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Comment by lowdose | Hacker News Reader

Does WeChat cause the same problems in China as Facebook & Twitter in the west?

I'm pretty sure WeChat has many revenue streams that don't depend on engagement, thus they have no benefit in encouraging toxic behavior. The main problem with toxicity is not just the people but that the mainstream platforms are built to amplify the worst out of people because that's how they make their money.

WeChat doesn't have a problem deciding policy, it just has to enforce the policies required by the government.

Obviously there's less open dialogue about it, but I think it's fair to say that it must. The CCP censors it very heavily, sometimes explicitly stating they're trying to prevent rumors and misinformation.

Maintaining societal cohesion is the justification for a great many of PRC's actions (I would say 'evils', but that's my judgement), including the Great Firewall, extermination of Uyghurs, etc. It is fundamentally a waste of time to compare that society to America's melting pot on the level we're discussing.

Non of the solutions China comes up with is worth to discuss?

I've found it even of little use to bring up frameworks of other Western countries. I once got a lot of angry replies because I brought up the German approach of mostly just tackling hate speech and having independent non-profit fact-checking organisations label and correct posts, which is about as non-invasive as it gets while trying to deal with the problem, still got a ton of responses about censorship and free speech.

The US is basically free-speech fundamentalist. Expression trumps truth, with that view in mind you by definition can't deal with the problem.

Those concepts of "truth" and "fact" may feel like absolutes but are a product of the observer. When people with similar beliefs/cultures/backgrounds/goals observe the same thing then it's easy to agree on what's true and what's not true. In general I think it's not a good look to tell somebody that the world they perceive is untrue, and that's why I support free speech as basic a human right :)

we're not talking about some highbrow philosophical disagreement or argument about cultural values, we're talking about very basic facts, which have the benefit of actually having truth value regardless of whatever people think.

The pandemic is a pretty good example. There are actually a lot of protocols and behaviours that have shown to make it so hundreds of thousands of people don't have to die regardless of what timezone or nation or religion or political party you're in, yet aided by constant social media barrage the US is so divided it can't even manage to enforce that.

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