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Wow, I'm sure glad I don't live in China. I could never live somewhere people aren't allowed to think freely or live as individuals!!
(lemmygrad.ml)
Wow, I'm sure glad I don't live in China. I could never live somewhere people aren't allowed to think freely or live as individuals!!
Sure, I would personally feel uncomfortable with browsing the Internet without some trusted proxy, just like I do right now because of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the rest. I would certainly like to be able to legally use Tor, for example, even if people who use it through bridges in China aren't routinely punished. However, I also understand why the government decided to block domestic civilian connections to Western social media and other sites, even if it could be considered overkill, because they are constantly under threat from highly effective imperialist propaganda, and I understand why they would prioritize shielding their citizens from this. Any domestic privacy concerns should be dealt with by Chinese citizens, not outsiders, and I certainly wouldn't denounce the Chinese revolution over something like this.
This is the point, which is better? Leave the Internet open, despite the fact that there may be imperialist propaganda? Or block it, but put up its own propaganda without the possibility of blocking it by the user? I think the first is better, leaving it up to the user to take the necessary measures to block propaganda in general, leaving free access to the necessary tools to do so.
That's an individualist solution to a systemic problem, though. It's not close to enough.
I disagree. I would much rather have pro-communist propaganda from China than pro-imperialist propaganda from Amerika, especially considering how effective the latter clearly is. Letting companies like Facebook interfere in your country's internal politics has been shown to be a terrible idea. In the future, when all children in China have grown up being taught to critically analyze everything they read, an open Internet would pose less of a threat, but until that has happened, I consider it completely reasonable for China to protect their information space, just like they protect their physical borders.