A chilling read. I use WeChat because I have a few friends in China. I am glad I have read this. I have never talked to them about China's internal politics for fear that something like this might exist. Now I know it is worse than I even thought possible. I cannot even tell them this article exists.
I believe (hope?) that this will be the death of social media in the long run, at least in authoritarian states. No one is going to use these forums if it means they or their family members can be put in jail for a joke. This is straight out of 1984, and that can be said with 0 hyperbole. When they start using ML to detect dissidents who speak in coded language, we will truly have a real live thought police. Christ almighty.
It's heading there in other countries, it's just not done by the government yet except in extreme cases. I already can't do anything on social media which could piss off my employer. It makes sense that I can't talk shit about them or leak info, but I also can only share certain political opinions - for example, while I'm sure my employer would be fine if I told them I voted for Hillary and supported gay marriage, I'm not so sure they would be fine if I told them I voted for Trump or was involved in union/labor politics. Of course there would be no direct consequences to either, but HR and managers would know (because they check) and it would affect their opinions of me negatively.
And now it's happening with advertisement too. Tell your friend you just took a pregnancy test via FB messenger and now every advertiser on the internet knows just what to sell you. Most people don't really care about this yet, but most people don't realize that this kind of thing could be used in the future for all sorts of dystopian shit. All this data is being stored. I think Google is treating my data pretty responsibly at the moment, but I could see it being used for anything from background checks (e.g. checking search history or message logs for indicators of illegal activity) to blackmail.
On a tangential sidenote, I read an article about Snap recently about how they're trying to position themselves as a different kind of social media company. They don't (yet) perform highly sophisticated targeted advertising and don't save a lot of actual content data. You typically are only connected to your actual friends, not some random guy from your high school class, your aunt, your ex-girlfriend, and your coworker. There's also no public profile for employers to search for and snoop around. Of course these are typically the case for any tool focused on direct messaging but I hope as Snap expands they can be both successful and keep these fantastic qualities.
I don't see how a jail term can be even compared to losing a job and tracking by Facebook to government surveillance programs. You can opt out of it just by not using FB or by using a fake name. Go try to opt out of chinese censorship program.
Regarding Snapchat - the company that cares about privacy wouldn't require so many permissions (including a permission to receive SMS messages).
First, I'm not directly comparing losing a job to going to jail, I'm saying that things are not so different here. Of course going to jail is much worse than losing a job but when you consider all of the negatives of losing a job (for an average person, not someone in tech) I'd still say it's one of the worst things that can happen to you aside from being the victim of a crime or natural disaster, losing a close family member or friend, and going to jail/prison.
Also, you can opt out of Wechat just as you can opt out of FB, so I'm not sure I see your point. Sure you can't opt out of chinese censorship in general but the chilling effect in both cases is where I see the analogy. It's bad for online platforms to do that whether by coercion or direct force.
Not that I disagree with you on the overall direction, but I guess the question here is how easy it would be to opt out of this sort of thing in China, given the extent of their "great firewall".
At present, in Western nations, it is somewhat easy to, say, self-host certain social media platforms (from Wordpress to Mastodon) for friends and family and whatnot that could be used for more private, less advertiser-monitored social media interaction. Assuming you get buy in among your friends, this pretty much avoids issues with advertiser and employer snooping that you have on large social media sites. You can then keep your Facebooks and Twitters for your "public face" (or ditch them entirely).
>I don't see how a jail term can be even compared to losing a job and tracking by Facebook to government surveillance programs.
Losing a job can be just as catastrophic as a jail term.
Especially if it brands you for future job positions too, as "that person that was fired because X".
Not everybody has it as good as in-demand developers, job wise.
And employer blacklists (e.g. of union types) have been a thing for ages, and can wreck havoc to a person's life (killing their economic prospects) in the way that a jail sentence might not.
Losing a job might in some cases be worse than going to jail. At least in jail, someone might be feeding you something. And you could opt out of WeChat just as you opt out of Facebook.
Sorry to be the party pooper, but Advertisers can and do target individual users on Snapchat by simple means of uploading mobile Ad IDs.
So while Snap takes the high road here and tells people they're not bleeding or collecting information on their users (which is true), what they don't say is that still all the info that has been bleeding from mobile users through any other of their weather and emoji apps can and will be used against them in Snapchat Advertising campaigns.
If they didn't play along, they'd be quickly out of any media planners' heads, and they're already struggling hard against Facebook in the ad ecosystem.
