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Comment by underseacables | Hacker News Reader

You cannot trust anything reported out of China, absolutely nothing. I do not doubt that there are people being slaughtered and massacred as I write, but anything reported out of China must be taken deeply suspicious, especially if it comes from the government. The Chinese government is the single greatest threat to freedom, and human rights this world has ever seen.

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You don't need to trust anybody's reporting, you can go browse Weibo or Toutiao or Douyin and go see for yourself what regular Chinese people are saying all across China right now. Sure, anything overly political is (self-)censored and there's some actual paid wumao shills in there, but day-to-day stuff like grumbling about local government incompetence is widespread. Here's the Xinjiang hashtag, go nuts:

https://m.weibo.cn/search?containerid=231522type%3D1%26t%3D1...

Self censorship is huge. I admire dissidents living under authoritarian regimes who are brave enough to share their stories, whether they remain there or escape.

Read the thread you're replying to - there's little self-censorship.

How would you measure the amount of self-censorship?

The Xinjiang hashtag isn't really a good target, because it's high-profile enough that there's probably a dedicated team of censors monitoring it.

And of course Weibo search doesn't work for Uyghur content. Try finding this post using any of the words in it: https://m.weibo.cn/detail/4606432605644442 I found it by searching for Uyghur words in Latin script to find someone posting in Uyghur, then looking through their posting history.

I think Weibo is pretty much useless as a source of unfiltered information, unless you're already a heavy Weibo user and can just stumble across things instead of having to rely on search.

And American imperialism is what, just and benign?

>The Chinese government is the single greatest threat to freedom, and human rights this world has ever seen.

How so? Its ability to expand its control beyond its current reach is pretty limited. It is surrounded by the lands and military forces of Russia, India, and the US and its client states like Japan and South Korea.

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