Comment by ethan_smith
9 days ago
Classic Streisand effect - attempts to restrict content access inevitably lead to widespread adoption of circumvention technologies.
9 days ago
Classic Streisand effect - attempts to restrict content access inevitably lead to widespread adoption of circumvention technologies.
seems to be working in China. While many Chinese use VPN software, many don't bother with the friction and are fine just using rednote and friends.
Leaving the complexity of attempting to circumvent the great firewall aside, VPN isn't free. Not many are willing to drop £60+/year just to avoid identifying yourself on PH. Easier to find a website that doesn't enforce it.
In the UK case, TOR seems to happily get around these restrictions for free (I gave it a quick check yesterday). I'd imagine that there might be some kind of crackdown on TOR exit nodes in the future though
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> VPN isn't free. Not many are willing to drop £60+/year
Yes it is, well, the shady ones that make you part of a botnet are. Those are the ones people are going to predominantly use.
VPNs barely work in China IME. NordVPN didn't work, for example, and my self hosted VPN would often get disconnected.
For a self-hosted VPN, you'll need to use a protocol that is specifically designed to be resilient to censorship. VLESS, for example. Things like WireGuard and OpenVPN are very easily detected.
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Maybe it's changed recently, but I knew a lot of locals just using the VPN stuff to use the outside internet (though, like a couple other countries, they have a big enough homegrown market to where for most people not having fb or whatever is a no-op)
My experiences in the country using VPN stuff was pretty interesting though... it _really_ felt like depending on where you were physically in the country that you were going through completely different censorship pipes. And things like Apple push notifications would just get through no problem so you could at least receive stuff via push from banned apps.
I wonder what kind of detailed explanations of the mechanics there are, because I don't have a mental model of it that works beyond "censors just tell each regional office of national operaors to do stuff and they all do it slightly differently"
They work but you have to put in some effort to find the right ones.
"Seems to be working in China." Yeah, let's follow the example of the authoritarian countries just to prove how liberal "democracies" have nothing to do with freedom.
The parent comment is not about following examples, but rather that the impact Streisand effect is going to be very limited, and the common folk will not bother to circumvent.
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This is how it worked out in Russia. First, around 10 years ago, they adopted very limited laws that required ISPs to block websites. Things like drugs and suicide, with the classic rationale "won't someone please think of the children". Then piracy websites were added to that. Fast forward to now, ISPs were mandated to install black-box "ТСПУ" devices on their networks, "to protect against threats", so now Roskomnadzor doesn't even pretend to care about the law. Half the internet is broken. More if you're on mobile data. Everyone knows what a VPN is. I personally have set up DPI bypass tools for many of my relatives.
In other words, if you censor enough of the internet that your population knows ways around that, your censorship simply ceases being effective.
At least in Russia and in china, the governments don't pretend that what they are doing is to save the children(TM) whereas in the west we like to drape our authoritarian tendencies under such false pretenses.
In Russia, access to websites was restricted initially "to prevent the spread of information that might harm children", it's in the names of the first censorship laws.
Did you miss there part where OP said that was how it started in Russia? The same is happening in the west.
> Then piracy websites were added to that.
Really? I thought it was de facto no care for piracy from the gov side. Maybe that is just how it looks from the outside.
The government does care somewhat and does some token gestures, at least because Russia is a WTO member. The people mostly don't care.
I think the UK govt is a bit more chilled about it all than Putin.
But it sounds like it's been a progression in the same direction for both nations, so you could say something like
Britain 2025 == Russia 20??
(and not just for those 2)