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We're allowed to take a little more of the broader context into account - China is banning things because ideas might be spread that they don't like. People might spread fake news stories, like a genocide in Xianjiang.

The US will read all your messages; but you can say what you like in them. The ban isn't for authoritarian reasons; it is a fairly pure economic/geopolitical play. You can say whatever crazy stuff you like as far as the government is concerned.



Until you can't.


The modern form of power stemming from controlling a social media platform doesn't lie in completely blocking out inconvenient information (old-fashioned censoring) or spreading that one official truth (Volksempfänger-age propaganda), it's the power of subtly augmenting some groups of voices while giving others less exposure. It's mostly a destructive power because the most reliable way to use it is to blow up harmless disagreements into crippling internal conflicts - and all without anyone noticing that they are being played.

The present-day equivalent to the train that carried Lenin from Zürich to Petrograd would be a little tweak in a social feed visibility algorithm in some corporate codebase.




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