I'm talking to my very neoliberal friend and I'm basically praising China and saying I'd want to move there and she's all "But they censor all the internet!" and I'm honestly at a loss because I don't know enough about their internet situation to have any strong arguments. Is the internet heavily censored in China? Is using VPN not allowed? What's up with their whole internet vibe?
The only reason Hexbear exists in the first place is due to western internet censorship. The West has managed to avoid the cudgel of internet censorship because it simply allows private firms to carry out this role, the same way the west has avoided the cudgel of "state media" by allowing private firms to saturate the media with sycophantic coverage.
I don't speak Chinese. I can't read Mandarin. I can't speak on what trends the Chinese government has clamped down on or allowed consistently over the past few decades, but a common mistake among westerners is that the "Great Firewall of China" is specifically about political censorship. More importantly, it is a matter of industrial policy and digital sovereignty. China has refused to allow Silicon Valley to gain a stranglehold on its digital infrastructure, and the west is eternally resentful over it. In doing so, they have created the space for their own domestic tech industry to thrive, while maintaining the ability to regulate it as needed. Today, the Chinese tech industry is the only serious competitor in the WORLD to Silicon Valley. They are in a much better situation than many global south countries, where the Internet is synonymous with Facebook and WhatsApp, or even eastern European countries which started out with blazing fast networks compared to the west, but have no digital sovereignty thanks to the consolidation of platforms.
For some years now in the UK there's been a country-wide ban on Russian news sites. Only western
allowed.
The great firewall is more to keep facebook and google out so China can build its own online infrastructure that isn't dependent on US companies than to keep Chinese people in. Using a VPN in China is just as easy as it is anywhere else.
This is my go-to response. The firewall only incidentally causes censorship (which is easily bypassed via VPN, and Chinese netizens are well aware of all the things mayos claim are hidden from them), the actual purpose of the firewall is digital protectionism to allow Chinese tech to develop independent of American tech. It's basically like if all the internet regulations the EU passed were executed by instead having a parallel version of the internet that wasn't owned by American techbros.
I believe Chinese posters on here have said it is fairly trivial to get around it if you want to, but most Chinese citizens don't bother or care.
Im currently in China right now, visiting for a month just doing normal tourism. I use a vpn no problem, it just makes the internet pretty slow. I dont know if I could live here though, as much I love Xi and communism, it's hard to be vegan and food is one of my main things.
Yunnan is very easy to be vegan in! The guy who put in the work to get me to go vegan there for a year + change and said it was the best place he’s lived in to be vegan (comparing to America, Morocco, Spain, and Greece).
It’s all about the mushroom dishes, apparently there is a regional hotpot (vegan) that has mild psychoactive properties even.
Youtube creators are always complaining about their videos getting removed, algorithm hidden, and demonitized for cockamamie reasons.
Chuds will have you believe it's because Google is run by communists.
It's really just a bot filtering out things that could be perceived as "bad" for advertisers.
The digital equivalent of those pictures of empty grocery store shelves in the USA under tweets going "this must be what life is like under communism!"
It's really just a bot filtering out things that could be perceived as "bad" for advertisers.
It's definitely that, but also direct censorship for political reasons too. See the infamous visit that JT Chapman (SecondThought) got from homeland security to intimidate him for uploading a video titled "The CIA is a Terrorist Organization." While technically that video is up on youtube somewhere, it is impossible to find unless you directly enter in the url. It is not searchable or findable via google, youtube itself, etc. From my understanding, mostly the bot filtering of things considered bad for advertisers just demonitizes the content, which is of course censorship too, but not outright removal. The "shadowbanning" of content often happens specifically to leftist political content and things like videos that encourage piracy.
Step 1 of the West's methods of overthrowing countries is propaganda, through manipulating news and entertainment. The Great Firewall isn't so much about censoring the people as it is about controlling how much influence western media and corporations have over China's culture.
Everyone I've spoken to from China has a vpn, but Facebook can't start a Facebook China over there. That seems to be the entire effect of the great firewall.
Imagine you go online and don’t have to be forced fed western imperialism. A fucking dream come true
The day the internet dies once and for all will be a great day
Everyone (I mean fucking everyone) is extremely online. For some reason instagram, twitter, facebook and TikTok don’t count though
Good for China
i mean you can just use the chinese version of those 4 websites if you move to china it's not gonna kill you
You have to ground it in western social media being used to organize many severe terrorist attacks within China and western companies refusing to follow Chinese laws. In additon you have the semi-disclosed Western cyberwarfare program to not just launch hacks and DDOS attacks and the like but use jump servers in foreign nations to disguise them as coming from abroad, from our enemies.
It is heavily censored, but most censorship is done by individuals and copyrights holders, same as in the west. For example, there was a notorious round of book bans last week, but it was initiated by a famous author using his leverage to coerce his publisher, which is sort of a monopoly to ban other works. Because the company owns the copyrights the authors can't go elsewhere. I don't remember who this guy is or what got banned, because it was relatively limited. There was a much more infamous banning wave started by the dog shit soul land author a few years ago.
The thing is, this happens in the west all the time, and the problem is not political, it's material, in that the book market rewards few participants and many authors have to agree to onerous terms. Tho the authors that get popular may tend to be dog shit because they flatter liberal values like the 3 body problem. But it's probably mostly random.
So if you are concerned about censorship you should be against copyright and for a welfare net for authors, and better contracts for authors.
All you have to do to get around the Great Firewall is use a VPN. Very easy.
its very heavily censored, yeah. most people can use vpns.
this has some carry on issues with lgbt organizations and support groups, most are very local and in person, its a bit hard to set up sites and get approval
