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I wonder if this service will facilitate collapse of censorship in dictatorship countries like China and Russia. Especially if those countries are currently su

I wonder if this service will facilitate collapse of censorship in dictatorship countries like China and Russia. Especially if those countries are currently suffering from economic depression like China and Russia, and its citizens are waking up to its harsh realities and are keen to get unfiltered information

kgwxd 3y ago
Not if Musk has anything to say about it.
- oskarkk 3y ago
  Starlink works in Iran and is crucial to the Ukrainian army, but as other commenter pointed out, Musk has business in China, so China would be off the table.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    I will say, if there's one person that might give China the bird and do it anyway despite a heavy economic penalty, it's Elon. His reactions against companies like Disney have been shocking and remarkably principled. That said, I agree it's pretty unlikely. No individual person has enough resources to win a fight againt a world-power nation state like China, even if they wanted to badly enough to risk it all.
heywoods 3y ago
If you are a country like China that wants to prevent this from being possible how would they go about it? Can these satellites provide communication between phones without a terrestrial cell network sitting in the middle?
- bdcravens 3y ago
  Unless Elon offers it for free, they'd start at the bank level, blocking payments. Then they would put pressure on Elon, putting Tesla's ability to sell there at risk. That's before they do anything from a technology standpoint.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    Yep, and that's only step 1 on a 100 step ladder. With monitoring tech that they probably already have in place, unless there's a widespread coordinated effort to obscure it (which itself would be extremely difficult), it wouldn't be hard to find the people accessing Starlink and punish them. There are a dozen different angles the government can take to make this impossible without great personal to the participants. I doubt it ever gets that far as the financial restrictions alone will be sufficient
gambiting 3y ago
I feel like the whole dream of "free internet will bring freedom and democracy to the whole world" died a decade ago if not earlier. All of those states had completely free and unrestricted access to the internet not that far back and it didn't really lead to anything groundbreaking - introducing satellite telephony to the common market is not going to do it. And you can bet that if the service is offered in China/Russia it will be forced to go through local servers to operate legally.
- concordDance 3y ago
  Language really matters, it's a great homogenizing force. Unfortunately, the Chinese and Russians mostly don't speak English and thus can't/don't interact with pro-democracy people.
  - MrEd 3y ago
    As if you would know what the percentage of English-language proficiency is . Ever had friends in RU and CN? Btw, not everyone on Earth seems Western faux democracy as a suitable / wanted direction to move to.
    - concordDance 3y ago
      I have indeed made online acquaintance with people from China and Russia. They are a pretty small percentage of the population. 1% and 10% respectively IIRC.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- miki123211 3y ago
  > it will be forced to go through local servers to operate legally. Not having to operate legally is the whole point here. The hope is that Russia / China will have no way of preventing Starling from existing (maybe except shooting down satellites and causing a major international diplomatic incident). There's still the question of how to make this profitable, if Starling is illegal in Russia / China, it will be difficult for them to interface with their financial infrastructure to receive payments. This could be solved either with cryptocurrencies or support from other governments and human rights organizations. It's also possible that Starlink will allow certain activity free of charge, particularly during protests and internet blackouts. This moves the global nature of the internet one step further. Until now, it was generally possible for law enforcement to force ISPs to censor content and give up activity logs, something that made catching criminals a lot easier. Satellite networks make that much harder, especially if your government isn't very friendly with the jurisdiction the ISP is incorporated in. It's not unimaginable to me that, in ten years, most black hat US hackers will use a Russian satellite network as an additional layer of protection. Even if all else fails, all their devices get compromised and their IP address leaks, the Russians won't give up the customer info for that address anyway.
deleted 3y ago
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wmf 3y ago
Uncensored Starlink won't be turned on in China because that would upset the government and then the government would retaliate against Tesla.
- oskarkk 3y ago
