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The west censors things just as much as china does nowadays. The difference is that in china the connection to the state is much more clearer, whereas in the we

The west censors things just as much as china does nowadays. The difference is that in china the connection to the state is much more clearer, whereas in the west the establishment at large creates pseudo-policy regarding what to be censored and not. Essentially, china is good old fashioned censorship, whereas the west has turned it's censorship into a debate about what is misinformation, anti-democratic, or even just calling it hate.

ahzhou 3y ago
This is an incredible false equivalence. Your comment here would have been censored in China.
- rosmax_1337 3y ago
  The current motto of the western censors is that freedom of speech does not mean freedom of reach. Allow people to speak, but keep their words from reaching any other significant part of the population. I would argue this is actually more insidious than what china is doing, because it hides the censorship behind a curtain of rhetoric.
  - jodleif 3y ago
    Western censors?
    - rosmax_1337 3y ago
      I'm talking about the moderation teams of various major social media platforms, like youtube, facebook, twitter, etc, and the NGOs which train and set the tone for these.
      - jodleif 3y ago
        Which are worse than government censorship? How?
        rosmax_1337 3y ago
        >it hides the censorship behind a curtain of rhetoric.
        jodleif 3y ago
        I see. Seems worse than jail
  - stonogo 3y ago
    What exactly is the alternative? Compelling private entities to broadcast other people's speech? This is a bizarre position. Choosing not to amplify a specific worldview is not censorship and no amount of mental gymnastics will make it so. You cannot hide censorship with rhetoric. At the end of the day, actual censorship is backed with state violence.
chpatrick 3y ago
Completely absurd, your words having consequences in the west isn't the same as censorship. Free speech also means people can not like what you say.
- rosmax_1337 3y ago
  I'm not talking about speech without consequences, I'm talking about how online plattforms systematically cooperate with certain NGOs to police and suppress speech on topics which the west considers problematic.
  - chpatrick 3y ago
    Online platforms don't have to host any content they don't want to. The difference is that in the west you can make your own platform whenever you want - in China you can't.
    - rosmax_1337 3y ago
      Increasingly, the west has been using the very infrastructure of the internet to censor speech actually. So that argument doesn't hold. Where do you think we will be in 10 years? Do you think this trend is just temporary? Will someone earnestly say "Just build your own telecommunications system!"? Either way, it's actually a moot point, and I concede that infrastructure based censorship is extremely rare, but the "canaries" in the coal mine have indeed died, and people should be paying attention. See the EFF statement quite recently. The real point is that if the public square is on the internet, which it is, then speech must be guaranteed on the internet, just as well as it is guaranteed in public squares in any town. It raises a terribly complex question, of who should regulate the internet to guarantee speech. In some countries like Germany, speech is quite heavily restricted compared to the US. All major social media sites are natural monopolies, which will not break. If you are deplatformed, you are silenced. The internet grew to be something it wasn't envisioned to be, and our societies have not kept up, mostly because the western establishment actually enjoys the censorship which is provided by the private mega-corporations.
mbivert 3y ago
> The difference is that in china the connection to the state is much more clearer I think this is more of a reflection of the structure of the ruling classes: in the West, they are not aggregated behind a single entity, while they are in China. And so their actions are naturally more disconnected from the political regime(s) in the West. Thinking about it more, the "West" itself is composed of culturally distinct blocks ("countries", often with very different background); China itself is much more unified in this regard. There are, as you said in another comment, insidious forms of censorship in the West. But they are far from reaching the same degree of intensity than in China. We have yet to see a Western politician displaying a level of immaturity comparable to Xi's[0], when it comes to censorship. Furthermore, the fact that China relies on "hard" techniques of censorship doesn't prevent it from using "softer", insidious approaches too[1]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Winnie-the-Pooh_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Winnie-the-Pooh_... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party
- rosmax_1337 3y ago
  I think your analysis as to why the west is different from china in this regard is correct. And while you say that they are far from reaching the same degree of intensity, I say that I disagree. But to elaborate much further would lead to unnecessary flames. Certainly large block of oppositional parties and thoughts are allowed to spread, but those large blocks all fall within the more or less same [insert-state-ideology] group anyway which the west adheres to. And anyone who does not fall within that ideology is in fact censored just as harshly as china censors things. This is also a fairly recent development, up to as early as 2015 the internet landscape did not look this way.
  - mbivert 3y ago
    > I say that I disagree. But to elaborate much further would lead to unnecessary flames. It's almost impossible to reach a consensus on such complex issues: we all have different sources of information, sensibilities, biais, etc. Polite discussions with discordant point of views is pretty much the best we can hope to achieve. > This is also a fairly recent development, up to as early as 2015 the internet landscape did not look this way. For the sake of completeness, those kind of techniques have been successfully set into motion in the West as early as WWI[0][1]. This[2] was posted here recently: it was essentially "public" knowledge by 1949, well understood by educated classes. That's to say, it's not really surprising to see the Internet used in this manner. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Lippmann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Lippmann [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays [2]: https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/ https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
johnnyworker 3y ago
> Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines-being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals. -- Orwell's Proposed Preface to ‘Animal Farm’, https://orwell.ru/library/novels/Animal_Farm/english/efp_go https://orwell.ru/library/novels/Animal_Farm/english/efp_go
- rosmax_1337 3y ago
  Wow, thank you, I had not read this quote from Orwell before. It's incredibly correct and ahead of it time like many other things he wrote.

