Calls for TikTok to be banned in Australia over Chinese spying fears

First - you're confusing 'censorship' with issues of competitive concern. Protecting industries, is not about 'censorship' it's about controlling systems.

Take some time to grasp why 100% of nations protect their financial systems at a very minimum - and usually communications and media.

If a nation left its financial system, comms and media 'open' - it would be very quickly taken over by competitive or totalitarian forces.

For example, any South American country that left those systems open would be almost entirely under the control of the US, Soviets/Russians or China.

Second - it's incredibly naive. Everything is 'censored' on some level - and I mean everything, for a variety of reasons.

Violence and Terrorism. Are we going to allow people to start putting "Kill All the Blacks/Whites/Chinamen" on Twitter, or FB, or on their own websites? And have their little meetings on how to coordinate this? Seems like we're going to have to censor that.

And what about the Jihadis in ISIS showing beheadings, asking young Muslims to "Come on over and you can behead infidels as well!". Because in where I live, 11 young men were nabbed by the Feds trying to get on a plane to go to Syria to do just that.

Have you spent time in Germany? Do you know that Mein Kampf is still effectively banned there? Do you know why? And how sensitive that subject is, and for good reason?

More subtly - we have foreign propaganda and political influence.

China is spending very heavily to convince the world that they have no responsibility towards the spread of COVID. We know factually, that it seems very clear there was at least some degree of coverup in the early stages and that they failed to inform the WHO of important issues, and have lied and not been transparent in their reporting. They jailed and condemned medical staff trying to pull the alarm.

But 'facts don't matter' if they can simply confuse people otherwise and it's not that hard at all - they can completely erase the truth. With the right controls, China can absolutely convince large swaths of the world for example, that 'Coronavirus originated in the USA, and was brought to China by the CIA' - which is absurd, but it's a pretty easy truth to preach if there's no 'censorship'.

Would you be willing to allow China to completely misinform most of the world as to the reality of Coronavirus? Because that's what they want to do.

More poignantly, interference in elections. Thankfully, Google is a fairly ethnical entity, because they could, if they wanted to, shift the outcome of elections in a lot of places. Russia has a program specifically designed to influence America, to try to manipulate outcomes that meet their strategic objectives. RT is a direct attempt at this, it was created by Russian intelligences services, specifically for the purpose of controlling what people believe, and towards promoting Putin's objectives. It's not a 'news agency' it's literally a propaganda arm in the most pure sense of that term.

Media, just like financial services, is power - and that power, were it up for grabs, would be enable certain forces to basically do anything they want.

This is not a new idea, it's as old as time, and the game has been going on for thousands of years.

So the solution could look something like this:

1) China should be banned from selling any products or services in the US that are likewise banned in China. That's actually pretty basic fair trade.

2) Because China censors products of its own companies and uses them as propaganda Channels, any Chinese media company will have to demonstrate quite clearly how they are free from political influence both in terms of political censorship, and especially from promoting political narratives. Some degree of control is fine (nobody is concerned that TikTok is taking down hate speech), but whatever they are doing has to be publicly defined and transparent.

Then they can have access to Western markets.

Australia has banned books too. [0]

The most recent example I know of is "The Peaceful Pill Handbook", which was banned around '07 by giving it a "Restricted Classification", which makes distributing or owning a copy illegal in most state and territories.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Australia#Books

That's true. Following the Christchurch shootings, Telstra pre-emptively blocked 4chan, 8chan, Zero Hedge, Liveleak and others. (Vodaphone and Optus had similar blocks with slightly differing lists of sites they put in place after Telstra had enacted theirs).

They did later lift some of those blocks after everyone stopped sharing the video of the shootings, but not all of them. (And if the government ordered blocks on some of those, I actually would be fairly comfortable with it, if it were done with process and transparency.)

This isn't a judgement of whether their actions were morally right or wrong. However, an ISP should probably be pre-emptively calling MPs to make a decision, rather than controlling access directly.

Tragic

This is the black mirror episode

I'm sure you're of the opinion that that ban should be taken all the way. After all, people could become addicted and that's terrible.

My point was that society/people by and large don't care about unhealthiness and/or the negative effects of addition, they simply want things that they dislike or disagree with (usually from a weird moral or intellectual high horse) to be banned. Else Americans would all be on the streets protesting the continued legality of alcohol consumption or the ridiculous amount of sugars pumped into so much of their food and drink; why the pearl-clutching over teenagers being teenagers and fooling around on a frivolous app compared to the monumental damage to society those two things inflict?