[yterdy]

Continuing to the next step of this argument that has been had before ad nauseum: the West is arguably worse in these regards because China et al. make no bones about preferring order to freedom, while we nominally tout our "opportunity" while actually limiting it to a degree such that conversations like the one we're having take place. (Your argument's only refuge is in casting your opponents in this debate as hysterical, which is ironically a hysterical position to take in-and-of-itself. Measure the actual merits, please.)

[kelnos]

Oh please. The whole "no one is free anywhere, but at least those other people are honest about it" garbage. There should be a logical fallacy named after this sort of argument.

People in the West are measurably, significantly freer than people in China. That doesn't mean the West is perfect. That doesn't mean that there aren't bad actors in government and in the private sector who want to introduce more systems of control and propaganda.

But the difference is that we're allowed to speak out, protest, and fight against these people, and that allowance is enshrined in the lowest level of laws in most Western nations. Again: not perfect, and the worst of the bad actors will try to bend those laws to find loopholes to silence dissent. And sometimes they'll even succeed at that.

That is wildly different from an authoritarian censorship state like China where you get immediately deplatformed if you say things the government doesn't like. And that's the lucky outcome; annoy the government too much and they'll do far worse to you.

[yterdy]

You're comparing ideal to ideal, not practical reality to practical reality. Here's a fact: the Chinese middle class is the size of the US's entire population. The whole thing. Citizens, residents, undocumented immigrants. That's an economic freedom that Americans would - and sometimes do, if you consider law enforcement and the downstream effects of the actions of financial, medical, and industrial professionals - kill for. Which is actually a part of the way American censorship works: empower a buffer class who is preoccupied with maintaining (and lecturing the rest of us about) their political freedoms while most can't access any practical benefits from those freedoms because we can't afford to, in this society where money is speech. This isn't even getting into the more overt and baldly authoritarian ways Americans have their nominal rights infringed upon, simply speaking to the way economic/class-shaping does much of it for us.

Meanwhile, Winnie the Pooh memes say that you're ironically buying into the overstated projection of Chinese control.

But to get back to the crux of the issue: "bad actors" in America (like Google) are not unlike Chinese censors in kind, only degree. That is the conclusion an honest assessment and comparison has to come to. And however much you may want to turn this into some sort of geopolitical pissing match, my message is not, "Let's be more like China," it's, "Let's be what we say we are instead of becoming more like China."