As you know, it is not possible to separate corporate China from government China due to the structure of that system so no analogy exactly works, but our day to day experience is exceedingly similar as we rely on heavily censored and manipulated private platforms. Although we retain options to express ideas, there is not enough saturation of other people to view those ideas except to participate on heavily censored platforms and risk complete deplatforming. Its an almost daily topic here, for example.

So the user experience on a Chinese service is simply not different enough for me to treat it differently.

I'm someone who is heavily critical of Facebook and Twitter.

However there is a world of difference between sloppily shutting down vaccine or election misinformation, and actively censoring a Tennis star reporting a sexual assault by a politiburo member.

There is a world of difference between taking down shit talking politicians twitter profiles, and actively censoring the genocide of an ethnic minority.

Ads that slurp up personal data are bad. Threatening political dissidents abroad directly is incomparable.

To say "well they are all the same bad" is to be willfully blind to the basic facts.

[1] - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/what-...

[2] - https://www.thecut.com/2021/12/the-disappearance-of-peng-shu...

> To say "well they are all the same bad" is to be willfully blind to the basic facts.

Haha I’m not saying that, I’m saying it has nothing to do with my participation in those platforms because I know what to expect and my lack of participation changes nothing.

My words are the user experience is not different enough.

For everyone else, check out that great robust example of a web outside of browsers.