases? No, not at all, and they absolutely do not. > Who remembers PRISM? Did the government censor it? Or did we just conveniently forget? I do, but sure, many don't. But that's mostly evidence that the market for grievances against the government is a competitive one, in the US (and the west in general) - you'll always be able to cherry pick some single issue (or several) that are serious, yet fall below the radar of the general populace. In the west, we can curse our leader's names all day long, publicly with a megaphone. In the east, you can't mention Winnie the Pooh.
freeflight 7y ago
> Of course that was not done at the behest of the US Government. How would we know that? When ActivisionBlizzard, a US company, banned a player for trying to turn a private event into a political platform nobody wanted to see evidence for how "The CCP forced ActiBlizz to do that!", it was just accepted as established fact, even without the slightest bit of evidence for it. > Criticism of the US, US politicians and Government officials is rampant on Western social media. Just like a demand to moderate it even more [0]. Just like this kind of criticism can have very far-reaching consequences in the real world [1]. > The US Government doesn't try to censor this. No, it just nudges US social media companies into doing it for them under the very real threat of having government regulation forced on them [2] As a German, I'm plenty familiar with this kind of "Not government-censorship censorship" that gives legal plausible deniability but still ends up forcing people into censoring their content if they want it to get any exposure. > Meanwhile, Chinese tech companies are beholden to the whims of China's CCP leaders. Unlike US companies? The third-party doctrine [3] is still a very real thing, heavy cooperation between US private companies and US intelligence services is still a very real thing . Just because people sometimes talk about PRISM, and pretty much only that [4], does not change the reality that these crimes are still going on to this day. But that's okay because "We are allowed to talk about it!", somewhere besides the mainstream, every couple of months when Snowden manages to pierce a headline trough the attention glass ceiling, after that it's back to business as usual. A reminder: Intel is subsidized by the US government, Intel's ME is pretty much exactly what Bloomsberg fictional Chinese super spy chip supposedly does [5]. The difference is: Intel ME is real [6], Bloomberg's chip has yet to be actually found, even tho there are supposedly tens of thousands of physical samples in the US. This has very real consequences for companies outside the US [7]. Deflecting from that whole situation by going "We sometimes talk about PRISM", when nothing changes and no major political movements are pushing for change, is belittling the problem for the sake of projecting a completely fictional moral high ground. [0] https://medium.com/@nayafia/why-do-millennials-support-government-censorship-9d361fe84d43 https://medium.com/@nayafia/why-do-millennials-support-gover... [1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/27/border-deny-entry-united-states-social-media/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/27/border-deny-entry-united-s... [2] https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/327887/pbs-the-cleaners-uncovers-secret-world-of-socia.html https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/327887/pbs-th... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine [4] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/activities/cont/201403/20140307ATT80674/20140307ATT80674EN.pdf http://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/activities/cont/20140... [5] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h... [6] https://www.bsi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Warnmeldungen/DE/CB/2018/01/warnmeldung_cb-k17-2012_update_1.html https://www.bsi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Warnmeldungen/DE/CB/2018/... [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial_espionage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial...

baddox 7y ago

Do you think it’s possible that the US government has enough control over public opinion/attention that they simply don’t need to explicitly censor in most cases? Who remembers PRISM? Did the government censor it? Or did we just conveniently forget?

CountSessine 7y ago
Sorry; again, no equivalence.
Thorrez 7y ago
I still see discussion of PRISM on HN. And of course if anyone forgets details, they can check the Wikipedia page. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=prism&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
alasdair_ 7y ago
Anyone who would like to learn more about PRISM is welcome to search for it or look at (for example) the wikipedia page. Now, if someone in China would like to learn more about the massacre in Tiananmen Square, would they be easily able to visit (say) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protes... to read more about it?
- baddox 7y ago
  Of course, that’s precisely my point. You can easily read about PRISM, and yet the government wasn’t held responsible and presumably didn’t change its actions, so it appears that censorship simply wasn’t necessary.
SmirkingRevenge 7y ago
> Do you think it’s possible that the US government has enough control over public opinion/attention that they simply don’t need to explicitly censor in most cases? No, not at all, and they absolutely do not. > Who remembers PRISM? Did the government censor it? Or did we just conveniently forget? I do, but sure, many don't. But that's mostly evidence that the market for grievances against the government is a competitive one, in the US (and the west in general) - you'll always be able to cherry pick some single issue (or several) that are serious, yet fall below the radar of the general populace. In the west, we can curse our leader's names all day long, publicly with a megaphone. In the east, you can't mention Winnie the Pooh.

freeflight 7y ago

> Of course that was not done at the behest of the US Government. How would we know that? When ActivisionBlizzard, a US company, banned a player for trying to turn a private event into a political platform nobody wanted to see evidence for how "The CCP forced ActiBlizz to do that!", it was just accepted as established fact, even without the slightest bit of evidence for it. > Criticism of the US, US politicians and Government officials is rampant on Western social media. Just like a demand to moderate it even more [0]. Just like this kind of criticism can have very far-reaching consequences in the real world [1]. > The US Government doesn't try to censor this. No, it just nudges US social media companies into doing it for them under the very real threat of having government regulation forced on them [2] As a German, I'm plenty familiar with this kind of "Not government-censorship censorship" that gives legal plausible deniability but still ends up forcing people into censoring their content if they want it to get any exposure. > Meanwhile, Chinese tech companies are beholden to the whims of China's CCP leaders. Unlike US companies? The third-party doctrine [3] is still a very real thing, heavy cooperation between US private companies and US intelligence services is still a very real thing . Just because people sometimes talk about PRISM, and pretty much only that [4], does not change the reality that these crimes are still going on to this day. But that's okay because "We are allowed to talk about it!", somewhere besides the mainstream, every couple of months when Snowden manages to pierce a headline trough the attention glass ceiling, after that it's back to business as usual. A reminder: Intel is subsidized by the US government, Intel's ME is pretty much exactly what Bloomsberg fictional Chinese super spy chip supposedly does [5]. The difference is: Intel ME is real [6], Bloomberg's chip has yet to be actually found, even tho there are supposedly tens of thousands of physical samples in the US. This has very real consequences for companies outside the US [7]. Deflecting from that whole situation by going "We sometimes talk about PRISM", when nothing changes and no major political movements are pushing for change, is belittling the problem for the sake of projecting a completely fictional moral high ground. [0] https://medium.com/@nayafia/why-do-millennials-support-government-censorship-9d361fe84d43 https://medium.com/@nayafia/why-do-millennials-support-gover... [1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/27/border-deny-entry-united-states-social-media/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/27/border-deny-entry-united-s... [2] https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/327887/pbs-the-cleaners-uncovers-secret-world-of-socia.html https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/327887/pbs-th... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine [4] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/activities/cont/201403/20140307ATT80674/20140307ATT80674EN.pdf http://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/activities/cont/20140... [5] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h... [6] https://www.bsi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Warnmeldungen/DE/CB/2018/01/warnmeldung_cb-k17-2012_update_1.html https://www.bsi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Warnmeldungen/DE/CB/2018/... [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial_espionage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial...