[coldtea]

>Yet here you are, criticising them with absolutely 0 fear of any kind of repercussion, and you could be 100 times harsher and still expect nothing wrong happening

How benevolent! Zero fear as a person with insignificant reach and following, commenting on a tech forum (and under a nickname). What a feat!

Try having 0 fear as a journalist doing your job. Or as a whistleblower. Or as a content creator.

Even mere regular people expressing counter to the party line views in major issues on social media are fired, censored, harassed by the police, "fact checked" into social media bans, increasingly the target of new related laws (recent examples from UK, France), and so on.

Heck, just a couple of weeks ago students supporting Palestine in US universities were doxxed, threatened, and had a coordinated effort to render them "unhireable".

[andsoitis]

> Try having 0 fear as a journalist doing your job. Or as a whistleblower. Or as a content creator.

Journalists, whistleblowers, and content creators in the west are living in fear of governments targeting them for saying things the government doesn't like?

[raxxorraxor]

Yes, they do and Thierry Breton is on the frontline in this fight. He proposed legislation that would have endangered free journalism and protection of their sources aside from the fight for editorial control of social media. And he did that multiple times, every time to protect particular interests that fool people that have diffuse fears about social media.

[lm28469]

I think you don't understand how china operates. You conflate so many things at once, most of these aren't governmental censorship. Companies firing people, advertiser dropping influencers, being fact checked, &c. has nothing to do with the government

Do you know what censorship is ? Do you know how china enforce censorship ? and at what scale ? If so you can't say in good faith that EU = China.

[coldtea]

>I think you don't understand how china operates. You conflate so many things at once, most of these aren't governmental censorship.

A lot of these is outsourced governmental censorship.

And all of these support a single narrative, in lock-step about all kinds of issues.

>Companies firing people, advertiser dropping influencers, being fact checked, &c. has nothing to do with the government

Yeah, just happens to coincide with domestic and foreign policy agendas and narratives the government pushes, and government affiliated/sponsored overt or covert "fact checkers" and "independent bodies", all the way to direct orders from the government. Read on "The Twitter Files: The Censorship Industrial Complex".

The private sector companie don't have to be told what to do: they just see where the wind goes and act accordingly. Nobody was fired for being pro-narrative or for firing anti-narrative people. But increasingly they are also told what to do, threatened with related ("disinformation") or unrelated (taxes and such) violations, and such.

>Do you know what censorship is ? Do you know how china enforce censorship ? and at what scale ? If so you can't say in good faith that EU = China.

No, but I can say that I give very few fucks in what China does, but as a person in the EU I give many fucks what the EU does, and how the public discourse is getting increasingly less open than in past decades.

(I wouldn't give much fucks about what the US does internally either, but unfortunately, unlike China, they also export it)

[lm28469]

You're free to think whatever you want, just don't expect people to swallow the "EU = literal China" without commenting, especially if you admit of not knowing much about half of your statement. I have yet to see an argument being strengthened by the "it's literally china", "it's literally hitler", &c. techniques

[coldtea]

>You're free to think whatever you want, just don't expect people to swallow the "EU = literal China"

Note how nowhere in this thread I said "EU = literal China" or anything to that effect.

[ethanbond]

Matt Taibbi on the Twitter Files:

“There's no evidence — that I've seen — of any government involvement in the laptop story."

[coldtea]

Matt Taibbi also on the Twitter Files: thousands of lines, citations, and evidence about goverment directly and covertly asking Big Tech to censor content and people on all kinds of issues, keeping tabs on how that goes, threatening, and so on.

Which is actually pertinent to the discussion, as opposed to Biden's son laptop.

[ethanbond]

The government had a more direct “report content” button. Twitter is free, has been free, continues to be free, to ignore or actively reject almost all such requests. These rights are extremely well-established, extremely well-defended, extremely well-known to the lawyers Twitter has on staff. The US has a rich history of being successfully sued for coercing private parties, which Twitter has still never claimed actually occurred to them.

[mazurnification]

If you are not in Turkey than it might be free: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4019109-twitters-turke...

[coldtea]

>Twitter is free, has been free, continues to be free, to ignore or actively reject almost all such requests.

Of course it's free to ignore or actively reject all such requests from an entity like the government. Kind of like how a shop owner is free to ignore requests from the goodfellas that pass by and say "Great shop you got here. It would be a shame if anything happened to it".

[nindalf]

> Read on "The Twitter Files: The Censorship Industrial Complex".

lol

[coldtea]

Yeah, "lol". It's not like "reputable sources" confirmed it. Like, you know, Saddam's WMDs, or the Steele Dossier, or Biden's laptop being fake news.