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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

The really scary part of that article is the screenshot of Weibo with every message censored automatically with "content is illegal".

If you think this sort of thing could never happen in the west, I think you're underestimating how quickly it could happen. The constitutions and bills of rights of any country are not laws of nature that can't be broken- they're words on paper that governments or populist movements can easily ignore.

Consider any politician you disagree with deeply and ask yourself: if they could ban dissent from their views, wouldn't they?

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> they're words on paper that governments or populist movements can easily ignore

For example, China's constitution also contains "Article 35. Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration."

However various words and phrases to even mention Article 35 itself are banned in some chat apps, etc... in China even though the full text of the constitution is available anyways.

China's constitution sounds very unlike their real policy. Is there no recourse for Chinese citizen's to challenge unconstitutional actions?

You must be mistaken. China's Constitution matches exactly with daily life in China. Of course there's a way to challenge unconstitutional actions, through the Communist Party member dispute process where you can escalate to each level of political officers in the township you live in.

If you go high enough, you might get personal attention from the regional or even provincial governors, who also have to make sure they have enough food, water, shelter, jobs, and prisons to fit the population of their jurisdiction.

I do not understand this comment. Is it sarcasm? Or do you use some unusually restrictive definitions of "freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration"?

China has literally just banned the word 'disagree'.

https://www.hongkongfp.com/2018/02/27/china-drowns-critics-l...

It's sarcasm. Note the last element in the list.

No, there isn't. Try it and you'll be put under house arrest or worse, and you won't get any due process.

They can do it without any cognitive dissonance by either classifying certain persons as non-citizens (hence not granted those rights) or by raising some unclear limit to these rights (so those who break national unity, "harmony" or some such aren't covered).

An example outside of China: Venezuela's Maduro, paying attention to international sensibilities, now classifies opposition to him and his government as "hate speech".

https://hosted.ap.org/article/8b39037f0c71478784778e4dcc8bb4...

Why go to China for examples? That's how we do it in the USA, too.

Free speech zones? cough

like censorship doesn't happen in the usa. remember all that media coverage sanders got when he was packing stadiums while Clinton could barely fill a highschool auditorium? me neither.

how many mass shootings china had last year? oh wait

how about all those bombs dropped daily in the middle east? ah ooos sorry, america again.

USA USA USA

That’s not censorship. Censorship is when the government restricts speech. The government doesn’t control American news media.

With that said I have no disagreement about the hypocrisy of USA bombing foreign countries.

As for shooting, how would we know if this happened in China since the government does control the media there. They could suppress anything they reflected negatively.

China is not a rule of law country, so whatever it’s constitution actually says isn’t very important legally speaking.

Even this two-term was just a speed bump to be repealed quickly if convenient by a rubber stamp congress.

The US is just one branch of government away from the same fate.

Right, FDR pulled it off.

Get the joke?

Try sending a piratebay URL on Facebook Messenger... nope! "Malicious website! Please calm down while we protect you!" (I paraphrase...).

Well, they aren't wrong. I never go to TPB without NoScript on.

The reason constitutions are relatively stable in the west is that people take them seriously and expect violations to be punished. You're more likely to violate the constitution if you think the people won't demand recourse. The constitutional tradition is really the more significant factor. Sadly, ours seems to be weakening.

> Consider any politician you disagree with deeply and ask yourself: if they could ban dissent from their views, wouldn't they?

I'm less concerned about politicians in the US and more about grassroots censorship from the political fringes.

I see Trump fans frequently utter that they like to shut up mainstream media. In their view anybody who is lying or criticizing their great leader doesn't deserve free speech.

One advantage we have here is that the government is separated enough from the people who have actual executive power to ban content. A sudden ban is quite impossible but we should probably be beware of being a slowly cooked frog.

We could start with entirely well-intentioned self-censorship, e.g. with banning the word "gun" from shopping search :-\

Or ban the gun emoji:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/02/apple-rep...

I jest, I realize it's not "banned".

It is already happening. In France some website are already censored and send you to a website of the Interior affairs Minister.

Some are also "shadow-banned" (the default DNS of the ISP return nothing), like the pirate bay (but I think it depends on your ISP).

Are you seriously comparing freedom of speech in France and China?

Is there something seriously wrong with that? The whole argument people here are trying to make is how quickly freedom of speech can erode. In that context, it is absolutely apples to apples when you compare freedom of speech in US, France, Germany, China, wherever.

As a French person, the American view of "everything else than absolute free speech is not free speech" annoys me. Our view on that subject is different and I don't feel like living in China.

Not to mention that the American view of free speech also is not absolute. They just define theirs as the "most free". It's just hypocrisy.

I am also French and I was not comparing France and China. I was just presenting fact: In France (and in other European country as well), we also censor content.

Now, obviously France and US have a different idea of what is free-speech and both view have advantages and disadvantages, I am not going to argue about this.

But, at least for speech, we know what is allowed and what is not allowed to be said. But when in come to internet censorship, the minister of interior affair is almost a unregulated black-box. As far as I remember, their was still the control of a judge , but their was no obligation to publicly have a list of banned website and the reason for their ban. Plus, all the government have been weakening the frontier between the executive and the juridical system for decades now, so the independence of judges regarding theses issues as been really weakened.

If that doesn't scare you enough, you can read some articles by Yve Sintomaire[0] which explain why France is one of the European country with the least defense against a derive to authoritarianism.

[0] http://civic-forum.eu/espace-public/yves-sintomer-la-france-...

Would you have examples of the first case?

> Consider any politician you disagree with deeply and ask yourself: if they could ban dissent from their views, wouldn't they?

Anyone ambitious and competent enough to gain power would. That is the wisdom of the Constitution: balancing checks on power instead of relying on the “right” leader. Based on that, I would amend your question to: would they use the law against others in power who seek to silence dissidents?

Isn’t the more important question, if you disagree with someone and had the power to censor them, would you do it?

Unless people believe in free speech even when it benefits points of view they disagree with, its future in society is in peril. Nobody wants opinions they like to be censored, it’s much more difficult to say that the NRA or religious fundamentalists should have the same protected right of speech as everyone else.

Exactly. We don't need protections for the speech we like. Free speech exists for the speech we don't like.

Democracy requires shared values. It's what allows us to disagree in a civil manner. Once values become divergent enough, democracy is no longer really possible because accepting the outcome of losing becomes intolerable.

consider that the internet is the new imperialism of the west. people are so quick to wag the finger at china but no one stops to think that they are looking iut for themselves. Companies like google and facebook promote western values and they do it subversively: whats the old Billy G quote? Integrate, assimilate, dominate, elimate or some such?

this article is just another western propaganda piece trying to paint China as this overbearing big brother entity (which I will admit is a very compelling narrative to western individualists).

Absolutely. As a lobbyist I encounter this issue all the time. Unfortunately it's both parties, albeit one more so than the other. Still, issue exists in both parties which is scary.

It already happened several times. Twitter admitted to hiding tweets with hash tags like #wikileaks; #podestaemails... So I guess the USA isn't all that different, if you dismiss the propaganda. You just don't have the universal healthcare and you get to spend 10 times more on the military and NSA snooping.

They admitted to banning bots, which is what they did. If someone doesn't like the fact that bots inflated propaganda that they happened to believe in doesn't make it censorship.

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