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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

I know it's not a popular opinion here but there's an argument to be made that a censored Facebook would do more good than no Facebook at all. It's not like Facebook being blocked in China is going to spark a popular revolt or reduce government censorship/spying. It could help, for one, expose more Chinese to Western culture and vice versa.

For me however, the strongest argument is that nearly everyone in China would prefer a censored Facebook to no Facebook at all and I'm humble enough to accept that they know, better than me, what's best for them.

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I think the concern is that if Facebook builds sophisticated censorship tools for China, the temptation for other nations to adopt them will become overwhelming. The Chinese level of censorship could become a defacto standard without a robust conversation about what that means for society.

Even those enthusiastically calling for censorship of 'fake news' may be given pause for thought when considering how those tools might be used by political opponents.

This. I'm sure our Russian government would absolutely love to have the similar level of control. Currently, Facebook's too big for them (although they test the water with LinkedIn), but this is a clear signal.

And more countries (e.g. Kazakhstan) will likely follow the suit.

Facebook is not very big in Russia and I wouldn't be surprised if it is banned as LinkedIn soon. Most of ordinary Russians use VKontakte.

> It could help, for one, expose more Chinese to Western culture and vice versa.

"Western culture" is a large part of what that censorship would be aimed at suppressing.

Why is "Western culture" in scare quotes there?

Probably because he's just quoting the person above him

It's a vicious cycle

Those aren't scare quotes, they're quotation quotes.

I wouldn't say a large part but definitely some. Having lived in China for ~5 years, most of the censorship seemed to be targeted at internal scandals and politics.

This also assumes facebook is a net good, which I don't believe it is. Take away even the guise of freedom of speech on it, and it's absolutely a net negative, in my mind.

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