Source: I do this stuff for business. Throwaway obviously.
Thank you for sharing! That is disheartening to hear, but it is still miles better than what other social media companies do. It's more the mass collection, analysis, and potentially sale of data that concerns me about social networks.
I already can't do anything on social media which could piss off my employer.
Well, the thing is that FB may have a real names policy but they really only occasionally enforce it.
Plus I think it's possible to just not be FB friends with anyone in your company or even use FB's permission system to hide controversial opinions. And I haven't heard of advertisers putting people in jail or firing them for their opinions. Here, it seems like you're confusing "creepy" and "actually has the ability to harm you".
But most people or many people, indeed connect their FB profile to their employer and wind-up censoring themselves accordingly. But that actually seems like the ordinary censoring of "peer pressure" that has always happened in among with the people who someone chooses to associate with.
If I went to the company picnic and hung-out with co-workers and boss, I would be self-censors like heck - fortunately, I'm able to avoid such situations which I find miserable experiences on all levels. God help me if I have to spend a lot of my social time like that.
It's easy to summarize this as "really what you mean is you're too lazy to set up communication which you're employer can't see" but I wouldn't want to imply the situation isn't a problem. That the medium requiring least effort broadcasts to people's employers, that is a problem, just a slightly different problem.
I used the advertising and employer situations separately. I think you're noticing that I mentioned being fired when talking about advertisement - by "advertisement" I meant by proxy all of the related data storage / exchange / leaking that accompanies it. What if Google gets hacked or sold and the new owner of their data sells a background check service on your searches? Or what if an advertiser tries to target to suspected drug addicts, then turns around and uses that info unethically?
I understand what you're saying about your employer, but there are different levels of self-censorship. My level of self-censorship for friends who work at the same company as me would be very different compared to acquaintances at the company and my boss. I'm ok with the first one because it's what I would do for my friends anyway. I know there are ways to toggle privacy/whatever to affect what people can see but at the end of the day I'm always going to assume my employer can see any regular post I make on Facebook through one means or another.
One big difference between government snooping in china and Facebook and google having tons of potentially compromising data is that in the US and EU and other countries, you have some level of protection from harmful misuse of that data in the form of regulations, lawsuits, and public goodwill. Not saying that either of those are perfect but they are real protections.
Regulations are slow and won't necessarily protect the first people who are harmed (see subprime crisis) but they can make it much harder to do similar things in the future
Lawsuits don't always work and are heavily weighted against consumers but do provide some protection
Public goodwill is huge. If lots of people got really hurt from a Facebook or google data compromise, id bet people stop using them. Seems crazy now but there are alternatives and Facebook is not essential. All these companies (and many other non tech ones, like banks for example) are strongly incentivized to not harm the public in a large way because the execs would lose their jobs and careers
These protections are FAR from perfect and shouldn't prevent you from losing sleep, but imagine living in a country where the government is incentivized to not protect its citizens through regulation or enforce standard legal protections
More chilling is the potential social acceptance of such snooping in the name of social harmony, trust in government etc. if people no longer believe such censorship or oppression is bad, you have a real problem
Edit: The NSA is an analogous threat in the US, but to my knowledge that info isn't used to secure the reputations and positions of government leaders. Also there is a huge public backlash against them, not sure if the same exists in china
> Of course there would be no direct consequences to either, but HR and managers would know (because they check) and it would affect their opinions of me negatively.
It's one thing to fire someone for having a political opinion (like Google recently) and just to have an opinion about people you work with.
You can't help having an opinion. We're not logical robots. All we can hope to do is to be aware of or decision making process d not to let irrelevant opinions influence it.
I agree with you, I'm just saying that the reality is that people will have worse opinions of you / treat you worse if you have political opinions they consider unsavory. So practically speaking, if you are interested in your career, you shouldn't voice any controversial (given your employer) political opinions on public social media.
I don't want to give HR any more reasons to mistrust me: say I supported candidate X, and HR think's X and their supporters are racist/misogynist/anti-immigrant. Now if someone raises a complaint about me, legitimate or not, and HR sees that, they're more likely to assume I'm guilty. And at the end of the day, all else being equal (and it often is with HR because they aren't really able to evaluate technical work well), who gets the promotion: the person HR sees as edgy, controversial, and potentially an asshole because of their political views, or the person who doesn't share their political views?
