Comment by FridayoLeary
2 days ago
My first thought was unfortunately whether the UK and other Western nations would copy this to build their own Firewalls. To be honest i still don't think it's a goal anyone is actively working towards and that's a bit of an hyperbolic take. But the truth is that we are moving more towards such a system then we are moving away.
My second thought is how badly Chinese communism must be doing that they need such a massive effort in order to prevent their citizens from accessing information and voicing dissent. We are lucky to be living in such a free society. Internet seems to be losing the battle against government interference and censorship and that is more of a bad thing then a good thing.
As I understand it the idea is not necessarily to stop all dissent / awareness, but that it's useful to be able to slow the spread of "rumours" / incendiary information when it is spreading virally. This gives authorities time to come up with a response if required.
While I personally wouldn't want to live in a country which does this, the flip side of unrestricted virality in countries that culturally might not be prepared for it are events like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_WhatsApp_lynchings
Given that the US controls much of what happens on the Internet, another issue for many countries (not China so much) is that without controls they become extremely vulnerable to US influence campaigns and "colour revolutions".
I predict that all countries will end up with something like the GFW eventually because there's basically no other way for governments to achieve "Internet sovereignty" (enforce laws regarding users and publishers on the web). The US might be last to do this because it is in the doubly privileged position of a) being able to exert significant pressure on other countries and b) being able to apply regulation to major US-based Internet companies using their own legal system.
The apparatus we call GFW is really a Chinese CDC for memes. The CDC expects novel strains of bird flu every year, it’s okay, they closely monitor the situation, research the novel strains, cull risky populations, and develop vaccines for worst case scenarios. GFW expects novel strains of anti-CCP viral memes every year, it’s okay, they closely monitor the situation, they analyze the meme for spreaders and origin, they use the new meme to gauge changes in public sentiment, they fine or jail or imprison particularly quarrelsome netizens, and in the worst case scenario they prepare narrative shifts or outright censorship to maintain a net that is deemed healthy. It’s meme epidemiology, with mind viruses instead of RNA viruses.
I think GFW is more of a fallback (hammer) in the overall system but yeah that does happen "in detail" on WeChat etc.
In the US, censorship is obviously a hot-button political topic (core values), but we are starting to see US concerns around things like troll farms, foreign influence, election misinformation etc and systems to quietly tamp that down. The sorts of things that appeared in the "Twitter Files".
The US doesn't usually need "big hammer" technical controls for this because they have legal control over the corporations involved and can ask them to moderate themselves in line with US law & natsec requirements.
Places like e.g. the UK are in an interesting pickle because while they are _largely_ culturally aligned with the US, their lawmakers don't have the same level of influence on platforms. They can either impotently "shake their fist at the sky"; or they can reach agreements so the major platforms co-operate with their governments; or they implement China-like technical controls.
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It's not meme epidemiology, it's outright fascism
I listened to a British politics podcast the other day called Not Another One and they were discussing that among western governments there is some looking at the UK’s porn block because in general politicians think that things have gone too far in children being able to access to extreme content, and that if 20 years ago it had been suggested this had been where we’d be, it wouldn’t have been seen as acceptable. They used the example that if you want to publish a very explicit book in the U.K., the Obscene Publications Acts would put limits on you doing so, but putting it online would be allowed
> things have gone too far in children being able to access
Look, the reality is that kids will be kids ...
Remember the pre-internet days when the porn mags were on the top-shelf at the newsagent ?
I'm sure many of that generation will tell you stories of copies of Playboy being passed around in the school playground.
Or back in the VHS or DVD days .... someone in the playground would be passing around some porn.
Or, a UK-centric example would be the famous Page 3 of The Sun newspaper.... "giggle giggle...boobies...giggle"
Moving swiftly forward to the modern day. You can legislate about it all you like, but kids know their way around tech and will soon discover what you can do with a VPN or any of the other many workarounds.
I think the reality is more that the government is trying to legislate for things that could be resolved by good old-fashioned parenting and teaching.
Educating your child properly is better than doing the helicopter-parenting routine and trying to smother little Billy in cotton wool.
Previously, it was controlled by kingship Now, we suppress freedom under the pretext of safety.
If you have read "1984", the story is fast.
I'm a korean, And a fake news censorship law has been drafted here. When We asked what the standard of fake was, the answer came back that "it was not important".
It's actually the case. Because they already have standards.
You say that but I’m sat at the cricket match today listening to another Dad talking about their 11 year old kid turning on their phone this week and watching a video they’ve been sent by another chile of Charlie Kirk being shot by another child. That’s not going looking for it right?
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> if 20 years ago it had been suggested this had been where we’d be, it wouldn’t have been seen as acceptable
20 years ago was 2005. We were "here".
Ah, the good old "think of the children" argument. Does anyone buy that?
“Think of the children” is a persistent nemesis of modern civil liberties precisely because people buy it so often! One of the easiest emotional arguments to make is “your children are in danger” because parents have extremely low risk tolerance for the safety of their children.
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Perhaps the children who don’t have free access to information anymore.
Oh, right..
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Yes, especially lots of people with children are terrified that their little darlings will be able to access the best German BDSM content in 4K at an early age.
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Unfortunately, yes.
Maybe it'll die off in a generation or two, when cynical millennials and zoomers become the backbone of politics. But for now?
"Think of the children" is hilariously transparent to us, but it enjoys moderate support across population, and, much worse, it gets overwhelming support of geriatric politicians. Which is what makes fighting for liberties so hard.
