zlacker

The CCP seems to be quite good at practical censorship. They have a history of this - they know the Great Firewall isn't perfect, and don't seem to make a tremendous effort to plug every single hole or find and lock up everyone trying to circumvent it. They know that controlling what most people see most of the time is good enough. They also know that not making too much clear direct effort against those trying to bypass it denies the anti-censorship movement the energy of having martyrs, cause celebres, etc. It seems to work quite well.

I think they're doing the same thing here. Just take an amount of money that's rather modest in the budget of a major government, throw it at 90% of the biggest companies with a few strings attached, and presto, you effectively control the narratives in the American News Media. Most of the companies involved lapped it right up.

>>ufmace+(OP)
In related corporate censorship, the Top Gun remake altered the physical leather jacket worn by Tom Cruise to remove the flags of Taiwan and Japan.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/top-gun-...

>>drak0n+bf
Lol why Japan

>>TchoBe+GJ
They are not really friends since https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Sino-Japanese_War

>>TchoBe+GJ
Basically everyone else in Asia hates their guts due to their conduct in WWII.

>>drak0n+bf
This is the real powerful actual vector.

Hollywood flicks and bad 80s pop/rock were (arguably) a genuinely massive part of the Soviet Union's decline. Those things make culture.

>>BadOak+1N
Yeah but why are they censoring any mention of the country. Is Japan's existence controversial or something.

>>ufmace+gO
That's really not true. Taiwan, for example, has widespread pro-Japanese sentiment. Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam also have warm relations with Japan.

On the other hand, Mainland China and both North and South Korea continue to have a dominant anti-Japanese sentiment.

A cynical observer might suggest that the ability of a nation's public to forgive past grievances correlates closely with how much benefit the government sees in maintaining that hostile sentiment.

>>TchoBe+gZ
It appears that countries like China would like to be able to decide that.

>>jbay80+o61
> both North and South Korea continue to have a dominant anti-Japanese sentiment

I've learned it's extremely difficult to find Samsung products on the shelves in Japan. The conglomerates in East Asian are intertwined with political influence.

>>ufmace+(OP)
from https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-bing-raises-con...

"A significant percentage of the Microsoft employees who work on Bing are based in China, including some who work on image-recognition software, according to a former employee."

>>jbay80+o61
What’s the benefit for South Korea?

>>dwight+lP1
They have territorial disputes unlike other Asian nations who only had WWII compensation dispute.

>>ufmace+(OP)
It's good enough not because people will stop at that, it's good enough because the Great Firewall is one piece in the overall apparatus that "repression" is. People who go beyond the limit will emit other signals that will be caught: they will use non-chinese censorship-resistant softwares, they will connect to non-chinese ips, they will have a secret life that appears suspect to their friends and family, they will raise controversial topics while at work... much like OpSec, running against this system requires impeccable hygiene that will be caught at some point or another.

The Great Firewall will be enough for most people to not look for trouble, but they need the other means to make sure curious people are kept in check