> And at the end of the day, all else being equal (and it often is with HR because they aren't really able to evaluate technical work well), who gets the promotion: the person HR sees as edgy, controversial, and potentially an asshole because of their political views, or the person who doesn't share their political views?
You are correct. However, I don't think that it can is even remotely close to China's censorship.
It's been like this forever, the police have access to so called "information management system" directly to QQ and later Wechat. There is no other way to talk to people online, you are monitored in all channels. They have no choice, anyone that doesn't cooperate is blocked. Also the sense of "Privacy" is very weak among Chinese, they are brain washed enough to believe "what are you afraid of if you have nothing to hide". So yeah people will continue to use Wechat and other social channels in China.
The practices of the Ministry of Truth — “memory hole” and constant revisioning of history — also become trivial to implement when all data is on centralized servers owned by companies whose continued existence relies on the benevolence of the government.
The censors didn’t like Jane’s posts? With the aid of some text generation AI that captures her writing style, rewriting her post history is much less conspicuous than deleting it outright.
Or you only show Jane's posts to her closest friends, to minimize the reach of an idea without directly censoring it. Even if those friends share it you can limit the reach to their closest friends too. If users complain that they're getting their exposure limited base on content, just throw up your hands and say "but it's the algorithms that determine the best content to share to your friends, not us!". I'm pretty convinced that Google and Facebook already actively do this.
You bring up a good point with text generation, which made me think of what can be ascertained by writing style. Certainly gender, nationality or regional location, education level, probably something akin to IQ. I'm not sure whether there exists such a thing as a "writer's fingerprint" but if there is, you wouldn't even be able to write things anonymously even with a fake/stolen/alternate account.
>No one is going to use these forums if it means they or their family members can be put in jail for a joke.
Nah, they will. The convenience factor far outweighs the risk for most people. Everyone thinks "well, they must've done something stupid", and if not that, "well, that was just one strange occurrence. It won't happen to me."
Because if someone says they want your facebook/line/whatever to talk to you, you become a bit of an outcast when you say that you only use secure messaging apps like Signal. People here might be willing to put up with those discussions, but most people don't.
Furthermore, I have huge doubts whenever any US-based company says it's "secure". It's easy to say that. Even on their security page[1], they don't give a clear, straight "yes" to the "is it private?" question. Ask a farmer if his beef comes from real cows and he'll say "yes." Ask a company that makes secure apps if they read your messages, and they say "we use various encryption techniques to prevent unwanted man in the middle attacks and our specific organization name won't read your messages." So sure, they're safe from unwanted attacks and they won't personally read your messages. Governments, well, we won't reference the clear suspect of this question because you know why.
I understand the social / cultural problems with moving form Facebook, but the value of privacy is a social / cultural one, not a technical one. If you can't engage people on a cultural level, then you've already lost.
My original point was just that technical solutions exist, not that there is a social will to use them.
If you use Android I recommend you to use Work Profile (or experimental app Island) for it. You never know what WeChat is actually reading from your phone, having really extensive set of permissions.
It's chilling indeed. Unfortunately I don't think the masses (anywhere, not just in China) care enough about censorship or surveillance for the trend you described to ever happen. Most of my Chinese friends I've talked to about the dangers of WeChat (in person, of course) just shrug off the censorship aspect of the app as a minor inconvenience that they occasionally run into, one that gets completely outweighed by the overall utility the app provides.
And that's probably an accurate assessment for most individuals. Even in a borderline dystopian surveillance state like China, the chances that an average law-abiding citizen could ever see the chilling effects of surveillance and censorship materialize as a life-changing event in their own lives or the lives of someone close is admittedly rather slim. The chilling effects shrouding over their society is rarely ever felt to a significant enough degree by a significant enough portion of the populace for them to want to affect change at the risk of prosecution.
That said, the possibility that eventually Chinese internet products could by their own merit compete in the global market, outcompeting western alternatives in some cases, is the even more terrifying aspect to me. I wrote a lengthy post about it a while ago, and have copy pasted it a few times already, but here it is again anyways, because I feel it's still relevant:
To authoritarian governments all over the world, the censorship and surveillance frameworks built into many Chinese internet services like WeChat are actually extremely valuable features, rather than something they'd want to opt out of.
These features have been battle-tested in the largest and most ruthlessly robust surveillance state the world has ever seen, and have time and again proven their effectiveness in influencing public opinion and quelling dissent.
