What a silly, provocative comparison. China is a suppressive state that strives to control its citizens while the EU privacy protection laws are put in place to protect citizens. If you cannot access websites from "the free world" because of these laws, it means that the providers of said websites are threatening your freedom, not providing it.
> China suppresses citizens while EU protects citizens!
Lol this is the real silly provocative comparison.
China bans sites & apps from the West that violate their laws - the ad tracking, monitoring, censorship & influencer/fake news we have here... the funding schemes and market monopolizing that companies like Facebook do in the West is just not legal there. Can you blame them for not wanting it? You think Facebook is a great company for citizens, yet TikTok threatens freedom? Lol it's like I'm watching Fox News.
Companies that don't violate Chinese laws and approach China with realistic deals are allowed to operate there - you can play WoW in China because unlike Facebook it's not involved in censorship, severe privacy violations etc. and Blizzard actually worked with China (NetEase) to bring their product to market there instead of crying and trying to stoke WW3 in the news like our social media companies are doing. Just because Facebook and Google can do whatever they want unchecked in America and its vassal the EU, doesn't mean other countries have to allow it. I applaud China for upholding their rule of law and their traditions, and think it's healthy for the real unethical actors behind our companies to get told "No" for once in their lives.
US and its puppet EU just want to counter-block Chinese apps like TikTok in retaliation for them upholding their own rule of law. Sounds like you fell for the whole "China is a big scary oppressor" bit when the West is an actual oppressor - we have companies that control the entire market and media narrative over here - our companies and media can control whether or not white people can be hired, or can predict what you'll buy for lunch. Nobody has a more dangerous hold on citizens than western corporations.
> China is a suppressive state that strives to control its citizens
China's central government also believes it is protecting its citizens.
> while the EU privacy protection laws are put in place to protect citizens
The fact that they CAN exert so much power on information access in the name of "protection" is a bad precedent, and opens the door to future, less-benevolent authoritarian leadership being formed.
(Even if you think they are protecting their citizens now, I actually disagree; blocking access to AI isn't protecting its citizens, it's handicapping them in the face of a rapidly-advancing world economy.)
>China's central government also believes it is protecting its citizens.
Anyone who's taking a course in epistemology can tell you that there's more to assessing veracity of a belief than noting its equivalence to other beliefs. There can be symmetry in psychology without symmetry in underlying facts. So noting an equivalence of belief is not enough to establish an equivalence in fact.
I'm not even saying I'm for or against the EU's choices but I think the purpose of analogies to China is kind of rhetorical purpose of warning or a comparison intended to reflect negatively on the EU. I find it hard to imagine one would make a straight faced case that they are in fact equivalent in scope or scale or ambition or equivalent and their idea of the relation of their mission to their values for core liberties.
I think the difference is here are clear enough that reasonable people should be able to make the case against AI regulation without losing grasp of the distinction between European and Chinese regulatory frameworks.
The previous poster said that the EU is not restricting the freedom of its citizens, but protecting them (from themselves?). I fail to see how one can say that with a straight face. If you had a basic understanding of history of dictorships you would know that every dictatorship starts off by "protecting" its citizens.
> The fact that they CAN exert so much power on information access in
They don't have any power on information access. They just require their citizen can decide what you do with it. There is no central system where information is stored that can be used in future by authoritarian leadership. But the information stored about American by American companies can be use in such a way if there one day an authoritarian leadership in America.
In my opinion this is a thought stopping cliche that throws the concept of differences of scale out the window, which is a catastrophic choice to make when engaging in comparative assessments of policies in different countries. Again just my opinion here but I believe statements such as these should be understood as a form of anti-intellectualism.
EU? I live in south america and don't have access either, Facebook is just showing what the US plans to do, weaponize AI in the future and give itself accesss first.
