Title, I'm a leftist but after reading some things on lemmygrad and here it seems I might have been lied to all my life. I have talked with some people from Cuba and Venezuela (expats) that support the west narrative about poverty and mismanagement. I "believe" that Russia is attacking Ukraine for selfish reasons and that China censors access to foreign information using the Great Firewall, please prove me wrong. Furthermore, it ultimately depends who do you want to believe or there are hard facts from reputable sources that are simply a hidden by the mass media?
EDIT: Thanks everyone for your very civil responses. I'll answer as many as I can!
Haven't been on Facebook for nearly 10 years and have only seen Facebook cringe posts on Reddit. However, I think that having access to any and all information is important (even if it's false), if someone decides what is the "truth" and bans the rest, how can you fact-check and choose what to believe?
Hundreds of millions of Chinese people access YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, FB, Wikipedia etc every day. No one gives a shit, not even the government. The point of the bans were
A. Legal. FB, Twitter etc weren't arbitrarily banned but they failed to meet a d follow domestic Chinese regulations regarding data collection and algorithms. PRC demands that you have to store your data of Chinese users IN China if you want to operate in china and you share your algorithms with the Chinese government. FB, Reddit etc didn't agree to that and so they can't operate legally on China. Hardly dystopian and a logical move to say the least. Obvious requirements Especially since they are in a new cold War against the US initiated by the US .
2.To cultivate domestic social media and information hegemony and sphere. Having Western social media freely operate on your soil means the convo and information war is de facto dominated by the Western dominated and led information and propaganda campaigns and narratives in social media. Hell even for random countries that aren't even designated US enemies we have seen just FB playing a big role in creating and spreading narratives and propaganda that determined elections. Not allowing FB, reddit etc in in a time where Chinese social media and online communities were still shaping up allowed China to create just as good or better domestic equivalent and have a sovereign internet, news and information sphere. No matter how influenced by domestic state propaganda it's undeniably much better than the alternative. And there was only one alternative. Chinese people getting their brains rotten by the hundreds of millions by FB etc and the West going 1000% all in to push anti-prc news and narratives that target them. There wasn't some magic secret third alternative of free non Western non state influenced billion people online environment
Facebook helped perpetrate the genocide of the rohingya people
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China heavily censors Weibo, too. Remember that train crash? And everyone was sharing the truth on Weibo, the official narrative was clearly lies, and then the director of the rail bureau said something like, "I don't care whether you believe it or not, I believe it" and was widely ridiculed for lying again? Yeah, they learned a lot from that. That will never be allowed to happen again, the Party's honesty being shown in a bad light like that.
guy got fired btw, when similar happened here stock prices went up and all was ignored
He wasn't fired, he was transferred to Poland to be the rail attache there.
so a fate worse than death. the chinese are so cruel, fully on board with western propaganda now
I understand that if a company doesn't comply with reasonable regulations they can/should be banned. However, I'm not sure if asking for the algorithms is reasonable due to it being part of their competitive advantage (or so they would say).
I don't see the need of domestic social media, why not a global one? Why do you need a sovereign internet? If FB and other companies brain rot with lies, why can't other parties show the truth?
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I don't think nationalism is good, taken to the extreme you will only care about your closest family and see everyone one else as enemies.
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I extrapolated from this, if what you want is non-US, why not create a neutral one insted of a hundred per-nation ones?
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Why not? Do you mean that everyone has a selfish motive for what they do?
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Philosophically speaking, there appears to be an objective, consistent world, but any individual only has their perspective on it and fundamentally cannot escape having just their perspective. There is no such thing as neutrality or objectivity in people short of, perhaps, formalized a-priori systems like mathematics.
The marketplace of ideas is fake. Debate doesn't work. People either leave on the side they came in with or go with the side they hear the most. Letting cognitohazards just float about consumes the time of good people to fight, and the brains of everyone else to consider. There is no upside to having garbage everywhere.
Not sure if that's fascism or communism?
Are you asking me if it is fascism to not waste time hearing out fascists?
That sounds like “don’t think and don’t hear anyone else”
You are aware you can evaluate ideas in ways other than watching two nerds be wrong at each other?
People have mentioned restricting western ideology and propaganda, but imo the more important reason for this is money. The PRC doesn't want all the potential money in tech and social media to fly across the globe to California. "Global" social media are nearly exclusively based in the US.
Why should anyone in the left sympathize with American companies' competitive advantages?
Why is having access to false information important? False information can only cause harm. When scientists publish studies that are wrong (like the doctor that claimed vaccines cause autism), they get censored because it's not good to have false information out there that can be interpreted as true
This is similar to the argument that everybody deserves free speech but that just means letting Nazis and fascists spread their hate which can only cause harm
That's not the reason why foreign websites are banned. There's another comment that already explains this nicely
What I mean, is that if you can't fact-check and hear different versions it's difficult to know what is true. I understand science censorship of false things but it isn't as clear cut in ideology and politics, or you can say 100% you are in the true and everything else is wrong and should be banned? Who decides what is true in things outside of science?
In terms of ideology and politics that China censors, it's fascism and other related ideologies and politics that aim to harm the working class people for their own benefit
Sure, there's no mathematic formula to say fascism is bad but why would you give fascists the ability to spread whatever they want to spread?
This applies to all parties that mean harm including America, Europe, and all the other Anglo countries that have colonized the entire world, bombed countries to dust, sanctioned people to starvation. couped governments for natural resource access, ruined economies for their own companies, etc. etc.