If an app like WeChat were to ever gain foothold in a nation with an authoritarian government, all they'd have to do is strike a deal with TenCent, and with the flip of a switch, that government can then enjoy unprecedented control and visibility into the "private" communications of its populace. All the friction involved in the decidedly difficult and costly exercise of building your own large-scale surveillance/censorship infrastructure will suddenly have been removed. The one thing Chinese internet services can offer that no western counterpart can reasonably compete with also makes them by far China's most dangerous export: authoritarianism as a service.
To those of us in democratic nations, we must also remember that authoritarianism usually doesn't manifest itself as a cliff, but rather as a gradual, slippery downward slope. Every government in the past has displayed authoritarian tendencies in their history, to varying degrees, and governments in the future will inevitably continue to do so. The natural tendency of government is to slide down the slope of authoritarianism, because government is power, and power corrupts. It takes diligence and continued effort on the part of the governing body and its citizenship to counteract this natural descent.
All it would take is another 911 type terrorist attack to sway public opinion enough to the point where enacting some kind of dragnet surveillance system in the name of national security would become politically feasible, in any democratic nation in the world. At that point, the horrible user experience and PR nightmare in having to rebalance the national budget or raise taxes to make room for improving your domestic spying infrastructure could be the only thing standing between us and an irreversible descent into authoritarianism. And if a significant portion of a democratic populace happens to be using WeChat at that point, well, let's just say I don't have a lot of faith that my own government could resist the temptation and take a principled stand against such a frictionless way to expand its own powers.
As Chinese offerings mature and become polished and innovative enough to compete with western counterparts in markets outside of China, we could easily start to see users around the world voluntarily start switching to them. That could very well mark the beginning of the end of this golden age of democracy as we know it.
I highly recommend taking a look at Nathan Freitas's excellent talk "The Great Firewall Inverts": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEJGqNf2rgk. In it, he explores how China's so-called Great Firewall is actually a bit of a misnomer because it's most crucial functionality is its ability to control the flow of information inside its own borders as opposed of keeping information out, how this ability is readily available to be exported to countries around the world in the form of internet services like WeChat, and what we can do about it (which is unfortunately, not a whole lot, other than to educate others on the very non-obvious non-immediate consequences of using these services, and to be vigilant and proactively take stands against the spread of authoritarianism in our own governments).
>All it would take is another 911 type terrorist attack to sway public opinion enough to the point where enacting some kind of dragnet surveillance system in the name of national security would become politically feasible, in any democratic nation in the world.
This exists today. Virtually every single communication in every Western country is already being captured and stored indefinitely.
For all I know, you could very well be right when it comes to surveillance, sadly.
The saving grace is western countries can't be nearly as blatant as China when it comes to outright censorship, in fear of the political backlash that (one would hope) would still incite. So the chilling effects on speech won't be quite as dramatic as they are in China until that changes (i.e. people are still unaware that there are things they're not "allowed" to say due to lack of censorship, so they won't start to self-censor out of habit or fear).
Yeah, censorship really isn't part of the agenda for Western surveillance—at least for Five Eyes nations. If there's any ulterior motive there aside from profit, it's likely to do with maintaining hidden power structures in clandestine fashion.
You can share the articles to your friends in China, and they surely will not be jailed.
And I think you can talk with them about China's internal politics through WeChat if they are interested in these talks, if there is not a third person will report your conversations to the authority.
The person in the article is 'jailed', because someone publicizes his comment or reports it to authority.
For whoever this is news to, check out this XinhuaNet[0] article on holding group administrators accountable for things said in their groups. That they're able to view things is implicit in that. Then check out the pushes for Real Name Identification with online services[1] and phone numbers [2]. Check out the social credit system[3], mandatory by 2020[4]. The national face recognition system [5]. Its actually kinda incredible.
If by "incredible" you mean "a dystopian hellscape" then yes, it is. And with this comment I probably just eliminated any possibility of a Chinese visa!
I'm not sure what you mean by end-to-end encryption.
It's a group chat, so it's more likely all messages are processed on server and then relayed to every people in the group. The easiest way to monitoring that kind of chat messages is .... install monitoring software directly on server.
And as far as I know, many (If not all) commonly used domestic chat software in China are monitored by the government.
So, it's a rather common sense in China to NOT chat on some specific topic during some specific period (Or, don't talk about it at all) online.
It's not an end-to-end encryption problem, it is the problem of National security (What ever that means to CCP) v.s. Individual freedom.
