While China has many horrors (from the digital great wall, to Uyghurs and Tibet to abhorrent working conditions for internal migrants, lack of health and safety, little enforcement of environmental rules, ...) it seems at the same time that China dares to intervene when companies exploit consumers and try to get onto the addiction tracks. Gambling, drugs, short form videos (aka tiktok) and now banning human-like assistants that play on and manipulate our emotional machinery.

While I still wish all Chinese to finally have a democracy and liberties the rest of the world can still learn from this - the "nanny state" is needed when it's our psychology alone against thousands of professional programmers and psychologists trying to enslave our mind.

I wonder if this is going to come to the West too. It's not like the harms or problems are any different, only the flow of money and power and willingness to enforce is different.

Considering that gaming is the world's biggest entertainment industry, I don't know how you'd fairly enforce which manipulative virtual interactions are ok and which ones are not, unless you just pick and choose by fiat. Which China is glad to do (they've been doing this for a long time with games), but it probably wouldn't fly in the States.

i saw the news..its still hard to understand why the gov forbid it.. for now. china's gove tend to be too controlling on everything..

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