In fact, GFW has been a lot more sophisticated than a black list of sites, it applies ML / traffic pattern analysis capabilities which makes it even less relevant of "authenticity of a news source". Do a Google search of GFW analysis you will get a lot of details on that.
> odd because WSJ at least is heavily pro China
Why do you think so?
WSJ is incredibly pro business and doesn't give much care about human rights. They take the capatalist pro business guys point of view in ignoring much of the bad about China to make money.
You have almost 12k karma on HN so you are one of the experienced HN readers. I feel strongly that your tinted negatively biased China view has contributed greatly in HN community.
Being living in both China and U.S., one thing I can tell you for sure is that U.S. (being the leader in the free world) is NOT on a moral high ground to criticize other countries given the recent events of racism and bigotry.
My advise for you is that you should go out there, travel the world, living in a different country for many years and look back on your worldviews.
My tint of China is shared by other long term laowai, and many locals as well. The people most optimistic about China are Chinese that have already left...voted with their feet one way but vote with their mouth in an exact opposite way. This contradiction is pervasive in the Chinese government as well (Xi will send his daughter to Havard while decrying the unsuitability of western education). I guess many Chinese see no hypocracy in this kind of thing, but it drives us crazy.
Who cares about the US, they don't even bother fighting for the moral high ground. China feels like they really need the high ground badly and are also entitled to it (we are strong, but we are also always victims, Vietnam stop making us do bad things!). This just makes the rest of the world very annoyed.
I suggest that you travel the world, go back to China and see it for what it really is. You should also try living in different countries, like Europe. Your worldviews will broaden substantially.
This doesn't mean that it's pro China. In fact, that proves my point of WSJ being neutral.
What is seen by locals as the driving force of the censorship is suppressing hysteria/superstition/conspiracy-theories. That kind of stuff would flourish in a society like here. You can see how devastating it is in places like the Middle East.
So yeah they want to suppress things that paint the party in a bad light, but mostly they just don't want anything to get out of control
Judge China by what it does, not by what it says.
uhhh... what? Are you just making this up? I never come across any of it. Not a single porn site I've tried works. They're pretty thorough in my experience. Haven't seen any mass hysteria, though Reddit surprisingly isn't blocked yet
"but you'll be shut down quickly at the slightest mention of political reform, corruption, or financial info that doesn't fit the gov's narrative"
Again, BBC, with all their uncomfortable information isn't blocked. English Wikipedia (which is over HTTPS, so you can look up any topic you want) isn't blocked (though the Chinese one is unfortunately)
I think you've already made your judgement and are seeing the patterns you want to see
I don't read BBC, but when I last checked some of the BBC sites were blocked on China Unicom Beijing (but the GFW is hardly consistent). They don't block English wiki, but make it unusable sometimes with whatever they are doing with HTTPS (if you use it too much, you get put in a penalty box for a few minutes).
> I think you've already made your judgement and are seeing patterns you want to see
I think you aren't opening your eyes to the true situation. Most foreigners in China figure out after 5 or so years, it really is messed up.
This is BS. First, do you have any source to back you up on "is mostly porn"?
Second, Chinese internet users are NOT familiar with imgur or reddit at all. Look at the stats yourself.[1]
Second, it doesn't even matter, there is plenty of porn on the Chinese internet. You run into it on Baidu for even the most innocent of image web searches.