I’m not really an expert or close to that but I believe some apps (like whatsapp) encrypts each message individually for each member of the chat group. While the server relays messages, it does not have the private keys of recipients. That should work, no?
I agree that this is not a technical issue though. Still there are possible measures to be taken.
OP must mean GPG or something like that (where users control their own keys), but there is nothing to stop the government from holding you to demand your private key and the passphrase you use to unlock it.
The only real answer is to avoid using the internet for any meaningful political or community dialogue if you live in an authoritarian state that might use that dialogue against you. That is a truly depressing thought.
If you look though the history, you will found democracy in the entire history of China is very rare thing (Republic Of China is short lived).
So, I'm not so surprised that we Chinese end up with an authoritarian government model we currently have here.
First, let me clear one thing: It's not saying you can't blame the government for any wrong doing at all. In fact, I (and other people) do that all the time on the online forum operated by local government (I consider our local government is a fairly open one, so it's may not apply to other local governments). But you have to learn to avoid some topic that may get you into trouble.
This case is an example. If my guess is right: He's talking about a high ranking official of central government, who recently got exposed by a guy call GuoWengui[0] and been removed from a very important position.
In China, this kind of case by nature is very sensitive, CCP don't want to see anyone talking about it.
I'm not saying everybody should follow CCP's No Talk Rule though, I believe all kinds of censorship is bad. However, consider is very hard to change people's (Including government officials) mindset after thousands of years of authoritarianism, sometime it's better to save yourself from those troubles, and let time do it's work to upgrade the society first.
The hope is that, through years of advancement on science and economy etc (in short, productivity), the importance of individual can eventually out weight authoritarianism, and force the government to reform to an more advanced one.
And, hey, there are lot's of places people can talk about those very sensitive topic, like ... Twitter? Why doing so on a domestic online service and then worrying about getting trouble because of that.
Well, if you look into history if the west, you also find not soo much democracy. A bit more and with the US a bit longer, but for the most parts we have been under empire rule as well.
So it is good, that you are optimistic about things to change, but I also see the other side, with smartphones acting as spying devices enabling true surveilance everywhere, which could fortify authoritarianism, rather than deconstruct it.
But in general I am also optimistic that eventually things will improve, even if it takes some generations..
> If you look though the history, you will found democracy in the entire history of China is very rare thing (Republic Of China is short lived).
> However, consider is very hard to change people's (Including government officials) mindset after thousands of years of authoritarianism
Isn't that true for most parts of the world? Germany has only been a fully functioning democracy since 1945 (plus maybe a few years when the Weimar Republic was still working). The Republic of China was not democratic until 1987, when martial law was lifted in Taiwan. If we look at history as a whole, that's really just an anecdotal drop in the bucket.
Let's first figure out why democracy rises in the first place: It's because some events, the Industrial Revolution for example, created a bunch of wealthy middle classes, who then sort of became the driving force of their country and start to demanding for rights.
Middle class exists for very long time before official democratization, and I don't think they just sit there and waiting for rights raining on them, rather, I believe they're constantly demanding for more rights. It's just the society takes time to change.
In China, something like Industrial Revolution never actually happened because of invasion, war and stupid government decisions. As result, we also don't have middle class people until after the Economic Reform[0] which is very recent compare to other countries.
There are group chats with end-to-end encryption, meaning the server does not have access to the message it is relaying. The "end-to-end" part is used to differentiate it compared to merely encrypting the connection with the server (which has been ubiquitous for chat apps for some time).
Does that include group chats with history (i.e. add a new member and they see the previous discussion)? I'm curious how the encryption would work in that case. In the simplest case I suppose the invite could contain a shared key, but is there an individually-keyed approach?
End-to-end encryption really isn't the solution here. Your message might be considered harmful and blocked instantly if they couldn't decrypt it. It may not the case for now, but it's possible and fairly foreseeable.
If you intend to spend any time in China, and your friends are intelligent and decent people, your friends are probably already censoring themselves (even outside of China), fearing it may have repercussions toward you.
> Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all.
-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
But it can't happen here, regardless of where "here" is. And when it does happen, it can't be discussed or resisted, especially when "here" became everywhere.
