China’s firewall plays a crucial role in shaping the country’s digital landscape, preventing foreign intervention, and maintaining national security. While often criticized in the West, the firewall provides China with the ability to control information flow, shield its population from foreign influence, and protect domestic media.
Oh shit this blew up, lol. Haven’t seen the video, but protectionism is necessary if you want to develop your own industry and not have it undermined by a country that has hegemonic control over said industry, so control on the internet is a good thing. Same with not allowing said hostile foreign actors to sow dissent unrestricted.
Damm you russian spies controlling social media and influencing the result of our election.
So let’s regulate this shitty space controlled by big corporations? … MY FREEZE PEACH!!!
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Fyi propaganda can be factually correct, calling something propaganda does fuck all to prove it wrong
Finally watched this, it’s very good, highly recommend it.
The firewall seemed like a much more egregious affront to information freedom over a decade ago. Since 2016 or so things have changed. Now with ubiquitous online western astroturfing disinformation campaigns, increasingly shit, biased media and in combination with increasingly divergent regulatory regime’s between the EU and the US leading to less than universal access even between those regions - in 2025 the firewall seems a lot more reasonable.
“the ability to control information flow”
Yay! What a feature! Tell me what I’m allowed to know, O lord.
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How does that make the great firewall a good thing?
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Keep deepthroating that boot.
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You’re allowed to know that bleach can’t cure covid
This youtube channel was registered in 2010 but up until 4 months ago it was just private videos. Now it’s about china/communism/politics.
Also, the only short posted by this account is this guy on a Chinese cruise!
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GD_Qetmjbzc
Sounds like he’s receiving gifts in return for positive Chinese propaganda.
Edit: He also posted a video about spending a year at Trinity College in Dublin which has significant ties to China.
Saying that like he didn’t mention in the video that he spent a long time in China
Of course seeing how far China has come in person would turn him into a commie lmao
China doesn’t have to pay people for propaganda, just existing and investing in their infrastructure makes them visibly better than the US and the vast majority of our lackey nations
Did we all forget about the pollution, censorship, and the ethnic cleansing of the Uyghurs? Or is that unimportant/fake news?
There are certainly worse places to be (unless you’re a Uyghur).
The US tried to foment division in China by funding and organizing terrorist cells in Xinjiang, and once those efforts failed, it concocted and promoted a genocide narrative.
- The Xinjiang Genocide Allegations Are Unjustified
- The Uyghur Human Rights Project is a product of the National Endowment for Democracy, which is the American government’s main regime change NGO.
- Uyghur genocide allegations
- American Debunks All Major Western Propaganda on Uyghurs and Xinjiang
- US-Funded Uyghur Activists Train as Soldiers of Empire
- A Reddit AMA Claiming To Be A Uyghur Quickly Exposes A CIA Asset Slandering China
- The blueprint of regime change operations How regime change happens in the 21st century with your consent
Everyone is pushing misinformation campaigns on everyone else. Everything is suspect, not just western media.
Then I suggest developing real media literacy.
How about you try suspecting western media for once instead of taking US propaganda at face value and loudly parroting it online and getting butthurt when people correct you
I do. There’s a TON of international media that corroborates the information, but I know that you all stand from a perspective of: It didn’t happen and if someone says it did, they’re full of shit.
That’s not something that can be overcome. That’s fine; I don’t hold hate for you. Just clearly will not be persuading you so i won’t try.
No, you don’t. No, there isn’t.
International media eagerly corroborated US allegations of Iraq having WMDs too, that was also a lie. Media you like saying a thing isn’t evidence that the thing is real.
If you had actual evidence you could persuade other people who see this post even if you didn’t convince me, you’re not trying because you have none and you know it.
I absolutely do hate you, you’re an arrogant ignorant chauvinistic dipshit, but I take significant comfort in knowing that the impending american century of humiliation will humble you.
The pollution is the direct result of other countries outsourcing their manufacturing to exploit chinese labor for increased profits, and they’re rapidly reducing that pollution with the infrastructure investments I mentioned. The censorship is clearly necessary, as evidenced by the US getting absolutely bodied by relatively simple online disinfo campaigns. And the ethnic cleansing is fictional, fucking duh. Uighurs are directly represented in the ruling party, their language is present in official documents and on their currency. Xinjiang is literally open to foreign tourism right now, you could go there yourself and learn better in person.
