The conversations are amazing
this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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No nation has "free and open internet" in reality. Some are just more open about their biases while others try to obfuscate how they censor.
dunno what your talking about ive never been blocked by government mandate only corporate mandates, and I can just vpn around those.
The US government literally just effectively banned a social network through government mandate.
true! of course your hand waving why it was banned and the options they were given. tiktok could have divested from chinese control in the US region they chose not to. in no way has the US government censored information from individuals as a result of that bill. they censured the business operating procedures. two very different and distinct issues when it comes to access to content.
In no way have americans been prevented from accessing the information within tiktok. compare and contrast that with say trying to find tiananmen square information in china.
in fact i'll help everyone out, here is the ruling
US users make up about 17% of TikToc's global user base. Selling their addictive algorithm to keep a small number of users was never going to happen.
And what hand waving? It was banned because the US government could not control the flow of information to its own people like it can with all the other US corporate/state owned media. The data collection nonsense is just that. If they cared they could have regulated data collection across the board. Foreign countries abide by host countries laws all the time, see GDPR and similar. But that would have cut into the profits of other corporate/state controlled media outlets like Meta and Google.
I didnt say they should/would sell it, just that they had options. The data collection is actually important, thats the hand waving your doing by dismissing it. it is literally a national security problem. you can extrapolate state secrets from mobile location data.
they did. they regulated limits on data collection for foreign adversaries. but again that'd require you read and comprehend the bill.
in no way have they limited speech or prevented people from speaking. the fact the oligarchs control the media is absolutely a problem, but tiktok ban wasnt about information dissemination, it was about information exfiltration.
so again what information has the US government banned americans from accessing? Im honestly curious, because I'd love to know what information i can't access.
Chinese users use VPNs all the time. Additionally, western countries deliberately distort search results so the most approved sources are front and center.
I've been to China. VPN access requires jumping through insane hoops and disguising your traffic as different traffic. Tor is blocked. Most commercial VPNs are IP blocked. HTTPS proxy or HTTP proxy over SSH tunnel gets blocked very quickly due to traffic analysis.
You're also not, presumably, a Chinese citizen, who know better how their own internet works. Why would you immediately jump to doing what you know?
uh obviously? do you not understand the distinction between corporate and government mandates? I can explain it if you need me to because its kind of critical to this whole conversation. and if you do understand the difference, then wtf is your point.
My point is that there is no such thing as a truly "free" internet, whether it be by corporations or governments. You might as well be defending unicorns.
lol, there absolutely is. you just dont partake in it. pray tell me what precisely am I prevented from doing on the internet in my US hellscape, that isnt illegal in general internet not withstanding, which you think should be allowed.
Do you know the difference between the internet and the World Wide Web?
Accessing the dark web is illegal in China, for example. They reduced access to the internet to government regulated websites, who must apply and be approved by the Chinese government to be accessible within the Great Firewall.
https://www.goclickchina.com/insights/the-complete-guide-to-the-great-firewall-of-china-gfoc/
Sure, and in the US companies like Google heavily distort search algorithms to make it so that the vast majority of people see only what's already approved.
So you don’t like that your point was disproven and are now comparing corporate manipulation of their own services to governmental control of the entire internet?
Get real.
What did you "disprove?" It's absolutelty comparable to acknowledge that no matter where you are, the internet is deiberately censored and distorted to curate a narrative, regardless of if its corporate owned or government owned.