  Musk being reliant on his business in China is one thing, but I also think that the US government may not want to upset China by having an American company serving people in China without approval of the Chinese government? Starlink works (or worked?) in Iran, but International Telecommunication Union ordered Starlink to stop it[0]. I'm not sure if it changed anything because US government doesn't mind it. [0] https://amwaj.media/media-monitor/will-starlink-comply-with-ruling-to-engage-with-iranian-authorities https://amwaj.media/media-monitor/will-starlink-comply-with-...
alterego2 3y ago
It will not. Don't know about China, but Russian citizens already have almost unfiltered access to information. The only major western media outlet currently blocked in Russia is BBC. Anyone can read pretty much anything else - Reuters, Newsweek, CNN, whatever - right from their phones. Access to information is not the problem (at least for now). It is trivial to get access to uncensored news for anyone with a modicum of desire to do so.
- drak0n1c 3y ago
  Linguistic and cultural barriers are far stronger than informational barriers. Which may be an upside considering how other potentially self-destructive fads and attitudes spread so rapidly with the internet. We've seen the beginnings of that with the Arab Spring, and various culture wars across English-speaking western countries. If the world were even more homogenous the whiplash from such polarizing movements would be even more severe.
  - rany_ 3y ago
    Also I think the only reason why the BBC was banned in the first place is their BBC in Russian service. See https://www.bbc.com/russian https://www.bbc.com/russian
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- concordDance 3y ago
  Interestingly, most (all?) UK providers block RT, so it's pretty symmetrical.
  - KomoD 3y ago
    Just on DNS level, or?
bdcravens 3y ago
This assumes those citizens have an avenue to signing up and paying for Starlink's mobile offering, and whether Elon will cooperate with requests from those nations. I can't imagine he'd put his ability to sell his cars at risk.
Vicinity9635 3y ago
[dead]
Beijinger 3y ago
"Especially if those countries are currently suffering from economic depression like China and Russia" Dude, I don't know. "Despite the challenges posed by external pressure and earlier negative forecasts, Russia's GDP growth in 2023 is expected to be 3.5%," Most EU countries would be happy about such a growth. Russia has 100 times less debt than the US and an unemployment rate about 2.5% if I remember correctly. I give you two more links, one by a US nobel Prize winner, another by a French guy who predicted the collapse of the UdSSR when he was a PhD student: https://www.gulf-insider.com/robert-shiller-warns-of-cataclysm-for-us-dollar-reserve-status-if-confiscated-russian-assets-given-to-ukraine/ https://www.gulf-insider.com/robert-shiller-warns-of-catacly... https://unherd.com/thepost/emmanuel-todd-world-war-iii-has-already-begun/ https://unherd.com/thepost/emmanuel-todd-world-war-iii-has-a... I am not a Putin puppet. This guy may be a dog, but he has the luck of the devil. Russia may rise out of this mess as a power to be reckoned with.
- spacebanana7 3y ago
  As a person who expected a 30-50% decline in Russian GDP when the sanctions were first announced, I’ve been very surprised at how resilient the Russian economy has been. I’d love to read an analysis about why sanctions were so effective at harming the economies of countries like Venezuela & North Korea but so much weaker against Russia.
  - biotopia 3y ago
    Here's a very good in depth article https://carnegieendowment.org/politika/91235 https://carnegieendowment.org/politika/91235. "They essentially put the Russian economy into an artificial coma by raising the key rate to 20 percent. Additionally, they imposed temporary capital controls, compelled exporters to sell export revenues, and prohibited non-residents from leaving Russian markets....This combination of factors allowed the Russian economy to sustain itself in 2023 and gave time to Putin, the government, and Russian businesses to adjust their strategies, turning to new markets, mostly China and India." However, it does look like Russia's strategy of supporting economy on strong oil sales will falter in 2024 and 2025. "Indian purchases of Russian crude have fallen to an 11-month low as the price tag on the discounted oil rises...Sources at the Indian refineries told Reuters that the country is looking to Saudi oil partly because of problems with payments for Russian light sweet crude Sokol." https://www.newsweek.com/russia-oil-india-war-saudi-1860480 https://www.newsweek.com/russia-oil-india-war-saudi-1860480
lxgr 3y ago
Probably not, given that operating satellite communication services targeting a given country requires approval of the respective government. And even ignoring that: I doubt that Elon has any appetite for his satellites being targeted by nation states that have publicly demonstrated [1] [2] their capability of taking them out. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_missile_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi... [2] https://www.spacecom.mil/Newsroom/News/Article-Display/Article/2842957/russian-direct-ascent-anti-satellite-missile-test-creates-significant-long-last/ https://www.spacecom.mil/Newsroom/News/Article-Display/Artic...
