Disagree. Saying bans lack confidence is a good rhetorical twist, but bans (or at least threatening them) need to be part of the toolkit. Why? B/c the CCP owns the content distribution pipeline. Producing Chinese content is a waste of time and taxpayers' money if no one sees it. https://twitter.com/DSORennie/status/1305029865851310082

I think people like to use words like "confidence" partly because of memories of Radio Free Europe and Voice of America during the Cold War. They both carried democracies' message far behind the Iron Curtain. It felt good, right, democratic. It felt, dare I say, confident.

But the USSR didn't own the "platform" for their distribution--in that case, the electromagnetic spectrum. The Soviets could (and did) jam RFE/VOA signals, but they couldn't pick and choose which content to let pass and which to ban.

That's what WeChat lets the CCP do. So you can throw all the money in the world at "democratic" Chinese language content. It won't matter. Almost no one will see it, b/c almost everyone who speaks Chinese as a native language uses WeChat as their primary vehicle to share news.

This is a really hard problem to solve. Providing alternate content isn't enough, because WeChat as a platform is so attractive.

(For the connoisseurs out there, I know I'm leaving out Jinri Toutiao, but the problem's the same there.)

Publications like Apple Daily (see below) have a decent following, but with respect to Mr. Simon's work and his sacrifices, I doubt his claim is anywhere close to correct, b/c I doubt it includes WeChat pageviews https://twitter.com/HKMarkSimon/status/1305096762332311552?s=20's

So if you really want to "compete", you need to compete with the platform. And platform competition is very very *VERY* expensive business. Put bluntly, it is not an area where democratic governments can or should play. They will waste a lot of money, and then they will fail.

Bytedance spent over a billion dollars a year on user acquisition advertisement *in the United States alone* when it was building TikTok's US userbase in 2018/2019. And that's before you even get into the cost of actually building and running the platform https://boingboing.net/2019/08/07/10000-censors.html

Lots more thoughts on this, but I'm going to leave it here for the moment. I do think providing alternative content is part of a solution, but the solution has to include the ability to threaten bans, and characterizing bans as "unconfident" doesn't help in this respect.

One coda. I know folks say places like the US threatening bans might redound on US companies like Facebook running into similar treatment, to which I say: I'm not convinced this is a problem, for a whole host of reasons that are probably a thread unto themselves.