For many Chinese, the US has showed its true face in the past couple of years. Unfortunately this digs a lot deeper than Facebook.
Facebook is guilty of poor management; involving themselves in partisan politics in order to get a competitor banned is an incredible stupid risk to take.
Given what China will demand and the likelihood that Facebook will give in to 'gain market' there better be some way to distinguish between Chinese customers of Facebook and everyone else. Having anyone in the Chinese government even being able to see what passes for my small page or two would be enough for me to close up shop and di di mau as we used to say in Sunny Southeast (Vietnam). I can barely tolerate what they (the Chinese government) have done to their own people but if the idiots in charge (at Facebook) extend this access to their other customers it will make their recent screw-ups look like quality work...
I don't see how having national backed social media platforms to the likes china does is a better alternative for end users compared to facebook.
If you are a proponent for open speech this will accomplish the opposite since it simplifies state issued censorship.
I understand that bashing on facebook is a popular narrative here and they have made significant mistakes but it can hardly be argued the platform doesn't bring value to a significant share of people.
Ok fine I'll turn flippant curt mode off for a moment.
I don't actually like Facebook. I don't work for them. I don't use them. But if a government is going to ban something they should have a compelling reason. It's not a freedom of speech thing it's a freedom to do what you want with your time and money as an adult thing. I don't care if the thing is drugs, porn or Facebook, it shouldn't be banned. Banning Facebook because it's inconvenient to the establishment is the path towards becoming China. That was my point. We will wake up very soon to a world of banned sites and vpns all in the name of our protection.
What's the use of Chinese people getting access to Facebook if it's no better for speech than Weibo, WeChat or any of the other Chinese social network? I don't see any benefit at all here for the public. Not the Chinese public. Not the global public. The only benefits I see are for governments who wish to control and surveil their citizens, and Facebook. The governments get a nice automatic dissent control toolkit, and Facebook gets a nice payday from being able to enter the Chinese market.
I might sound like I'm being a bit hyperbolic, but I find it deeply scary that Facebook is applying its considerable engineering talent towards building censorship and monitoring at scale. Facebook has some of the smartest engineers in the industry as well computing power that only the richest governments can match, and they have a good shot at cracking the problem of doing efficient censorship at scale. China manages to scale its censorship by employing more and more people to censor. If Facebook builds a plug-in system that allows governments to censor automatically, then every country could censor like China, at a fraction of the cost.
You still haven't showed any convincing argument why Facebook "hurts freedom", at least systemically.
The bubbles of these gigantic social networks and the closed walled-gardens are bad for sure, but Zuckerberg isn't the one that gets to decide what can or not be said, and surely he is not the one persecuting anyone with dissenting views, and much less he has a monopoly on how information can be shared, which would allow him to control people that could spread any kind of information that doesn't align with "Uncle Sam's interests".
> "If both of them hurts "freedom", the one that brings more prosperity is better."
That is a false equivalence (the kind of damage to Freedom is not the same), and still does not show how WeChat benefits "most if not all" Chinese. Even if you reduce to the pure economic argument, you would still have to show that the people not working for WeChat wouldn't be working for Facebook or any other competitor in case China had an open economy.
I did not say that you suppose to fully back western democracies or their governments. What I said is that you cant play "politically neutral" by pretending that Facebook (that obviously affected by some US state actors) is as evil as CCP backed company.
Facebook and Zukerberg personally obviously have political agenda, influence and censorship. At the same time it's not the same thing as totalitarian state agenda and censorship.
I do think it's relevant that a corporation that has that kind of clout with the government is something you should be just as afraid of as branches of the government themselves, but I still feel like the potential for abuse by Facebook and the Chinese government is not even close.
The reason China bans Facebook, I think, is about stifling competition because they know these internet platforms are about creating global monopolies and they want to win or at least not lose.
You're not alone. I don't like this level of abuse of power, either. I don't miss Facebook, and I see that it is useful in some ways. I'd prefer government regulation with teeth, assuming the government doing the regulating is not abusing its power. That takes continuous effort by all of us. It's messy, and that's okay.
Forced to choose between Facebook and a government controlling anything, I'd rather have the government at the wheel. For me this is a "devil I know" type of thing.
Facebook needs to be regulated or the US will become the next China. Once the other tech companies see that they can censor political views they disagree with, they will and the US will have what China has without even the state mandating it.
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