Then that is your app. Most of the missing comments are from users deleting their own bullshit.

Also I am not a bro.

calling Donnie a moron, nor for calling Joe a demented crank.

“Serious critism”

The US government banned tiktok for the explicit purpose of censoring information about the holocaust they’re committing in Gaza

Calling someone a moron is not seriously criticizing them. It’s impotent shouting, which is why it’s tolerated.

And if we’re going to get into the finer points of what domestic criticism is or isn’t tolerated in China, we’ll need some evidence.

“That ME topic” is a full-blown genocide and fuck you for trying to hide it behind some nicer sounding phrase.

I am blaming the g*rman government for their draconian crackdown on anti-genocide propaganda but also the mods for giving in a priori! Like nothing had even happened and they’re already self-censoring. So I don’t know why you’re saying “Aside from that bit of genocidal censorship, you can talk about anything else”, because that censorhip of genocide is not going to be the end.

Also you can’t criticise anything else, because if you’re critical of their lack of evidence for what they claim to be an “Uyghur genocide” you get pretty much insta-banned. But thats not due to the government rather than the feddit mods marinating themselves in NED propaganda and not interacting with anything outside their information bubble.

So you’re just Motte and Bailying from “the West doesn’t censer criticism” to “our censership is justified! How can you expect Germany not to suppress critism of genocide, don’t you know that they did the holocaust?”

which is why an uncensored internet is of value.

Great, tell me when you find one

So censorship is bad unless it’s good. Got it.

You are playing very loose with context. There are reasons to distrust all the Governments, which is why an uncensored internet is of value.

Yeah so your argument boils down to it’s okay to dismiss the Chinese context because they’re categorically evil, but the Western governments have “good reasons” because they’re categorically good.

Surprise surprise it’s just chauvinism.

Your German example is legit, but you are completely dismissing their cultural guilt related to WWII; there are signs of them shifting.

They have no guilt, else they would not be supporting another genocide or wanting to invade Russia again. Their pretense of feeling guilt is purely performative and self-aggrandizing. The only signs are of them getting worse, more self-righteous, more authoritarian toward any dissenters, more deranged and detached from reality.

but you are completely dismissing the existential threat of Russia.

Is their deranged paranoia supposed to justify their revisionist history portraying SS butchers as the good guys and the liberators of the death camps as the bad guys?

You are also trying to be subtle in shifting to mainstream media

Where have i mentioned mainstream media? And why are you shifting the goalposts? The topic was freedom of speech, regardless on which media. And social media has replaced mainstream media for most people nowadays anyway.

when the thread was about internet control and social media

Both in Britain and in Germany you can get arrested and prosecuted for social media posts. There have been plenty such cases.

In Germany you get sued and even arrested for simply insulting politicians on social media. It is enough to simply call a politician stupid (what else can you call someone who doesn’t know what doing a 360° turn means?) and you can get charged and taken to court. One particularly ghoulish politician has levied over 2000 defamation charges at people for insulting her.

Your Balics example show possible Goverent overreach, but you are completely dismissing the existential threat of Russia.

This is you abandoning your own values the moment someone in authority tells you there’s an implacable horde of scary foreigners who we can’t beat without taking away your rights.

It seems naive to believe that the Chinese firewall acts purely as a benign protector of the assaulted Chinese citizen. Chinese people are not like stupid children in need of protection, they are smart and strong.

Yeah it’s equally naive to believe that the Chinese firewall acts purely as a hostile censor, Chinese people aren’t uneducated, oppressed, impoverished individuals, they are accomplished, politically active, and well to do. The Chinese people have comparatively derived a larger individual and collective benefit from their government than Americans have in the last 50 years.

If you read actual comparisons of “censorship regimes” there are tons of commonalities that are just ignored by Westerners and their Chinese counterparts are made out to be uniquely evil and beyond the pale. For every news article you read about how the National Security Police invites a satirist to “drink tea” you’re ignoring all of the times the FBI does the exact same thing, and uses various psychological tactics to escalate into a position of legal authority to get around their limited authority to collect evidence.

You know why it’s “soooo hard” for the cops to arrest rich people even if they know where they are? It’s because the tactic of escalatory arrest (an arrest that happens without a warrant as the result of an “investigation”) doesn’t work on rich people, they have gates, intercoms, staff, and know their rights. They aren’t easily cajoled into the position of opening their home to a cop, or allowing a cop access to their body. Isn’t is very strange that these very technical legal distinctions aren’t told explicitly to the “freedom loving people” of America? Meanwhile the agents of “evil Chinese government” don’t need to play games like this, because the cards are all on the table.

People in other countries get “dissapeared”, but when ICE or the Department of Corrections shuffles prisoners around for political purposes such as Mahmoud Khalil. People in other countries are “political prisoners” but in America we have the WGAD which is a nice rhetorical trick so that the government can “honestly label” it’s political prisoners (upon a opaque and deliberatley difficult review process only undertaken by those who actually want to go through it for the benefit of being labeled a political prisoner. WGAD has not authority to enforce anything.

People in other countries get thrown in jail because of political corruption, in the US saying such a thing is insulting the honor of the judiciary as a whole, a judiciary that allows the same practices the jailed Stephen Donzinger for the crime of taking on a legal case against Chevron in Ecuador. Furthermore it’s processes are abused to provide legal procedural punishments for missteps in engaging with the system such as the contempt charges the Donzinger case. Donzinger is still disbarred and cannot leave the country, despite winning all of his appeals. All at the behest of a corporation that doesn’t want to create a precedent that it must pay for poisoning people.

The reality here is that you’re not actively comparing things, you are just going on hunches or whims, and if you take a look that’s how a lot of information you receive is actually structured. That is what allows labels like “authoritarian” to have a spooky evil weight. In essence the US has simplify codified the abuse into law, which is how it gets around these icky little moments of “Are we the baddies?” the reply is a thought terminating cliche of “No we’re all just following legal orders, in the freest country in the World”. China doesn’t need to Nuremburg because it’s goal of social cohesion ensures that people understand how and why things are happening to them.

yeah, it’s definately odd not a single mention of tiannamen nor the uiyghurs; where it’s usually it’s an overwhelmingly dominant parade of liberals doubling down on their ignorance as proof of authoritarianism.

Every state is authoritarian.

The point is that it’s only “authoritarianism” if the west doesn’t like it.