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Taking out the number of sats that Starlink fields is hard, keep in mind that it will take an order of magnitude more launches to kill them off than it takes SpaceX to launch them in the first place. If you wanted to play that game long enough you'd be bankrupt, besides I'm fairly sure that other entities besides Starlink/SpaceX might have an opinion (or two) about doing that.
WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
> Especially if those countries are currently suffering from economic depression like China You seem to ask a question to push a narrative rather than by curiosity https://www.reuters.com/world/china/imf-upgrades-chinas-2023-2024-gdp-growth-forecasts-2023-11-07/ https://www.reuters.com/world/china/imf-upgrades-chinas-2023... ~5% growth when the west is contracting, specially Germany and the US is quite the feat, what's happening in the Red Sea didn't even hurt that forecast Have you seen the forecast for most EU countries? it's quite dark in comparison And have you read about EU farmers protesting? Dictators must be wearing blue, and censorship may rule, perhaps not just red ;) In the meantime: https://consumer.huawei.com/za/community/details/Huawei-Mate-60-Pro-is-the-world-s-first-satellite-calling-phone/topicId_280286/ https://consumer.huawei.com/za/community/details/Huawei-Mate... https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/China-s-own-GPS-BeiDou-satellite-system-comes-down-to-Earth https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/China-s-own-GPS-Bei... Economic depression? has any of the European countries attempted this?
- biotopia 3y ago
  that 5% growth is just a fantasy number made up by the Chinese government, and parroted by other institutions like world trade bank. No way the 5% growth is real when FDI has fallen all the way from 344B in 2021 to 15B!! in 2023. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-chinese-fdi-inflows-hit-multi-year-lows/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-chinese-fdi-inflows.... Global investors like Blackrock and Vanguard obviously know the real financial truths. When Chinese youth suffers from 46.5% unofficial unemployment rate https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-real-youth-unemployment-rate-041919954.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-real-youth-unemploymen.... When a large shadow bank with $65B in debt just declared bankruptcy https://fortune.com/asia/2024/01/08/zhongzhi-china-shadow-bank-declares-bankruptcy-real-estate-property-crisis/ https://fortune.com/asia/2024/01/08/zhongzhi-china-shadow-ba....
carabiner 3y ago
China is as free as the US. You can leave the country and emigrate to the US, and that's why there are so many Chinese everywhere. No, it's not Orwellian any more and people do not carry a "little red book" with them. Chinese people can choose their jobs, start a company, pursue hobbies like rock climbing and guitar and gardening and live basically like most westerners.
- coolbreezetft24 3y ago
  No one in China is allowed to criticize their leader lol
- chpatrick 3y ago
  Except you can't have certain political opinions without going to jail, that's a pretty big difference.
  - piloto_ciego 3y ago
    I feel like - and I don’t mean to do the whataboutism thing, but… - that rings a lot less true to me after BLM and the border patrol tear gassing grandmas. Arguably it’s better here, but like, I feel like the boot comes down more or less the same.
    - chpatrick 3y ago
      It's absolutely whataboutism. Just because bad stuff happens in doesn't mean America is authoritarian. It has many many flaws but it's one of the few places where checks and balances still work, for now.
      - piloto_ciego 3y ago
        Do they though? Like, basically the Supreme Court is legislating morality now… I’m not saying China is “better.” But, like shit is pretty bad here in a lot of ways. I think it’s folly to look at them with much of a sense of superiority. Now, Russia? Russia is real messed up… but that wasn’t the topic of conversation here. I don’t see much practical difference between BORTAC tear gassing grandmas and Hong Kong protesters getting tear gassed.
jacquesm 3y ago
Of course it will not. Kim, Xi, Vladimir P. and Alexandr (to use some random names) are not going to be bothered by citizens communicating freely unless it leads to near instantaneous mass revolt in which the army, the police and the security forces all move over to the other side. Otherwise they'll just kill a few hundred, thousand, ten-thousand or hundred thousand of their citizens (which they can afford to lose) to bring the rest back in line. It would take far more than a bunch of cell phones to bring this about.
ChatGTP 3y ago
The problem isn't the lack of access, the problem is China and Russia are doing an awesome job of using Western infrastructure against us and their own people even when using products like Facebook and YouTube. When people do end up on these platforms, they see a bunch of pro Russia and China stuff anyway. Do you log into Facebook and feel the freedom right away?

