Comment by redwall_hp
16 hours ago
I can't get over how widely accepted this paternalistic thinking is. "People might be viewing and think in the wrong things and must be stopped!" It's textbook censorship, with a bunch of legal tap dancing to attempt to justify it against the obvious unconstitutionality.
We can hardly claim to have a democracy while acting like the population at large needs to be controlled in such a way. It's contradictory.
If you want politically contrarian content you can just go to /pol/ or numerous internet forums discussing global events and politics. Hell, Wikipedia would be sufficient, and if you are serious you would be reading academic papers and studies, not social media.
The fact that these people don't want to do that, and would rather rely upon walled gardens and algorithms to feed them short-form content to inform their opinions already implies a desire for paternalism in of itself. You look at some these people talking about they were "lied" to about how China is third-world dump (where did they get that idea?) and in fact it's bustling cities with skyscrapers, when there are plenty of youtube videos showing the modern Chinese cities since it's inception.
When they didn't try to verify their assumptions with a trivial 2 minute search should tell you that these people want to be propagandized and will always be propagandized. Whether it's American Propaganda or Chinese Propaganda or whatever, they aren't ever going to take the responsiblity to actually to challenge their own preconceptions, they'll just sway from one extreme of propaganda to the next.
These people, by rejecting the old internet and choosing walled gardens, they want to be treated paternalistically. That's why they'll always reference other walled gardens like Facebook or Instagram, they'll never reference older forums or image boards. And so if we don't take that role, well the CCP would be quite content to fill in.
As a society we just get to decide that. We can simultaneously be a democracy and also prohibit people from doing things. We can even be hypocritical. It's great!
There's nothing contradictory about it because living in a democratic society doesn't mean that you have free reign to do anything that you want.
Hell, yall can put people in concentration camps, enslave folks, summarily execute them.
It's great. /s
Look: I live next to a reservation, where the US gov committed war crimes. There's a fort up the hill a quarter mile up from where I am, which was a "residential school" where the US gov put kidnapped children to "educate them".
You are 100% right that democracy can coexist with all manner of depravity.
We get it, yall can happily do enact horrors you feel like enacting on the rest of us and still enjoy feeling smug that we don't like it.
But that fact means that something being "democratic" does not mean that we should respect what you do just because you have a veneer of democracy across it.
I am profoundly grateful I have so many greater crimes commited by the US to contextualize what, in the big scheme of things, is a meaningless and goofy action. If I didn't know that they were spearheading the literal ecocide of the planet while incarcerating more people than have every been locked up, while simultaniously funding a genocide in Israel, I'd probably feel like this is some kind of espeically bad thing.
But it's not; it barely even registers once you start looking at the millions of people that the US has directly murdered in the last 250 years.
But It's Great! (tm)
I know I know.
Americans... sorry I meant United Statesians, are really bad people. We might even be the worst people on the planet by any conceivable measure.
Since we're so bad and we've murdered so many millions of people, I guess there's no redeeming us and anything good we've ever done was meaningless so I say we go ahead and ban TikTok as our final coup de grâce in this terrible and twisted timeline.