| Since you mentioned about "training to wield them correctly". This is the state of China that majority people that are actively using online social networks are those who lack of control and responsibility. The Greatest Firewall blocks those who are less educated and does not know how to use technologies for the good, block those who can be manipulated easily by other politicians. A lot of techies in China are able to get through this, in fact, there are special routers for setting up the network linked with Google/Youtube/Facebook or you name it, it's privately giving consent by the government, they sometime installed in large firms to ensure that smarter people can use information for the good. Now, again think about the gun scenario comparing to the US. From national point of view, blocking or censorship is not only about freedom. They are protecting citizen's privacy and information for the nation. If you are the president, of course you do not want majority of the citizen's information held by a US company that is very good at machine learning; you also want to think about how to protect or help to shape the technology culture slowly without being disrupted by foreign countries. Mostly of the time that people talking about things went wrong, but once you are in that person's shoes with the limitations/stresses he/she's facing, you probably start to see the reasons. And of course the wsj or any US media is going to troll it as an outsider. It's also under US's national interests. At least that the news in China never troll about other countries. I rarely seen any, most of the time they are thinking about what's good in other countries (creativity, tech, startup). Now, try run a startup with about 100 people and maintain a good culture there - scale it 100 Billion times and think about maintaining it - it's not an easy job. It's nice to observe it, I won't complaint about it. |