I’ve wonder for a while how censorship will be sold in the west given that western propagandists made freedom of speech the key differentiating factor between the west and China. Turns out that you can just say you’re removing misinformation, and liberals will defend censorship. It’s an incredible cognitive disconnect where they think that Chinese government curating information to remove harmful content is evil and nefarious, but their own government doing it is good and wholesome.
The very foundation of the western liberals ideology is that their countries are democratic. The more a country is different from them the less democratic they think it is. There’s no disconnect because they never asked themselves what are the signs that “the people have power”, and whether or not those signs can be seen elsewhere.
Basically they use the opposite of the scientific method. They think they know something in the first place so they twist the facts in order to confirm this a priori knowledge, instead of making hypothesis and observing to learn how their hypothesis confronts to observation.
The Trump win/Clinton loss plus the several (now-debunked) Russiagate scandals have been godsends for manufacturing the consent of Democrat-leaning Americans to embrace the censorship of “misinformation, malinformation, and disinformation”. My gen-x professional-managerial class peers are believers, despite my deprogramming efforts.
yeah, stuff like Russiagate is basically taken as gospel by the libs even though it has been thoroughly debunked at this point. That was an absolutely brilliant piece of propaganda that convinced large swaths of US public that Russia is able to have significant influence on US domestic opinion.
Musk pulled all the wires out of the walls when he bought Twitter, because he didn’t understand what they did. He fired all the engineers who put those wires in, because engineers cost money. He’s paywalled everything mainstream, under the theory that he can extort all the other media orgs who reference his site. And now all that’s left is various flavors of shitpost, gray/black market trade, and competing strains of propaganda.
I don’t think censorship on Twitter is really possible in the way it was before it was sold. Not when you’ve downsized the department responsible for censoring because shit costs money.
It’s an incredible cognitive disconnect where they think that Chinese government curating information to remove harmful content is evil and nefarious, but their own government doing it is good and wholesome.
The fight with China illustrates the power of mass media and the means by which it is weaponized. One could compare digital “free speech” with the same “gun rights” debate we were fixated on a decade ago. What’s being argued over isn’t freedom but control.
An Australian plutocrat curating content on a corporate news feed in order to influence public opinion to the benefit of a bunch of Murray Rothbard die-hards is totally cool under a government by and for Silicon Valley AnCaps. In the same way, a bunch of hogs buying AR-15s from a Texas factory run by an open fascist is totally cool under a government by and for white nationalists.
Any opposition to said Australian plutocrat injecting bigotry-laden gossip and hysteria-inducing pseudoscience into public media is subversive from the perspective of the AnCap state leadership. In the same way, any effort to disarm a bunch of white nationalists intent on corralling brown people into labor camps and exterminating dissidents is subversive from the perspective of the Fascist state leadership.
So I wouldn’t call it dissonant, save for the way in which the language is abused to provoke sympathy from a gullible audience.
I agree, but there is still a case of applying a different standard to increasing domestic censorship. And we’re seeing it being done fairly brazenly now. For example, Canada just passed bill C-11 which is vaguely worded and gives the government a lot of broad powers to censor content. We’re starting to see similar laws passed in EU as well. The government having the authority to decide what content constitutes misinformation, and to censor content that it considers harmful is precisely what liberals criticize in China saying that makes Chinese system authoritarian.
The government having the authority to decide what content constitutes misinformation, and to censor content that it considers harmful is precisely what liberals criticize in China saying that makes Chinese system authoritarian.
Its what they say they’re complaining about. But more practically, what they’re complaining about is the inability to disseminate their own misinformation within a rival nation’s borders. They do not have any interest in Chinese media inundating American media centers, as evidenced by the banning of Confucius Centers around American Universities and the closure of the Houston Consulate office, as well as the threatened state censorship of TikTok and Tencent inside the US.
The criticism ultimately boils down to the specific content of the message. Only “true” messages can be considered subject to censorship. Anything we flag as “false” is treated as a form of attack by a rival power or subversive fifth column, not a legitimate expression of speech.