ahzhou 3y ago

This is an incredible false equivalence. Your comment here would have been censored in China.

rosmax_1337 3y ago
The current motto of the western censors is that freedom of speech does not mean freedom of reach. Allow people to speak, but keep their words from reaching any other significant part of the population. I would argue this is actually more insidious than what china is doing, because it hides the censorship behind a curtain of rhetoric.
- jodleif 3y ago
  Western censors?
  - rosmax_1337 3y ago
    I'm talking about the moderation teams of various major social media platforms, like youtube, facebook, twitter, etc, and the NGOs which train and set the tone for these.
    - jodleif 3y ago
      Which are worse than government censorship? How?
      - rosmax_1337 3y ago
        >it hides the censorship behind a curtain of rhetoric.
        jodleif 3y ago
        I see. Seems worse than jail
- stonogo 3y ago
  What exactly is the alternative? Compelling private entities to broadcast other people's speech? This is a bizarre position. Choosing not to amplify a specific worldview is not censorship and no amount of mental gymnastics will make it so. You cannot hide censorship with rhetoric. At the end of the day, actual censorship is backed with state violence.

chpatrick 3y ago

Completely absurd, your words having consequences in the west isn't the same as censorship. Free speech also means people can not like what you say.

rosmax_1337 3y ago
I'm not talking about speech without consequences, I'm talking about how online plattforms systematically cooperate with certain NGOs to police and suppress speech on topics which the west considers problematic.
- chpatrick 3y ago
  Online platforms don't have to host any content they don't want to. The difference is that in the west you can make your own platform whenever you want - in China you can't.
  - rosmax_1337 3y ago
    Increasingly, the west has been using the very infrastructure of the internet to censor speech actually. So that argument doesn't hold. Where do you think we will be in 10 years? Do you think this trend is just temporary? Will someone earnestly say "Just build your own telecommunications system!"? Either way, it's actually a moot point, and I concede that infrastructure based censorship is extremely rare, but the "canaries" in the coal mine have indeed died, and people should be paying attention. See the EFF statement quite recently. The real point is that if the public square is on the internet, which it is, then speech must be guaranteed on the internet, just as well as it is guaranteed in public squares in any town. It raises a terribly complex question, of who should regulate the internet to guarantee speech. In some countries like Germany, speech is quite heavily restricted compared to the US. All major social media sites are natural monopolies, which will not break. If you are deplatformed, you are silenced. The internet grew to be something it wasn't envisioned to be, and our societies have not kept up, mostly because the western establishment actually enjoys the censorship which is provided by the private mega-corporations.

mbivert 3y ago

> The difference is that in china the connection to the state is much more clearer I think this is more of a reflection of the structure of the ruling classes: in the West, they are not aggregated behind a single entity, while they are in China. And so their actions are naturally more disconnected from the political regime(s) in the West. Thinking about it more, the "West" itself is composed of culturally distinct blocks ("countries", often with very different background); China itself is much more unified in this regard. There are, as you said in another comment, insidious forms of censorship in the West. But they are far from reaching the same degree of intensity than in China. We have yet to see a Western politician displaying a level of immaturity comparable to Xi's[0], when it comes to censorship. Furthermore, the fact that China relies on "hard" techniques of censorship doesn't prevent it from using "softer", insidious approaches too[1]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Winnie-the-Pooh_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Winnie-the-Pooh_... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

rosmax_1337 3y ago
I think your analysis as to why the west is different from china in this regard is correct. And while you say that they are far from reaching the same degree of intensity, I say that I disagree. But to elaborate much further would lead to unnecessary flames. Certainly large block of oppositional parties and thoughts are allowed to spread, but those large blocks all fall within the more or less same [insert-state-ideology] group anyway which the west adheres to. And anyone who does not fall within that ideology is in fact censored just as harshly as china censors things. This is also a fairly recent development, up to as early as 2015 the internet landscape did not look this way.
- mbivert 3y ago
  > I say that I disagree. But to elaborate much further would lead to unnecessary flames. It's almost impossible to reach a consensus on such complex issues: we all have different sources of information, sensibilities, biais, etc. Polite discussions with discordant point of views is pretty much the best we can hope to achieve. > This is also a fairly recent development, up to as early as 2015 the internet landscape did not look this way. For the sake of completeness, those kind of techniques have been successfully set into motion in the West as early as WWI[0][1]. This[2] was posted here recently: it was essentially "public" knowledge by 1949, well understood by educated classes. That's to say, it's not really surprising to see the Internet used in this manner. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Lippmann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Lippmann [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays [2]: https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/ https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/

johnnyworker 3y ago

> Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines-being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals. -- Orwell's Proposed Preface to ‘Animal Farm’, https://orwell.ru/library/novels/Animal_Farm/english/efp_go https://orwell.ru/library/novels/Animal_Farm/english/efp_go

rosmax_1337 3y ago
Wow, thank you, I had not read this quote from Orwell before. It's incredibly correct and ahead of it time like many other things he wrote.