kgwxd 3y ago

Not if Musk has anything to say about it.

oskarkk 3y ago
Starlink works in Iran and is crucial to the Ukrainian army, but as other commenter pointed out, Musk has business in China, so China would be off the table.
- freedomben 3y ago
  I will say, if there's one person that might give China the bird and do it anyway despite a heavy economic penalty, it's Elon. His reactions against companies like Disney have been shocking and remarkably principled. That said, I agree it's pretty unlikely. No individual person has enough resources to win a fight againt a world-power nation state like China, even if they wanted to badly enough to risk it all.

heywoods 3y ago

If you are a country like China that wants to prevent this from being possible how would they go about it? Can these satellites provide communication between phones without a terrestrial cell network sitting in the middle?

bdcravens 3y ago
Unless Elon offers it for free, they'd start at the bank level, blocking payments. Then they would put pressure on Elon, putting Tesla's ability to sell there at risk. That's before they do anything from a technology standpoint.
- freedomben 3y ago
  Yep, and that's only step 1 on a 100 step ladder. With monitoring tech that they probably already have in place, unless there's a widespread coordinated effort to obscure it (which itself would be extremely difficult), it wouldn't be hard to find the people accessing Starlink and punish them. There are a dozen different angles the government can take to make this impossible without great personal to the participants. I doubt it ever gets that far as the financial restrictions alone will be sufficient

gambiting 3y ago

I feel like the whole dream of "free internet will bring freedom and democracy to the whole world" died a decade ago if not earlier. All of those states had completely free and unrestricted access to the internet not that far back and it didn't really lead to anything groundbreaking - introducing satellite telephony to the common market is not going to do it. And you can bet that if the service is offered in China/Russia it will be forced to go through local servers to operate legally.

concordDance 3y ago
Language really matters, it's a great homogenizing force. Unfortunately, the Chinese and Russians mostly don't speak English and thus can't/don't interact with pro-democracy people.
- MrEd 3y ago
  As if you would know what the percentage of English-language proficiency is . Ever had friends in RU and CN? Btw, not everyone on Earth seems Western faux democracy as a suitable / wanted direction to move to.
  - concordDance 3y ago
    I have indeed made online acquaintance with people from China and Russia. They are a pretty small percentage of the population. 1% and 10% respectively IIRC.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
miki123211 3y ago
> it will be forced to go through local servers to operate legally. Not having to operate legally is the whole point here. The hope is that Russia / China will have no way of preventing Starling from existing (maybe except shooting down satellites and causing a major international diplomatic incident). There's still the question of how to make this profitable, if Starling is illegal in Russia / China, it will be difficult for them to interface with their financial infrastructure to receive payments. This could be solved either with cryptocurrencies or support from other governments and human rights organizations. It's also possible that Starlink will allow certain activity free of charge, particularly during protests and internet blackouts. This moves the global nature of the internet one step further. Until now, it was generally possible for law enforcement to force ISPs to censor content and give up activity logs, something that made catching criminals a lot easier. Satellite networks make that much harder, especially if your government isn't very friendly with the jurisdiction the ISP is incorporated in. It's not unimaginable to me that, in ten years, most black hat US hackers will use a Russian satellite network as an additional layer of protection. Even if all else fails, all their devices get compromised and their IP address leaks, the Russians won't give up the customer info for that address anyway.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

wmf 3y ago

Uncensored Starlink won't be turned on in China because that would upset the government and then the government would retaliate against Tesla.

oskarkk 3y ago
Musk being reliant on his business in China is one thing, but I also think that the US government may not want to upset China by having an American company serving people in China without approval of the Chinese government? Starlink works (or worked?) in Iran, but International Telecommunication Union ordered Starlink to stop it[0]. I'm not sure if it changed anything because US government doesn't mind it. [0] https://amwaj.media/media-monitor/will-starlink-comply-with-ruling-to-engage-with-iranian-authorities https://amwaj.media/media-monitor/will-starlink-comply-with-...

