What and how will they lose? What kind of potential harms do you foresee happening to the users of social media, as a consequence of that use?

There has been some discussion here about China’s plan to increase use of social media as a means of societal control.

Is the problem that people are sharing to much information, or is the problem that China has an authoritarian government with little respect for the rights of its citizens?

Information is a potent substance. Kind of like fissile material - tricky to handle, and can be used for a lot of good and bad things, depending on who manages to get their hands on it.

That said, I somewhat agree with you here; I feel there's way too much focus on data handling, and way too little focus on who's doing what with it. The problem isn't information. The problem in China is an authoritarian government. The problem in the West is that we've managed to somehow convince ourselves that lying to people, and maliciously manipulating them, is a legitimate and respected profession (that now happens to finance the Internet).

Sure, you don't want to have information lying around for bad actors to make use of. But I think we should also start dealing with the fact that there already are so many bad actors doing bad things with information, and maybe we should have less bad actors in the first place.