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Comment by chillacy | Hacker News Reader

> China has achieved this. It can communicate with the outside world, meanwhile Western opinion cannot easily penetrate as ideological tools

Media is powerful. And even in the US, most of us self-censor our news (liberal vs conservative media) to the point where we're largely reading only views we agree on (HN is no different in that regard). I always find it amusing that we can all read the same news with different conclusions and come out thinking that we're right all the time.

A lot of people assume that people in China are unaffected by all the censorship, but even if they're aware of it, I wonder if censorship in China actually reduces cognitive dissonance at this point, and it's actually more agreeable to read censored news than not. Much like advertising or the opinions of our friends/family, ideas can be subtle but extremely influencing.

View on HN

When I'm in Russia, I find the state-controlled media surprisingly critical of government policy and very outward looking. They are clearly ignoring the elephant in the room: the country being an ungovernable pool of corruption that can only be kept together by instilling nationalism and foreign threats and an authoritarian leader, but then again, it's not like US media are really asking critical questions. With or without free press, no one wants to hear that they're in a mess. It's much nicer to think that everything is good, but the evil-doers are trying to ruin it.

The US media as a whole may not be asking critical questions, but that's not the point of free press. The fact is that the US media is free to ask critical questions, and therefore some, though not all, of the media ask critical questions.

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Free to still allows another way to allow the powerful to control and manipulate.

In order to truly be a free system the system has to be fair as well, which means more income equality in addition to a free press system.

If money controls the "free" press and money distribution is heavily skewed, then it's not really a free press. This is how the US system works.

Bingo. I keep seeing the US chatter being about boo scary government, but then turn right round and supplicate themselves to the big US brands as some kind of deities of freedom.

fuck that shit. Every large org is a problem, as it will develop a internal culture and world view.

when you have corporations existing in the world that has bigger revenue streams than nations, it should bring pause for thought.

No it doesn't have to. Stop moving the goalposts. The US has a free press, and under no definition does free necessarily require fair. It would be better if it had a fair press, but it is not necessary for freedom.

You're again letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

>most of us self-censor our news (liberal vs conservative media) to the point where we're largely reading only views we agree on (HN is no different in that regard).

I wouldn't call what happens on HN self censorship. HN is heavily censored. One says things the authorities here agree with or one's posts are down voted off the board. New users don't have the ability to down vote. Sometimes user?id=dang steps in and deletes posts personally.

> we're largely reading only views we agree on [...], all read the same news with different conclusions and come out thinking that we're right all the time.

If not the premise, this is at the very least a nasty side effect of Twitter: users choose who to follow, and the overwhelming majority follow people they mostly find themselves in agreement with.

IOW Twitter is a self-satisfying echo chamber.

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