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.
It’s an incredible cognitive disconnect
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.
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.
Yea Zionists and Hindutva fascists have been posting garbage
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Not gonna comment on whatever Hamas says, but the actual (actual actual) reason the EU (and even in the US- LAND OF FREEDOM my ass) is pissy is not because of pro-Zionist/pro-Israel racist bullshit against Arabs. They’re mad about anti-Zionist (not anti-Semitic).
Although right wingers surely will and are using this time as a chance to say Nazi shit themselves and yes this stuff should be removed. But not anti-Israel/anti-Zionist comments.
If this sounds like a “double standard” to anyone that’s because it is. Unlike the right wingers and libs (also right wing…) I, and many on the left, will openly admit my bias. I don’t like racism, anti-Semitism, anti-LGBTQ+, etc. dogshit existing online. I also really don’t like fucking pro-Zionist pigdogs (new insult, thanks Hasan) equating Zionists and Jews as if they are interchangeable. They are not. Many Jews around the world oppose apartheid and genocide of the Palestinians because they rightly see what Israel has created and is continuing to expand on as a Jewish ethnostate where indigenous Arab Muslims are denied citizenship, rights, and any sort of freedom at all.
For the EU/US and any other group or country to equate calls for dismantling of a racist apartheid state to “hating Jews” broadly is disgusting, ahistorical, and frankly few things piss me off more than that sort of accusation probably because I have studied the Holocaust under the Nazis and I understand more than most (definitely true for Americans) that what Israel and their Zionist leaders have done and are doing is exactly fucking equivalent to what Adolf Hitler and his goons did. Only Israel has been successful, so far, in garnering international respect and avoiding war with nations that could stop them from continuing. England (the UK), the US, Canada, western EU broadly, etc. All the colonial powers united to back the modern colonial settler state- imagine that!
I honestly think this might be the issue that the US and/or Europe uses to begin rollbacks of whatever marginal leftist movements we have here. I absolutely would not be surprised to see a bill passed in the US making anti-Zionism or anti-Israel rhetoric broadly speaking illegal or considered some sort of hate crime. So if you’re out protesting Israel bombing two million people, about a million of which are literal children, well, you’re a Nazi buddy! And that can’t be tolerated! Maybe they’ll tie it together in a bill like “prevent fascism!” bill and they’ll label anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism as the same ideology and ban it all or highly restrict it in some way. Maybe deny funding to corporations who allow it on their servers, who knows, there’s a million ways to force dogshit down the throat if they want to make us eat it.
When I heard decrepit, 170 years old Joe say the other day (paraphrasing) “I’m having the FBI protect and look into events of anti-Semitism across the country.” All I could think was “does he mean actual anti-Semitism or does he mean anti-Israel/anti-Zionism?” The former is fine, but since when has anyone in law enforcement actually given a shit about minorities like Jewish people in the US? Hmm. I can’t prove any of this obviously, but it just felt like he was testing the waters on how people respond to the FBI being lightly sent after pro-Palestinian protesters. That racist piece of trash Johnathon Greenblat called Palestinian protesters anti-Semitic on TV less than 24 hours after Biden’s FBI comment. It really makes you fucking wonder what shit we might learn the FBI has been doing to protesters, specifically Palestinians and Arabs generally, in the coming months/years.
has been successful, so far, in garnering international respect and avoiding war with nations that could stop them from continuing
The U.S. was successful in performing genocide and getting international respect doing it as well.
I’m very aware of that. It goes for Canada, Australia, obviously England and France too.
That’s why it’s “funny” when Zionists try to say “well, the US genocided their indigenous!” And I just respond with “yeah, true. And that was bad and anyone alive at the time had a responsibility to end that genocide.”
I guess they think one country doing a “successful” and basically complete genocide justifies their continued efforts towards completion of their “final solution for the Palestinian question.” The Nazis decided to round up all the Jews, Roma, Slavs, etc. and mass execute them. The Americans drove them further west on death marches along with mass executions and pushed them into inhospitable lands which they were unaccustomed to. Among other ways of killing. The British carried out mass purposeful starvations, bombardment from their naval ships on cities, etc. The difference in all of these is the moment we live in and what we can do to stop it. It doesn’t excuse the past or make it “ok,” but we can’t stop those genocides now. We can stop this one. Maybe.
I’m sure they’re referring to the Zionist disinformation
EU concerned about genocide footage from the POV of the people we’re helping do it to making people feel bad or think, and we can’t have that.
Censoring speech under the flag of “protecting from misinformation” is a classic.
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