The pollution is the direct result of other countries outsourcing their manufacturing to exploit chinese labor for increased profits
The Chinese government allows this… Why is this the fault of everyone else? It’s the government’s job to regulate the industry and manage trade.
and they’re rapidly reducing that pollution with the infrastructure investments I mentioned.
Agreed. I hope it continues. I wish we could get BYD in NA.
The censorship is clearly necessary, as evidenced by the US getting absolutely bodied by relatively simple online disinfo campaigns.
I don’t disagree. But it is censorship; just calling it like I see it. It has both pros and cons.
And the ethnic cleansing is fictional, fucking duh. Uighurs are directly represented in the ruling party, their language is present in official documents and on their currency.
I would present evidence, but there is no evidence that you would accept so it’s kind of meaningless.
Xinjiang is literally open to foreign tourism right now, you could go there yourself and learn better in person.
I would love to go. Hopefully international relations will improve.
There is no evidence at all for anything even remotely resembling an ethnic cleansing going on in China. If you don’t have the spine for admitting you were duped the next best thing would be to shut the fuck up entirely.
keep screamin
Lol pure projection, try harder
I am once again inviting libs to xiaohongshu to see the uyghur culture featured front and center when you search for it. The language, the music, the art, the script, the stories. Did you know there is a made for tv puppet show of nasreddin hoca’s stories, known there as Afanti? You can see for yourself, from the comfort of the couch what the Uyghur culture, that is supposedly being erased, features. In a chinese app. Thats predominantly for chinese people. Go look for yourself.
🙄🙄🙄
Also in my all feed from a hexbear com.
I see non-Chinese criticism of the Chinese controlled internet centered more around control of domestic information than I do about preventing the foreign garbage. We hear a lot about Chinese netizens having ing to use coded language to discuss topics like criticism of leadership, or concern about social issues, or their contributions as will be removed.
Western internet is full of crap, and manipulation, but you won’t get censored for criticising the Government… I guess unless you are an American criticizing Israel (which is a newer thing, really.)
but you won’t get censored for criticising the Government…
You absolutely will. The fact that the censership will be carried through the proxy of a private media conglomerate doesn’t change the end result.
The self censorship that exists on the Chinese internet is a matter of moderation scale and techniques. It doesn’t exist in the West because Western companies have the incentive to keep you interacting with their products.
In China moderation is meant to:
- Protect the rest of the users from bad behavior
- Signal to the bad user that they are engaging in bad behavior.
Western moderation is meant to:
- Protect the rest of users from a bad behavior
- Keep bad users engaged in order to drive ad revenues.
1 and 2 are inherently at tensions with one another. Thus you have the problem where 1 is diluted by 2 leading to a much more limited set of what is considered bad, and an ever changing and political understanding of it based on the whims of the ownership and their relation to the party in power. Facebook changes its moderation policies based on presidential administration.
2 also leads to non-deterministic systems of gating users into fake interaction or limiting their reach to other similarly bad users.
Another reason is cultural / social. Praise is often used ironicly in China, they have a very fine line between legitimate praise and what in the West would be considered saccharine or gassing someone up. In China when you overly praise someone it’s read as a criticism of the person for what you’re praising them for. So typically censorship structures do not take into account sentiment unlike in the West esp. because Chinese is more of a figurative language than English. There is a lot of context lost in communicating text only and audio only Chinese due to how the language is constructed. In essence they prefer to police topic not types of speech (e.g. hate speech, criticism, etc).
The last reason this happens is a lot of the Chinese Internet’s moderation policies are based on the fact that their level of public social acceptability is much more constricted think PG not even PG-13. In that sense the codified language works to create a space where you’re able to have conversations on things that would “rock the boat” without getting everyone hot and bothered. Unlike the Western Internet where social media companies want these clashes to happen because they drive more engagement and thus more revenue.
