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Comment by coliveira | Hacker News Reader

It is clearly imperialism pure and simple. The US uses its financial stronghold on internet companies to essentially dictate what is allowed or not in public discuss. You don't need to be very smart to see that Google, FB, Twitter are bound to US norms and regulations (and its surveillance state) and give very little thought to what other countries need/want. If you think this is normal, just think again.

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> Google, FB, Twitter are bound to US norms

They're actually bound to (for the US) extreme views popular in a small part of California. Much of the rest of the US is dealing with the same cultural imperialism, and resents it quite a bit. I agree with the rest of your post.

The US government once made a microblogging service called ZunZuneo [1] for Cuba in an attempt to encourage political change there. It failed to achieve its intended outcomes, but is nevertheless quite interesting because the it shows that the US government is well aware of how electronic media has great potential for exerting political influence.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZunZuneo

This is more serious on AppStore / Google Play / Kindle. American companies effectively censor worldwide expression.

Censorship? Surely not! Isn't the USA the land of the free? Freedom of speech and all that?

The craziest part is that these internet companies are using that stronghold to optimize for "engagement" (i.e. flamebait) that looks outwardly bland enough so as not to disrupt the "advertising friendliness" that they seek to push. "Wuhan flu" is bad because some people in Wuhan might get angry and boycott your advertisers' products. "White male cis people are all racist Trump supporters!" (which weirdly enough seems to be most often posted by a white male cis person!) is not going to cause that kind of unwanted reaction so they push it. It's pretty much institutionalized trolling, it just doesn't get acknowledged as such.

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