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Comment by optforfon | Hacker News Reader

You're just seeing what you want to see. The BBC works just fine in China and it's def pretty anti-China. The way I see it Opinion/Editorial heavy journalism is heavily suppressed. Blogs, things like Medium don't work.

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

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Why China says it censors (to eliminate porn and dangerous rumors) and what it actually censors (political views opposed to its own) are very telling. You can find plenty of porn and hysteria behind the GFW, 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.

Judge China by what it does, not by what it says.

"You can find plenty of porn and hysteria behind the GFW"

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

Come on! Porn is pretty pervasive on the Chinese internet, you don't even have to search for it to find it. They are not thorough at all when it comes to domestic sites...its like they don't even care. Also, all of imgur is not blocked, which is mostly porn.

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.

> Also, all of imgur is not blocked, which is mostly porn.

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]

[1]: https://www.quantcast.com/imgur.com#/geographicCard

I don't think its really up for much debate that imgur is mostly porn, given that represents the largest volume of tradeable images. You might not see it if you don't go looking for it, but its totally there.

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.

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