alterego2 3y ago

It will not. Don't know about China, but Russian citizens already have almost unfiltered access to information. The only major western media outlet currently blocked in Russia is BBC. Anyone can read pretty much anything else - Reuters, Newsweek, CNN, whatever - right from their phones. Access to information is not the problem (at least for now). It is trivial to get access to uncensored news for anyone with a modicum of desire to do so.

drak0n1c 3y ago
Linguistic and cultural barriers are far stronger than informational barriers. Which may be an upside considering how other potentially self-destructive fads and attitudes spread so rapidly with the internet. We've seen the beginnings of that with the Arab Spring, and various culture wars across English-speaking western countries. If the world were even more homogenous the whiplash from such polarizing movements would be even more severe.
- rany_ 3y ago
  Also I think the only reason why the BBC was banned in the first place is their BBC in Russian service. See https://www.bbc.com/russian https://www.bbc.com/russian
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
concordDance 3y ago
Interestingly, most (all?) UK providers block RT, so it's pretty symmetrical.
- KomoD 3y ago
  Just on DNS level, or?

bdcravens 3y ago

This assumes those citizens have an avenue to signing up and paying for Starlink's mobile offering, and whether Elon will cooperate with requests from those nations. I can't imagine he'd put his ability to sell his cars at risk.

Vicinity9635 3y ago

[dead]

Beijinger 3y ago

"Especially if those countries are currently suffering from economic depression like China and Russia" Dude, I don't know. "Despite the challenges posed by external pressure and earlier negative forecasts, Russia's GDP growth in 2023 is expected to be 3.5%," Most EU countries would be happy about such a growth. Russia has 100 times less debt than the US and an unemployment rate about 2.5% if I remember correctly. I give you two more links, one by a US nobel Prize winner, another by a French guy who predicted the collapse of the UdSSR when he was a PhD student: https://www.gulf-insider.com/robert-shiller-warns-of-cataclysm-for-us-dollar-reserve-status-if-confiscated-russian-assets-given-to-ukraine/ https://www.gulf-insider.com/robert-shiller-warns-of-catacly... https://unherd.com/thepost/emmanuel-todd-world-war-iii-has-already-begun/ https://unherd.com/thepost/emmanuel-todd-world-war-iii-has-a... I am not a Putin puppet. This guy may be a dog, but he has the luck of the devil. Russia may rise out of this mess as a power to be reckoned with.

spacebanana7 3y ago
As a person who expected a 30-50% decline in Russian GDP when the sanctions were first announced, I’ve been very surprised at how resilient the Russian economy has been. I’d love to read an analysis about why sanctions were so effective at harming the economies of countries like Venezuela & North Korea but so much weaker against Russia.
- biotopia 3y ago
  Here's a very good in depth article https://carnegieendowment.org/politika/91235 https://carnegieendowment.org/politika/91235. "They essentially put the Russian economy into an artificial coma by raising the key rate to 20 percent. Additionally, they imposed temporary capital controls, compelled exporters to sell export revenues, and prohibited non-residents from leaving Russian markets....This combination of factors allowed the Russian economy to sustain itself in 2023 and gave time to Putin, the government, and Russian businesses to adjust their strategies, turning to new markets, mostly China and India." However, it does look like Russia's strategy of supporting economy on strong oil sales will falter in 2024 and 2025. "Indian purchases of Russian crude have fallen to an 11-month low as the price tag on the discounted oil rises...Sources at the Indian refineries told Reuters that the country is looking to Saudi oil partly because of problems with payments for Russian light sweet crude Sokol." https://www.newsweek.com/russia-oil-india-war-saudi-1860480 https://www.newsweek.com/russia-oil-india-war-saudi-1860480

lxgr 3y ago

Probably not, given that operating satellite communication services targeting a given country requires approval of the respective government. And even ignoring that: I doubt that Elon has any appetite for his satellites being targeted by nation states that have publicly demonstrated [1] [2] their capability of taking them out. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_missile_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi... [2] https://www.spacecom.mil/Newsroom/News/Article-Display/Article/2842957/russian-direct-ascent-anti-satellite-missile-test-creates-significant-long-last/ https://www.spacecom.mil/Newsroom/News/Article-Display/Artic...

jacquesm 3y ago
Taking out the number of sats that Starlink fields is hard, keep in mind that it will take an order of magnitude more launches to kill them off than it takes SpaceX to launch them in the first place. If you wanted to play that game long enough you'd be bankrupt, besides I'm fairly sure that other entities besides Starlink/SpaceX might have an opinion (or two) about doing that.

WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago

> Especially if those countries are currently suffering from economic depression like China You seem to ask a question to push a narrative rather than by curiosity https://www.reuters.com/world/china/imf-upgrades-chinas-2023-2024-gdp-growth-forecasts-2023-11-07/ https://www.reuters.com/world/china/imf-upgrades-chinas-2023... ~5% growth when the west is contracting, specially Germany and the US is quite the feat, what's happening in the Red Sea didn't even hurt that forecast Have you seen the forecast for most EU countries? it's quite dark in comparison And have you read about EU farmers protesting? Dictators must be wearing blue, and censorship may rule, perhaps not just red ;) In the meantime: https://consumer.huawei.com/za/community/details/Huawei-Mate-60-Pro-is-the-world-s-first-satellite-calling-phone/topicId_280286/ https://consumer.huawei.com/za/community/details/Huawei-Mate... https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/China-s-own-GPS-BeiDou-satellite-system-comes-down-to-Earth https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/China-s-own-GPS-Bei... Economic depression? has any of the European countries attempted this?

biotopia 3y ago
that 5% growth is just a fantasy number made up by the Chinese government, and parroted by other institutions like world trade bank. No way the 5% growth is real when FDI has fallen all the way from 344B in 2021 to 15B!! in 2023. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-chinese-fdi-inflows-hit-multi-year-lows/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-chinese-fdi-inflows.... Global investors like Blackrock and Vanguard obviously know the real financial truths. When Chinese youth suffers from 46.5% unofficial unemployment rate https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-real-youth-unemployment-rate-041919954.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-real-youth-unemploymen.... When a large shadow bank with $65B in debt just declared bankruptcy https://fortune.com/asia/2024/01/08/zhongzhi-china-shadow-bank-declares-bankruptcy-real-estate-property-crisis/ https://fortune.com/asia/2024/01/08/zhongzhi-china-shadow-ba....

carabiner 3y ago

China is as free as the US. You can leave the country and emigrate to the US, and that's why there are so many Chinese everywhere. No, it's not Orwellian any more and people do not carry a "little red book" with them. Chinese people can choose their jobs, start a company, pursue hobbies like rock climbing and guitar and gardening and live basically like most westerners.

coolbreezetft24 3y ago
No one in China is allowed to criticize their leader lol
chpatrick 3y ago
Except you can't have certain political opinions without going to jail, that's a pretty big difference.
- piloto_ciego 3y ago
  I feel like - and I don’t mean to do the whataboutism thing, but… - that rings a lot less true to me after BLM and the border patrol tear gassing grandmas. Arguably it’s better here, but like, I feel like the boot comes down more or less the same.
  - chpatrick 3y ago
    It's absolutely whataboutism. Just because bad stuff happens in doesn't mean America is authoritarian. It has many many flaws but it's one of the few places where checks and balances still work, for now.
    - piloto_ciego 3y ago
      Do they though? Like, basically the Supreme Court is legislating morality now… I’m not saying China is “better.” But, like shit is pretty bad here in a lot of ways. I think it’s folly to look at them with much of a sense of superiority. Now, Russia? Russia is real messed up… but that wasn’t the topic of conversation here. I don’t see much practical difference between BORTAC tear gassing grandmas and Hong Kong protesters getting tear gassed.

jacquesm 3y ago

Of course it will not. Kim, Xi, Vladimir P. and Alexandr (to use some random names) are not going to be bothered by citizens communicating freely unless it leads to near instantaneous mass revolt in which the army, the police and the security forces all move over to the other side. Otherwise they'll just kill a few hundred, thousand, ten-thousand or hundred thousand of their citizens (which they can afford to lose) to bring the rest back in line. It would take far more than a bunch of cell phones to bring this about.

ChatGTP 3y ago

The problem isn't the lack of access, the problem is China and Russia are doing an awesome job of using Western infrastructure against us and their own people even when using products like Facebook and YouTube. When people do end up on these platforms, they see a bunch of pro Russia and China stuff anyway. Do you log into Facebook and feel the freedom right away?