The original GFW was literally built by Cisco. The west already has the technology. They only need an excuse to deploy it.
China relies heavily on export, so they can't just block everything. There are tons of proxy services to bypass GFW in China, and most of them have government background.
> My second thought is how badly Chinese communism must be doing that they need such a massive effort in order to prevent their citizens from accessing information and voicing dissent.
Well, OpenAI and other companies training AI models have shown that the architecture of the model matters less than the quality of data fed into it. Same applies for humans.
I understand that the Great Firewall is mostly about censoring dissent, but it's also to keep Chinese citizens away from junk food media sources. The type of videos you see on Douyin vs Tiktok is a great example of the difference.
Yes, the videos on Douyin are politically censored, but they're also a lot less brainrot than Tiktok videos. The Tiktok algo is optimized for ad impressions and profit, whereas the Douyin algo is more tuned to some nebulous concept of Confucian social harmony, for better or worse.
A more nuanced take is that I don't think it's useful to measure Chinese govt behavior just mapped to "amount of suppressing political dissent". I actually think the level of censorship is above the level required for that. It's more useful to recognize that "suppressing political dissent" is actually a subset of Confucian "promote social harmony"- which is not strongly valued in the USA but is at least important enough to be paid lip service in China- and I suspect a big chunk of educated members of government may truly believe in that ideal. It explains behaviors like "why the Douyin algo is so different from Tiktok" and other overreaches of the Chinese govt, because it's not solely about suppressing dissent.
Yeah, I think there may be a lot of wisdom in the Chinese approach.
Right now on the HN homepage, there's a link "The case against social media is stronger than you think", which argues that social media drives political dysfunction in the US and some other countries:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45234323
Even if you disagree with that link, and believe social media is a positive force, do we really need to subject all countries to unregulated social media? Seems like putting all of our eggs into one basket, as a species. Why?
would copy this to build their own Firewalls.
Just about every company already uses some form of this on their network, especially those in highly regulated sectors like banking and other finance-related industries.
More usefully and perhaps "on the other side", I have a proxy on my network to block and modify requests for ads and other content I want to "censor".
There is a big difference between a firewall on a private network and another on an entire country's traffic.
In the US, we reject tyranny everywhere but where we spend our days.
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> i still don't think it's a goal anyone is actively working towards and that's a bit of an hyperbolic take
now this is what Pink Floyd meant by "comfortably numb". mass cognitive dissonance and denial
> My first thought was unfortunately whether the UK and other Western nations would copy this to build their own Firewalls
Various western networking companies already sell such products to authoritarian regimes, such as Nokia[1], Blue Coat Systems[2] and Siemens[3]. China, for reasons that are well documented elsewhere, has always wanted to build it with "their tech", the only thing that's new to me is their export of such tech to Chinese-allied nations.
> My second thought is how badly Chinese communism must be doing that they need such a massive effort in order to prevent their citizens from accessing information and voicing dissent.
This is a very controversial opinion, but the overton window has shifted in this respect and many people often like censorship/DPI when done for "altruistic reasons", and it was sad to see Europeans (presumably) asking for blocking of social media sites since Nepal[4] had done the same, disregarding the second-order effects it would have.
Of course, we live in interesting times, with a major western world power embracing economic policies that prioritize government ownership of industries[5], which is typically closer to communism than anything we've seen in the past :)
[1] https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1748/...
I would like to block most popular social media as they stand today. Both Kirk and his killer are excellent examples of how our most popular social networks seem designed to drive people insane.
I for one can only access rt.com from a European country if I use a vpn. So that is step 1. The next steps will come. Our government has shown itself willing and (partly) able to block content from its citizens, regardless of their intent. Ie being pro-Putin, or wanting to study what opinions circulate in Russia to try and maintain some level human understanding for our fellow humans on the other side.
Moreover a large part of our government is willing to implement something as egregious as ChatControl. So they are not above animing extremely invasive spying tech at their own citizens.
1+1=2. All prerequisites have been met for a European “firewall”. Hate the word btw, a firewall is supposed to be a defense tool. But these censoring tools are an attack on our agency. Every time I try to access something I am not allowed to access by my overlords I hear in my head "You are not allowed to see this information citizen."
I‘m not sure if it‘s different in your country, but I only know about DNS-blocking mandated by the government to ISPs. And while I don’t like that in itself and the ChatControl plans are pretty invasive, I would argue that right now we’re still pretty far away from something like the great firewall (and knowing European bureaucracy I don‘t think they’re even ready to deploy something like that from a technical standpoint).
> My second thought is how badly Chinese communism must be doing that they need such a massive effort in order to prevent their citizens from accessing information and voicing dissent.
I don't quite understand why the first impulse is that it covers up government incompetence. There are other incentives for mass social control of discourse and information.
"My second thought is how badly Chinese communism must be doing that they need such a massive effort in order to ..."
China have visa-free visit policy for many countries, you could actually go there to see how "bad" it is
https://www.china-briefing.com/news/china-visa-free-travel-p...
You don’t get the Chinese citizen experience by visiting as a tourist. Even as a fan of western individualist values, I think it would be nice to have some of the nice things China has, like low petty criminality, high speed rail, and a modern metro system. However, there are very real problems with authoritarianism, including the tail end of covid zero which almost incited a popular uprising, getting rid of covid zero without a plan or mRNA, internal mobility control that effectively creates castes, and the lack of full rule of law.