For example instead of posting about censorship and getting into an internet pile on where nothing happens and nobody learns anything because they’re talking past each-other why not just post a picture of a river crab wearing 3 watches. Anyone who cares knows what that means and they know that arguing about it online isn’t actually the way to change anything in China. Everyone having a take while barely understanding the thing they have a take on is only beneficial to Western capitalists running internet companies that act as treats. Higher education is affordable in China, you can actually go learn about censorship at an accredited program. Surprisingly because Chinese citizens on average are protected by their government from being wrung dry for all their profit potential by their capitalist class they have time/energy to do these things.
I have never been in China, so I can’t pretend to have certainty on the topic.
It seems naive to believe that the Chinese firewall acts purely as a benign protector of the assaulted Chinese citizen. Chinese people are not like stupid children in need of protection, they are smart and strong.
It seems naive to believe that the Chinese firewall acts purely as a benign protector of the assaulted Chinese citizen. Chinese people are not like stupid children in need of protection, they are smart and strong.
Yeah it’s equally naive to believe that the Chinese firewall acts purely as a hostile censor, Chinese people aren’t uneducated, oppressed, impoverished individuals, they are accomplished, politically active, and well to do. The Chinese people have comparatively derived a larger individual and collective benefit from their government than Americans have in the last 50 years.
If you read actual comparisons of “censorship regimes” there are tons of commonalities that are just ignored by Westerners and their Chinese counterparts are made out to be uniquely evil and beyond the pale. For every news article you read about how the National Security Police invites a satirist to “drink tea” you’re ignoring all of the times the FBI does the exact same thing, and uses various psychological tactics to escalate into a position of legal authority to get around their limited authority to collect evidence.
You know why it’s “soooo hard” for the cops to arrest rich people even if they know where they are? It’s because the tactic of escalatory arrest (an arrest that happens without a warrant as the result of an “investigation”) doesn’t work on rich people, they have gates, intercoms, staff, and know their rights. They aren’t easily cajoled into the position of opening their home to a cop, or allowing a cop access to their body. Isn’t is very strange that these very technical legal distinctions aren’t told explicitly to the “freedom loving people” of America? Meanwhile the agents of “evil Chinese government” don’t need to play games like this, because the cards are all on the table.
People in other countries get “dissapeared”, but when ICE or the Department of Corrections shuffles prisoners around for political purposes such as Mahmoud Khalil. People in other countries are “political prisoners” but in America we have the WGAD which is a nice rhetorical trick so that the government can “honestly label” it’s political prisoners (upon a opaque and deliberatley difficult review process only undertaken by those who actually want to go through it for the benefit of being labeled a political prisoner. WGAD has not authority to enforce anything.
People in other countries get thrown in jail because of political corruption, in the US saying such a thing is insulting the honor of the judiciary as a whole, a judiciary that allows the same practices the jailed Stephen Donzinger for the crime of taking on a legal case against Chevron in Ecuador. Furthermore it’s processes are abused to provide legal procedural punishments for missteps in engaging with the system such as the contempt charges the Donzinger case. Donzinger is still disbarred and cannot leave the country, despite winning all of his appeals. All at the behest of a corporation that doesn’t want to create a precedent that it must pay for poisoning people.
The reality here is that you’re not actively comparing things, you are just going on hunches or whims, and if you take a look that’s how a lot of information you receive is actually structured. That is what allows labels like “authoritarian” to have a spooky evil weight. In essence the US has simplify codified the abuse into law, which is how it gets around these icky little moments of “Are we the baddies?” the reply is a thought terminating cliche of “No we’re all just following legal orders, in the freest country in the World”. China doesn’t need to Nuremburg because it’s goal of social cohesion ensures that people understand how and why things are happening to them.
If you guys are so sure youre right about stuff why do you delete people’s messages you disagree with? It just makes reading the thread later on annoying lol
Press ctrl+f and search for “removed by mod” and “deleted by creator” in this thread. There’s 4 of the former, and 41 of the latter.
Mods just need to remove the blatantly fascist/racist shit, the rest of them will can just be bullied into deleting their comments lol
Most were deleted by creator, a handful were removed by mod for good reason.
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