> We’re going to live in a world unless we do something quickly in which our media consume us and spit in the government’s cup. There will never have been any place like it before and if we let it happen, there will never be any place different from it again.
and
> What will they say when they realize that we lived at the end of a thousand years of struggling for freedom of thought. At the end, when we had almost everything, we gave it away, for convenience, for social networking. Because Mr. Zuckerberg asked us to. Because we couldn’t find a better way to talk to our friends. Because we loved the beautiful pretty things that felt so warm in the hand. Because we didn’t really care about the future of freedom of thought, because we considered that to be someone else’s business. Because we thought it was over. Because we believed we were free. Because we didn’t think there was any struggling left to do. That’s why we gave it all away.
> Is that what we're gonna tell them?
> Free thought requires free media. Free media requires free technology. We require ethical treatment when we go to read, to write, to listen and to watch. Those are the hallmarks of our politics. We need to keep those politics until we die. Because if we don’t, something else will die. Something so precious that many, many of our fathers and mothers gave their life for it. Something so precious, that we understood it to define what it meant to be human; it will die.
-- both by Eben Moglen in "Freedom of thought requires free media"
We're already experiencing the start of this. This [1] article discusses an event when prosecutors in New York simultaneously subpoenaed Reason Magazine for information on commenters to an article, and also gagged them preventing them from being able to discuss it.
The commenters were upset about the judge who chose to sentence Ross Ulbricht, founder of Silk Road, to life without the possibility of parole -- a sentence even greater than what the prosecution was seeking. The comments range from innocuous like "I hope there is a special place in hell reserved for that horrible woman" to ones that are more vile, but still come nowhere near even remotely close our 'imminent criminality' first amendment exception. Given what happened the first time that line was stated, I'm hesitant to quote it. What freedom...
"Previously, the N.S.A. filtered information before sharing intercepted communications with another agency, like the C.I.A. or the intelligence branches of the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration. The N.S.A.’s analysts passed on only information they deemed pertinent, screening out the identities of innocent people and irrelevant personal information.
Now, other intelligence agencies will be able to search directly through raw repositories of communications intercepted by the N.S.A. and then apply such rules for “minimizing” privacy intrusions."
Constitutionality aside, while this does make some sense for the FBI and CIA - because they have people skilled enough to analyze the data and "legitimate" uses in counter-terrorism - it makes no sense to give all that data to agencies like Homeland Security and the DEA, and I also have little confidence that their agents are good enough to even make sense of basic raw data. Just imagine some TSA agent finding a knife you left in your bag and then getting passed to some moron who detains you for hours because he saw that you liked some communist memes on FB and your friend sent you a 9/11 joke.
Censorship of US citizens for the purposes of state propaganda is a whole other different thing than anything the CIA/FBI/DEA does. And FYI the CIA may be proactively involved involved in propaganda, like helping some Hollywood movies ... but they are not running around tell you not to say bad things about Trump on Facebook, is my point.
My point is that if there were to be any censor/like actions conducted by the government, it would not be the NSA carrying it out. It would be law enforcement.
I mean - you'd have to literally indicate you wanted to cause harm to a government official to get in trouble with the US Feds - and it's not unreasonable they do come after you as that is rightly a crime.
But you can say almost anything you want against Trump or the US Government otherwise, and nobody will care.
I kinda hate advertisements. News generates value and requires resources to write. The advertisement model was alright, but clearly WSJ decided that they're better off just forcing you to subscribe to get their news, and frankly it's not a bad deal. I do wish there was a "metanews" subscription I could pay to get access to every news source collated together and summarized.
Not to get too far into meta discussions, but It sucks when only part of this forum is able to discuss an article because of access issues like this.
I see that WSJ wants to make money, but at least not link those articles in a discussion forum when only a small portion of the participants can access it.
In US, if you say anything bad about US leaders, maybe you have trouble at the border when you go on holiday.
In Russia, you can say anything about US leaders, and nobody will care.
It's not a big deal in China. We all said "Big brother is watching you guys.". The first thing occurred to my mind that somedays ago I posted a thread for R.I.P someone, and you know what? Account have been banned just a few seconds. WhatsApp & telegram & VPN are blocked in China for a very long time. WeChat is the most popular app in China, the chat group is oversaw by the brother for some reason named "for country and people security". What a big joke.
YES, Apple is helping spying people for the GOV :(
I believe (hope?) that this will be the death of social media in the long run, at least in authoritarian states. No one is going to use these forums if it means they or their family members can be put in jail for a joke. This is straight out of 1984, and that can be said with 0 hyperbole. When they start using ML to detect dissidents who speak in coded language, we will truly have a real live thought police. Christ almighty.