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> The ideas of truth and logic literally are different than the western understanding of truth and logic. Truth in China isn’t something that is necessarily pro

by Gys 5y ago

> The ideas of truth and logic literally are different than the western understanding of truth and logic. Truth in China isn’t something that is necessarily proved, only suggested. Absolutist understanding really has no place in a world that embraces relative ideas of the truth. Very interesting. Seems to me 'the West' is slowly moving towards a more Chinese world view.

est 5y ago
Can confirm this. Many Chinese believer of "Freedom of Speech" was shattered after seen previous POTUS account vanishes from Twitter. This echoes the memory of their own accounts purged from Weibo. And crackdown of Covid-19 "false info" utilize the same method as the Chinese Internet companies do.
- cableshaft 5y ago
  Not infringing Freedom of Speech in the Bill of Rights is a restriction placed on the government, not private businesses. Private businesses have always had the ability to decide who can use their services, for the most part (I say for the most part because companies aren't allowed to deny service based on certain traits, like race or gender, but that's a good thing). And your second point, again, is something private companies are doing, not the government. There's a big difference between individual companies deciding how to police their services versus what a government forces a company to do.
  - OrvalWintermute 5y ago
    How do you balance that with the cases where Governments (extra-US/federal/state/local) have been implicated in correspondence with private businesses to obtain takedowns of politically unpopular positions? This gives the appearance of a Freedom of Speech issue, but it is actually more complex than that.
    - cableshaft 5y ago
      Just because the law is in place doesn't mean governments aren't going to do some shady shit anyway. I'm not trying to say that the US government is free from corruption or stretching/overstepping those boundaries. Hell, just look at what Snowden leaked a decade ago about the NSA mass surveillance of its own citizens. But generally speaking, we do have some checks in place that at least so far have kept us from going as far as China has.
  - refurb 5y ago
    “We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.” Jen Psaki, Whitehouse Press Secretary https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/2021/07/15/press-briefing-by-press-secretary-jen-psaki-and-surgeon-general-dr-vivek-h-murthy-july-15-2021/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/202...
    - jcranmer 5y ago
      Government and corporate cooperation in anti-disinformation campaigns is certainly an interesting, unsettled area of law. It's likely going to come down to the degree to which the government's efforts are coercive or not upon Facebook et al, and I wouldn't be able to tell you a priori if the current efforts do or do not violate the First Amendment. It would certainly be welcome to see some people actually advancing these arguments in legal suits, but the extant cases are turning on allegations which don't advance these claims very well.
    - nostrademons 5y ago
      This is something you can do too. Next to each post, by the 3-dot menu, select "Find support or report post." Click "False information", hit Next, and then hit Done. Voila! You have as much power as the U.S. government.
      - refurb 5y ago
        Who do I call when it’s not taken down? No doubt Jen Psaki has Andy Stone, former Democratic PAC Communication Director, now Facebook Director on speed dial? Hell I doubt Jen clicks anything when a quick call will do.
- adventured 5y ago
