Comment by bloopernova
3 days ago
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri:
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
Maybe this soundbite applies in an information vacuum like North Korea or ironically, and to a lesser extent, China. But in an environment where there is too much information for people to process, and truth is drowned out by lies and nonsense on social media feeds, it works against society.
It's bad enough that US based social media corporations are allowed to wash their hands of responsibility for the content on their platform and add to the executive bonus pool in the process. But having a hostile government control a platform is just insane.
There is a middle ground between being bundled into the back of a police car if someone speaks against their government, and freely allowing enemies to manipulate your population.
The problem is that it's the government who decides who the enemies are when silencing "the words of enemies"
> hostile government
I don't recall us being at war or anything with China. For example, most of our crap is made there and shipped here with barely a look. If China were truly hostile and combative like everyone claims, they could literally import bombs and spies via those means.
Is this just the Red Scare 2.0? I've had way more issue with American oligarchs and politicians fucking over America's values and our way of life than China in the past few years/decades, that is for sure.
If buying a plastic toilet bowl cleaner, I don't care where it comes from. If buying a 5G network equipment, we do care. Most of the stuff we buy from China is plastic junk.
1 reply →
There's nothing free-flow about TikTok, though. Like Twitter/X, Instagram, etc it's actually a carefully curated experience that can be tuned opaquely by whoever runs it to control the flow of information. The US took umbrage to this being in the direct hands of a foreign adversary.
TikTok is a restricted information environment controlled and manipulated by literal tyrants. Subjects that are disfavored by the CCP are heavily penalized by their algorithm [1]
if you are looking to safeguard against tyranny step 1 is to not have the CCP be in full control of your country's public square
[1] https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/A-Tik-Tok-ing...
Google the phase "flood the zone with shit". Your strategy only works if most of the people speaking/writing are genuinely trying to make the world a better place. If state actors are trying to flood the zone with anything and everything, then it becomes impossible for John Everyman to distinguish signal from noise.
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