> I'd argue it's already been flipped on.

The Great Firewall is, among various other things, an attempt to create a single historical narrative for the PRC by blocking out reference to things like Tiananmen, discussions of early twentieth-century China suggesting that China could have gone a different way than the Communist Party and prospered, etc. The USA has absolutely nothing like that, people can readily find open-web and social-media content taking every possible position on American history, both staid academic content and wacko conspiracy theory stuff.

When it all comes down to it, the USA just isn’t as hung up on social harmony and narrative control as the PRC. That’s why there isn’t a comparable system in place, and claiming that the odious DMCA is anywhere close, is hyperbole.

It's not totally comparable, but if you went against the approved covid narrative a few years ago, you would absolutely get shut down by the big players for "misinformation". Same with the 2020 US election results. And in many cases they acted on behalf of the goverment:

https://time.com/7015026/meta-facebook-zuckerberg-covid-bide...

Misinformation or not, I like form my opinions myself, rather than have the government do it for me. There was absolutely a lot of nonsense[1] going around during covid, but constantly being told what to believe felt extremely irksome.

[1] https://youtu.be/sSkFyNVtNh8

This is changing, because the ruling class of politicians and billionaires is discovering that things can actually change if they don’t control the narrative, especially in the age of social media.

Read up on the motivations behind the TikTok acquisition, or the attempts to legislatively censor certain topics on Wikipedia, or the myriad of knobs used by social media “content review” teams etc, or Chat Control in the EU, or going back further, the surveillance systems detailed in the Snowden leaks (why surveil if censorship isn’t the goal?).

It’s ultimately exactly the same reasoning as that used by the CCP, but in a more subtle and gradual manner. Yes, right now, the GFW is a different beast, but if we do nothing, I would wager that the solutions will converge.

This discounts the effects of things like shills (commercial or government) or propaganda in general and its quieting effect on discussion. Yes, there are conspiracy theories, but there is a reason why they end up relegated to the quacks and aren't broached upon at all, save for in jest perhaps, by mainstream sources of information. I mean really consider the actual diversity of thought among mainstream sources in this country. It is astoundingly limited and entirely biased towards neoliberalism. Our political spectrum is extremely narrow and differentiated by only a small handful of hobby horse issues.