You should probably read more philosophy and politics if you question that fascism might not be bad and deserves free speech. No coming at you. Just genuine advice
Chinese call their censorship red, yellow and black. Black is crime, criminal activity, mafia, that sort of thing. Yellow is porn, in China yellow is the color of sex, in the way we used to say "blue movies" for porn back when it was shown in movie theaters. No T&A, and if you even show cleavage (of T or A) it gets censored. Red is anti-Party activity, organizing against the State, Falun Gong, Eastern Lightning, that sort of thing.
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They would probably answer with a similar argument but saying that they are capitalist not fascist and that it's communism that does all that, who do you believe? they are saying the same thing but changing the suspect. Does China allow Anarchist ideologies? or that also goes against the working class?
Hate speech and fascism shouldn't be allowed, you can't be tolerant with the intolerants because they will use that tolerance against you.
Funny thing about this question is that Marxism seeks to be scientific to the point that it's really the basic foundation of the ideology. Marx was at the forefront of what would be called sociology today along with his pioneering economic and historical theories. Determining what is true and pushing the boundaries of where we can say that there is predictable truth is vital to Marxism.
So if you think that there is such a thing as misinformation on psychology and not merely physics and chemistry and math, then the Marxist contends that we should continue to make a science out of as much as we can, being careful not to declare something a "science" that is not adequately developed but also not shying away from considering a category of event in the physical world something that can potentially be analyzed scientifically.
A favorite example of mine is that somewhere in the preambles of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels goes on a tangent about science and the evolution of paradigms over time. During his own age, life was often considered to be founded on what would later be coined Elan Vital ("vital impetus" or "vital force"), such that the presence or absence of this nearly-unquantifiable thing was what separated a living body from a fresh corpse. Engels rejected this notion and claimed -- as some scientists and philosophers certainly did at the time -- that there is no evidence for living organisms having in them anything that isn't irreducible to physical phenomena (setting aside the body-mind problem, which is a slightly different domain). Because of this, he says that there is no reason to believe -- and great reason to think it virtually inevitable -- that people will be able to create living organisms whole-cloth out of non-living material in laboratories one day! Of course, he turned out to be right, but the clarity of reasoning to see that in the mid-19th century is very impressive to me.
No, it actually isn't. It is for us in the west because we are given things free of context and education. We are specifically feed disinformation propaganda all the time so we can't develop informed opinions on matters.
So yeah, I dunno. Maybe Iraq had nukes. They didn't, anyone with the context would know they couldn't, and the drumbeat of it only served to help Americans support the war and make the world worse. In every possible way simply preventing that from being as widespread would have been an improvement
You have 2 posts, one that says that imperialism is good and one that says it's bad. What do you do? This is the realistic situation in most socialist experiments, and that's why most have implemented forms of censorship. The US puts astonishing levels of propaganda out to wealthy/petty bourgeois in anti or non-US-aligned countries to convince people to do a counterrevolution and invite US imperialism. If you want to protect your people from this destructive force, you censor and inform about the censored info. This is what China does.
I'm just going to ignore your request of sources tbh, because you've likely just never investigated the resources that claim otherwise. Try to prove to yourself that your position is right first. If i come across mean, it's only because I'm not very excited to deal with educating on basic points for redditors that recently left and decided to try this place. Want more people always, but just not excited for this process and this exact question coming up 100 times this coming month
Do you mean that the chinese government tells people what they have censored? how?
No worries about that, I totally understand your reasons, I'll document myself looking around
I mean generally inform about the imperialism and the need for the great firewall. People there aren't dumb, they've seen the color revolutions around the world and even within China attempted. I'd prefer if my state censored books that support racism and imperialism, but they won't because they tacitly support it
Access to what information? What do Chinese people, in China, not know or understand? Have you asked them?
There is another force at work that is at least as important: the largesse of different media sources. The idea of sampling varied information and making an informed position is nice, but are you really going to be able to practically do that when 90-100% of the sources you will ever see are massively biased and themselves working with and communicating very little verifiable fact? Despite its pretenses, news media tends to uncritically repeat narratives favorable to those with power over them and their society and simply cannot verify the claims even if they wanted to - or would need to spend 10X more time per article.
I'll describe another angle: pick a topic concerning a foreign power that the US powers that be don't like. Take a sampling of articles about the same event in that topic. Now, check the sources. Which government officials are cited? Is it all of the equally relevant counties? Are the officials from the "bad" countries treated with the same skepticism and language as those from "good" countries? Who else is cited? Are they anonymous? What reason do you have to believe those anonymous sources? Does the paper have a track record of uncriticalky repeating US intelligence personnel to get a "scoop"? Are any people from think tanks cited? Why were those think tanks contacted and not others? Why is the Cato Institite cited so often, or The American Foundation for Eagles and Freedom and Democracy and You Losing Your Pension? Who is on the board of the think tanks cited and what is the history of that think tank? Where does it gets its money? Were think tanks from "bad" country cited? Was there any skeptical investigation by the journalist at all? Did the article do any research at all or is it just a rewriting of someone else's article?
Lots of questions to investigate, but the answers will have a pattern: uncritical repetition of US State Department talking points, seeking informstion exclusively from right wing sources, and almost zero skepticism against "good" country sources and intense skepticism towards "bad" country sources.
So in that ecosystem of information, if you were to sample those articles and not be intensely critical of them, you'd almost certainly get misled. What value has been provided by the illusion of openness snd choice? A false sense of knowledge. And a huge pile of homework if you want to engage critically with the media.
Only wanted to say, WOW, thank you very much, you have given a very solid argument. thank you!