We should let people know how bad politicians are. If everyone knows every time a politician is a mass murderer, it might provide an incentive for politicians to stop mass murdering people.

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AnthonyMouse 5 hours ago | parent [-]

The general problem is that people think based on relativity.

Suppose there are thousands of law enforcement officials in the US, some minority of them are violent offenders and as a result of that some minority of police shootings are murders rather than legitimate self-defense or protection of the innocent, where the number of annual illegitimate police shootings is somewhere between 2 and 999, and the propensity for those people to be prosecuted is lower than it ought to be. Suppose further that China has over a million Uyghurs in concentration camps and is using them as slave labor and subjecting them to forced sterilization.

Is the first one bad? Yes. Is it as bad? Uh, no. But you can present a distorted picture through selective censorship.

Obviously what you want is for neither of them to be censored, but not wanting a foreign power to be the ones who decide what people see is fully legitimate.

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autoexec 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> Obviously what you want is for neither of them to be censored, but not wanting a foreign power to be the ones who decide what people see is fully legitimate.

It's less legitimate when you don't want a foreign power to be the ones who decide what people see on their own platforms. The US for example shouldn't dictate what US users see when they visit www.bbc.co.uk

The just US got mad because a Chinese owned/operated social media platform got massively popular and they just wanted the ability to control and censor it.

	▲	AnthonyMouse 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		"Their own platforms" is the flaw. Countries and companies shouldn't "own" the means of mass communication to begin with. How the feed is filtered should be a fungible commodity that anyone can swap out for themselves or offer to others without sacrificing the network effect, because the network itself shouldn't be owned. Notice that the US doesn't censor bbc.co.uk, because the web is a decentralized system. But then ordinary people end up on Facebook or TikTok, which isn't.
	▲	pixl97 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I mean, you're not wrong, but there isn't very much nuance here. I think there are a number of things occurring all at once and it's going to lead to the destabilization of most democracies (which China is a big winner if this occurs). Democracy has never really been as free as the people living in democracies believe. The rich and large media entities have always controlled the vote with much more impact than the actual issues individual voters had. If you believe this previous statement to be true this leads to a number of issues in the modern world. One is that previous to now most countries demanded some kind of local media ownership, so the message would be more aligned with someone living in the country rather than some other entity (not perfect, but still better than nothing). Another is media groups tended to be smaller and more fractured. They may hold conflicting opinions on things. Which bring us to now, with huge foreign media organizations holding massive sway over gigantic audiences. This isn't just about China over the US, it's just as much about the US over many EU entities. These are potential powers that can change course of the world and they have governments behind them directing them where to go. Also don't forget the US absolutely loves to control what gets in the media. The right in the US didn't just start brining up socialism and communism yesterday, it's been a control mechanism on what can be published and what you can see for over 100 years.