Another false equivalence, not at all the same as in the West. This is government censorship scrubbing all search results from pre-2005. That Google update made it harder to search for groups that had put out misinformation and scammy SEO stuff, like googlebombing ("miserable failure" returns George W. Bush). Performing editorial or curatorial work is not in any way the same as a purge.
There is an active war on the Internet Archive, et al. in the West by private corporations seeking to monopolize information. How is this a false equivalence? Glass houses. Remember Aaron Swartz.
The difference is that we can fight back in the West, and on this particular topic we are largely succeeding so far. The people of China cannot fight back against their government, have already lost, and have no recourse.
Absent a drastic change in human nature, we are always going to have people who want to do these sorts of crappy things, in any society. In China, those people have the backing of the government. Here, they're just corporations (not that we don't have crappy government propaganda machines too). Yes, I would absolutely agree that corporations have much more power than they should. But their power is not absolute, by even the wildest stretch of the imagination, and ultimately they're are just another set of people who can -- and do, often enough -- lose when they try to impose their will on others.
> The difference is that we can fight back in the West, and on this particular topic we are largely succeeding so far.
By what metrics exactly?
Most people agree that Google etc results are increasingly useless, and it won't be long before AI content is based on previous AI content and all of the limitations inherent to that. Anything of value will be locked up and metered out based on class.
Given how captured by capital our political systems are in the West, it seems like only a matter of time before things are exponentially worse than our present point in the decline.
The Internet Archive jumped the shark and brazenly broke the law hoping they'd retroactively get pardoned for it. I dearly hope that the archive survives this lawsuit, but they 100% brought it on themselves.
You think you are being a critical thinker, but you are just playing into anti-Western propaganda that makes it seem like there is no difference between the two. It should be pretty clear that China has the most sophisticated propaganda system in the world, and you have been ensnared by it.
Continuing to the next step of this argument that has been had before ad nauseum: the West is arguably worse in these regards because China et al. make no bones about preferring order to freedom, while we nominally tout our "opportunity" while actually limiting it to a degree such that conversations like the one we're having take place. (Your argument's only refuge is in casting your opponents in this debate as hysterical, which is ironically a hysterical position to take in-and-of-itself. Measure the actual merits, please.)
Oh please. The whole "no one is free anywhere, but at least those other people are honest about it" garbage. There should be a logical fallacy named after this sort of argument.
People in the West are measurably, significantly freer than people in China. That doesn't mean the West is perfect. That doesn't mean that there aren't bad actors in government and in the private sector who want to introduce more systems of control and propaganda.
But the difference is that we're allowed to speak out, protest, and fight against these people, and that allowance is enshrined in the lowest level of laws in most Western nations. Again: not perfect, and the worst of the bad actors will try to bend those laws to find loopholes to silence dissent. And sometimes they'll even succeed at that.
That is wildly different from an authoritarian censorship state like China where you get immediately deplatformed if you say things the government doesn't like. And that's the lucky outcome; annoy the government too much and they'll do far worse to you.
You're comparing ideal to ideal, not practical reality to practical reality. Here's a fact: the Chinese middle class is the size of the US's entire population. The whole thing. Citizens, residents, undocumented immigrants. That's an economic freedom that Americans would - and sometimes do, if you consider law enforcement and the downstream effects of the actions of financial, medical, and industrial professionals - kill for. Which is actually a part of the way American censorship works: empower a buffer class who is preoccupied with maintaining (and lecturing the rest of us about) their political freedoms while most can't access any practical benefits from those freedoms because we can't afford to, in this society where money is speech. This isn't even getting into the more overt and baldly authoritarian ways Americans have their nominal rights infringed upon, simply speaking to the way economic/class-shaping does much of it for us.
Meanwhile, Winnie the Pooh memes say that you're ironically buying into the overstated projection of Chinese control.
But to get back to the crux of the issue: "bad actors" in America (like Google) are not unlike Chinese censors in kind, only degree. That is the conclusion an honest assessment and comparison has to come to. And however much you may want to turn this into some sort of geopolitical pissing match, my message is not, "Let's be more like China," it's, "Let's be what we say we are instead of becoming more like China."
