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There's actually a very good analogy in here. I know no one wants unsolicited comparisons between China and the U.S. right now, but hear me out. I've covered censorship in China for the better part of the last decade. >>thread https://twitter.com/mgerrydoyle/status/1348864002420404224
Chinese censorship happens within companies - at the behest of the government, for sure, but day-to-day censorship occurs in an opaque black hole within Chinese companies. It often leads to over-censorship. I've written about it>> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-congress-censorship-insight/tea-and-tiananmen-inside-chinas-new-censorship-machine-idUSKCN1C40LL
Today, social media companies in the U.S. are making similar opaque decisions from within their own back rooms, based off guidelines vague enough to be comparable to Chinese laws. Banning Trump seems like a win, but it's come on the tail of many, many failures.
China's censorship perseveres behind a veneer of legitimacy here because we have very little insight into the chain of command, and no insight into how real-time decisions relate to law. It's undemocratic for *any* company to make such monumental decisions behind closed doors.
I've never understood why the U.S. entrusts social media platforms with key democratic duties, like the decision to censor officials or hate speech, when the same platforms failed four years ago to stem an unprecedented campaign of electoral influence.
It's been 1,249 days since Heather Heyer was mowed down during a Unite the Right rally, how are social media sites only stepping in to ban violent factions now? https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-twitter-qanon/twitter-suspends-tens-of-thousands-of-accounts-dedicated-to-sharing-qanon-content-idUSKBN29H08Y
Countries like Germany have increasingly strong laws governing inciting behavior and hate speech on social media (unlike the U.S.), created by democratically elected lawmakers (unlike China). They know that self-regulation is insufficient. https://www.ft.com/content/6146b352-6b40-48ef-b10b-a34ad585b91a
Instead, the U.S. is entrusting these decisions to unseen figures in companies like Google, which - in case anyone forgot - made efforts to launch a censored version of its search engine in China barely two years ago https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-google-idUSKBN1KN09C
Or Apple - which got around to removing Parler with just days remaining in Trump's term - even though it's managed to censor *literally* tens of thousands of Apps in China over the past 4 years, including western media apps and VPNs. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/04/business/media/new-york-times-apps-apple-china.html
My point is that while Chinese and U.S. tech companies are compelled by different forces - both are ultimately making nation-altering decisions behind the closed doors of social media companies. To me, that's a subversion democratic structures.
Changing that reality in China is monumentally difficult, as Hong Kong is discovering. But the U.S. still has enough democracy in the tank to mandate better regulation and greater transparency from its social media firms.