  > Many Chinese believer of "Freedom of Speech" was shattered after seen previous POTUS account vanishes from Twitter. That's delusional thinking on their part then. There's obviously an enormous difference. Which is why we're able to freely have this conversation on HN. In China it's a blanket national policy. There is zero free speech in China, as determined by the government. You are not free to set up your own service, blog, site, etc. to skirt that. Trump is a billionaire and is free to start his own social platform, which has been discussed by his camp on multiple occasions since the coordinated social media bans. He has drastically more resources than he needs to launch a platform to push his voice in any way he sees fit. Trump wasn't censored by the US Government. Private social media companies decided they disagreed with how he was behaving and or what he was saying. As someone that isn't a billionaire, before the day is out, with an hour of time, I could choose from any number of dozens of hosts and push a new communication platform out to the world, whether a blog or other. Or just sign up for Substack and say what I think there. I can use it to rant endlessly about politicians, government, ideology, Covid, nearly anything I see fit to say. You can do none of that in China. The context could hardly be any more different when it comes to speech, between the US and China.
- whateveracct 5y ago
  > Many Chinese believer of "Freedom of Speech" was shattered after seen previous POTUS account vanishes from Twitter. This echoes the memory of their own accounts purged from Weibo. Sounds like they are missing out on US Civics 101 then - makes sense since Americans are the only people who take that.
- jcranmer 5y ago
  > Many Chinese believer of "Freedom of Speech" was shattered after seen previous POTUS account vanishes from Twitter. It should be remembered that Trump was not kicked off of Twitter until after a literal insurrection which he had helped to incite. It's not entirely clear if Trump's speech crosses the very high bar set by Brandenburg v Ohio, which you should recall holds that advocating violent overthrow of the government is First Amendment-protected free speech, but that it is toeing that line means that said speech would be outright illegal in most countries.
- jollybean 5y ago
  This moral ambiguity is the underlying thrust in almost all comparative Sino/Western discussions, it just doesn't work. Removing false information from some public social networking sites (and all sorts of other things like violent threats, depictions of violent crimes, kiddie porn etc), is not the same thing as removing arbitrary comments, information about the CCP, imprisoning or killing journalists and citizens for speaking basic, actual truths. Westerners are absolutely free to post COVID rubbish, or say almost anything they want about 'the President' on their own websites and communications if they want to. That said, it's going to take more data from these supposed financial posts (and more transparency on their sources) in order for us to give it legitimacy.
allemagne 5y ago
Few types of quotations could better convince me that their author is not worth listening to on anything related to China. Hilarious.
- wsc981 5y ago
  > Few types of quotations could better convince me that their author is not worth listening to on anything related to China. Hilarious. I love how you tell everyone this is hilarious, but you don't go into any depth why you find this quite so funny.
  - allemagne 5y ago
    I suppose the way I'd put it is that the author might as well have solemnly said that the Chinese word for "crisis" is composed of the characters "danger" plus "opportunity", therefore China is inherently better suited to meet the Evergrande crisis than America was for their financial crisis. The fact that this was expected to be taken seriously, and then seemingly was by being upvoted to the front of Hacker News is what's funny.
woodruffw 5y ago
You have to be remarkably misinformed about Western Philosophy to think that epistemic relativism is somehow unique to the Chinese and that any (exaggerated) trend towards it can be blamed on the Chinese.
- Gys 5y ago
  I am not blaming any specific persons or groups. I actually think its a group dynamic beyond control.