Exactly, what it really comes down to is that they just want their narrative to be dominant. And we see this with libs on lemmy as well. They get very upset when they’re exposed to contrary views. All the rhetoric about freedom of expression is just that.
I’ve wonder for a while how censorship will be sold in the west given that western propagandists made freedom of speech the key differentiating factor between the west and China. Turns out that you can just say you’re removing misinformation, and liberals will defend censorship. It’s an incredible cognitive disconnect where they think that Chinese government curating information to remove harmful content is evil and nefarious, but their own government doing it is good and wholesome.
The very foundation of the western liberals ideology is that their countries are democratic. The more a country is different from them the less democratic they think it is. There’s no disconnect because they never asked themselves what are the signs that “the people have power”, and whether or not those signs can be seen elsewhere.
Basically they use the opposite of the scientific method. They think they know something in the first place so they twist the facts in order to confirm this a priori knowledge, instead of making hypothesis and observing to learn how their hypothesis confronts to observation.
indeed
The Trump win/Clinton loss plus the several (now-debunked) Russiagate scandals have been godsends for manufacturing the consent of Democrat-leaning Americans to embrace the censorship of “misinformation, malinformation, and disinformation”. My gen-x professional-managerial class peers are believers, despite my deprogramming efforts.
yeah, stuff like Russiagate is basically taken as gospel by the libs even though it has been thoroughly debunked at this point. That was an absolutely brilliant piece of propaganda that convinced large swaths of US public that Russia is able to have significant influence on US domestic opinion.
Musk pulled all the wires out of the walls when he bought Twitter, because he didn’t understand what they did. He fired all the engineers who put those wires in, because engineers cost money. He’s paywalled everything mainstream, under the theory that he can extort all the other media orgs who reference his site. And now all that’s left is various flavors of shitpost, gray/black market trade, and competing strains of propaganda.
I don’t think censorship on Twitter is really possible in the way it was before it was sold. Not when you’ve downsized the department responsible for censoring because shit costs money.
The fight with China illustrates the power of mass media and the means by which it is weaponized. One could compare digital “free speech” with the same “gun rights” debate we were fixated on a decade ago. What’s being argued over isn’t freedom but control.
An Australian plutocrat curating content on a corporate news feed in order to influence public opinion to the benefit of a bunch of Murray Rothbard die-hards is totally cool under a government by and for Silicon Valley AnCaps. In the same way, a bunch of hogs buying AR-15s from a Texas factory run by an open fascist is totally cool under a government by and for white nationalists.
Any opposition to said Australian plutocrat injecting bigotry-laden gossip and hysteria-inducing pseudoscience into public media is subversive from the perspective of the AnCap state leadership. In the same way, any effort to disarm a bunch of white nationalists intent on corralling brown people into labor camps and exterminating dissidents is subversive from the perspective of the Fascist state leadership.
So I wouldn’t call it dissonant, save for the way in which the language is abused to provoke sympathy from a gullible audience.
I agree, but there is still a case of applying a different standard to increasing domestic censorship. And we’re seeing it being done fairly brazenly now. For example, Canada just passed bill C-11 which is vaguely worded and gives the government a lot of broad powers to censor content. We’re starting to see similar laws passed in EU as well. The government having the authority to decide what content constitutes misinformation, and to censor content that it considers harmful is precisely what liberals criticize in China saying that makes Chinese system authoritarian.
Its what they say they’re complaining about. But more practically, what they’re complaining about is the inability to disseminate their own misinformation within a rival nation’s borders. They do not have any interest in Chinese media inundating American media centers, as evidenced by the banning of Confucius Centers around American Universities and the closure of the Houston Consulate office, as well as the threatened state censorship of TikTok and Tencent inside the US.
The criticism ultimately boils down to the specific content of the message. Only “true” messages can be considered subject to censorship. Anything we flag as “false” is treated as a form of attack by a rival power or subversive fifth column, not a legitimate expression of speech.
Exactly, what it really comes down to is that they just want their narrative to be dominant. And we see this with libs on lemmy as well. They get very upset when they’re exposed to contrary views. All the rhetoric about freedom of expression is just that.