by Gys 5y ago

est 5y ago

Can confirm this. Many Chinese believer of "Freedom of Speech" was shattered after seen previous POTUS account vanishes from Twitter. This echoes the memory of their own accounts purged from Weibo. And crackdown of Covid-19 "false info" utilize the same method as the Chinese Internet companies do.

cableshaft 5y ago
Not infringing Freedom of Speech in the Bill of Rights is a restriction placed on the government, not private businesses. Private businesses have always had the ability to decide who can use their services, for the most part (I say for the most part because companies aren't allowed to deny service based on certain traits, like race or gender, but that's a good thing). And your second point, again, is something private companies are doing, not the government. There's a big difference between individual companies deciding how to police their services versus what a government forces a company to do.
- OrvalWintermute 5y ago
  How do you balance that with the cases where Governments (extra-US/federal/state/local) have been implicated in correspondence with private businesses to obtain takedowns of politically unpopular positions? This gives the appearance of a Freedom of Speech issue, but it is actually more complex than that.
  - cableshaft 5y ago
    Just because the law is in place doesn't mean governments aren't going to do some shady shit anyway. I'm not trying to say that the US government is free from corruption or stretching/overstepping those boundaries. Hell, just look at what Snowden leaked a decade ago about the NSA mass surveillance of its own citizens. But generally speaking, we do have some checks in place that at least so far have kept us from going as far as China has.
- refurb 5y ago
  “We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.” Jen Psaki, Whitehouse Press Secretary https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/2021/07/15/press-briefing-by-press-secretary-jen-psaki-and-surgeon-general-dr-vivek-h-murthy-july-15-2021/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/202...
  - jcranmer 5y ago
    Government and corporate cooperation in anti-disinformation campaigns is certainly an interesting, unsettled area of law. It's likely going to come down to the degree to which the government's efforts are coercive or not upon Facebook et al, and I wouldn't be able to tell you a priori if the current efforts do or do not violate the First Amendment. It would certainly be welcome to see some people actually advancing these arguments in legal suits, but the extant cases are turning on allegations which don't advance these claims very well.
  - nostrademons 5y ago
    This is something you can do too. Next to each post, by the 3-dot menu, select "Find support or report post." Click "False information", hit Next, and then hit Done. Voila! You have as much power as the U.S. government.
    - refurb 5y ago
      Who do I call when it’s not taken down? No doubt Jen Psaki has Andy Stone, former Democratic PAC Communication Director, now Facebook Director on speed dial? Hell I doubt Jen clicks anything when a quick call will do.
adventured 5y ago
> Many Chinese believer of "Freedom of Speech" was shattered after seen previous POTUS account vanishes from Twitter. That's delusional thinking on their part then. There's obviously an enormous difference. Which is why we're able to freely have this conversation on HN. In China it's a blanket national policy. There is zero free speech in China, as determined by the government. You are not free to set up your own service, blog, site, etc. to skirt that. Trump is a billionaire and is free to start his own social platform, which has been discussed by his camp on multiple occasions since the coordinated social media bans. He has drastically more resources than he needs to launch a platform to push his voice in any way he sees fit. Trump wasn't censored by the US Government. Private social media companies decided they disagreed with how he was behaving and or what he was saying. As someone that isn't a billionaire, before the day is out, with an hour of time, I could choose from any number of dozens of hosts and push a new communication platform out to the world, whether a blog or other. Or just sign up for Substack and say what I think there. I can use it to rant endlessly about politicians, government, ideology, Covid, nearly anything I see fit to say. You can do none of that in China. The context could hardly be any more different when it comes to speech, between the US and China.
whateveracct 5y ago
> Many Chinese believer of "Freedom of Speech" was shattered after seen previous POTUS account vanishes from Twitter. This echoes the memory of their own accounts purged from Weibo. Sounds like they are missing out on US Civics 101 then - makes sense since Americans are the only people who take that.
jcranmer 5y ago
> Many Chinese believer of "Freedom of Speech" was shattered after seen previous POTUS account vanishes from Twitter. It should be remembered that Trump was not kicked off of Twitter until after a literal insurrection which he had helped to incite. It's not entirely clear if Trump's speech crosses the very high bar set by Brandenburg v Ohio, which you should recall holds that advocating violent overthrow of the government is First Amendment-protected free speech, but that it is toeing that line means that said speech would be outright illegal in most countries.
jollybean 5y ago
This moral ambiguity is the underlying thrust in almost all comparative Sino/Western discussions, it just doesn't work. Removing false information from some public social networking sites (and all sorts of other things like violent threats, depictions of violent crimes, kiddie porn etc), is not the same thing as removing arbitrary comments, information about the CCP, imprisoning or killing journalists and citizens for speaking basic, actual truths. Westerners are absolutely free to post COVID rubbish, or say almost anything they want about 'the President' on their own websites and communications if they want to. That said, it's going to take more data from these supposed financial posts (and more transparency on their sources) in order for us to give it legitimacy.

allemagne 5y ago

Few types of quotations could better convince me that their author is not worth listening to on anything related to China. Hilarious.

wsc981 5y ago
> Few types of quotations could better convince me that their author is not worth listening to on anything related to China. Hilarious. I love how you tell everyone this is hilarious, but you don't go into any depth why you find this quite so funny.
- allemagne 5y ago
  I suppose the way I'd put it is that the author might as well have solemnly said that the Chinese word for "crisis" is composed of the characters "danger" plus "opportunity", therefore China is inherently better suited to meet the Evergrande crisis than America was for their financial crisis. The fact that this was expected to be taken seriously, and then seemingly was by being upvoted to the front of Hacker News is what's funny.

woodruffw 5y ago

You have to be remarkably misinformed about Western Philosophy to think that epistemic relativism is somehow unique to the Chinese and that any (exaggerated) trend towards it can be blamed on the Chinese.

Gys 5y ago
I am not blaming any specific persons or groups. I actually think its a group dynamic beyond control.