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China Social Networks

Evading Censors, Chinese Users Flock To U.S. Chat App Clubhouse (msn.com) 50

Posted by EditorDavid from the audio-apps dept.
"The U.S. app Clubhouse erupted among Chinese social-media users over the weekend," reports Bloomberg, "with thousands joining discussions on contentious subjects...undisturbed by Beijing's censors." On the invite-only, audio-based social app where users host informal conversations, Chinese-speaking communities from around the world gathered to discuss China-Taiwan relations and the prospects of unification, and to share their knowledge and experience of Beijing's crackdown on Muslim Uighurs in the far west region of Xinjiang. Open discussion of such topics is off limits in China, where heavy government censorship is the norm...

On Friday night, a room attracted more than 4,000 people from both sides of the Taiwan Strait to share their stories and views on a range of topics including uniting the two sides. In another room on Saturday, several members of the Uighur ethnic community now living overseas shared their experience of events in Xinjiang, where China has rolled out a widely criticized re-education program that saw an estimated 1 million people or more put into camps...

"Thanks to Clubhouse I have the freedom and the audience to express my opinion," a Finland-based doctor and activist who goes by Halmurat Harri Uyghur told Bloomberg News.
Bloomberg spoke to Michael Norris, a research/strategy manager at a Shanghai-based consultancy, who said most Chinese Clubhouse users he'd spoken to are part of the tech/investment/marketing world. "Those who do engage in political discussion on Clubhouse take on a degree of personal risk," he said. "While most are aware Clubhouse records real names, phone numbers and voice, they are broadly unaware about recent cases in China involving interrogation and jail for errant posts on Twitter." Since Clubhouse so far is only accessible on Apple Inc.'s iPhone and users must have a non-Chinese Apple account, the app has only gained traction among a small cohort of educated citizens, according to Fang Kecheng, a communications professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. "I don't think it can really reach the general public in China," he said. "If so, it will surely get blocked."
Reuters highlights the significance of the event: "I don't know how long this environment can last", said one user in a popular Weibo post that was liked over 65,000 times. "But I will definitely remember this moment in Internet history."
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Evading Censors, Chinese Users Flock To U.S. Chat App Clubhouse More

Evading Censors, Chinese Users Flock To U.S. Chat App Clubhouse

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  • It's not censorship unless the government does it.

    Chinese sites are simply exercising their right to be responsible to stop the spread of misinformation, of calls to violence, and to stop anyone attempting to organize an insurrection or other domestic terrorism incident.
    Even big US companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google agree that misinformation has to be stopped in order to save online discourse from itself. Why should Chinese companies behave differently?

    • It's not censorship unless the government does it.

      And this app is working around Chinese government censorship.

      • Re: It's Not Censorship (Score:4, Insightful)

        by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Sunday February 07, 2021 @04:40PM (#61038134)

        In your dreams it is.

        Signal is the only messenger I know, who managed to solve end-to-end encryption with groups.

        Everyone else is just decrypting at a server. Aka trivial MITM in China, which can make sure everyone has their CA's root certificare installed or gets blocked from connecting at all.

    • Re:It's Not Censorship (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Frank Burly ( 4247955 ) on Sunday February 07, 2021 @02:58PM (#61037876)

      You can make a good argument that the actions of a private company aren't censorship if they are exercising their own free speech rights. But you can't make that free speech argument when the government is pressuring companies to disallow certain topics (as you know is happening in China).

      And I've never seen Facebook, Twitter or Google make an argument that "misinformation has to be stopped in order to save online discourse from itself." As far as I can tell, they are just saying: "we are not going to help spread these lies."

      In America, private companies are able to tell the President of the United States and his supporters to fuck off. In China you'd be in deep pooh.

      • "we are not going to help spread these lies."

        Not to defend the liars or anything, but that's the excuse that every censor uses to justify his/her actions.

        There should be limits to speech, but it's hellishly difficult to strike the right balance. Just claiming "it's to stop lies" and call it a day is waaay too short off the mark.

        • they're fighting immoral behavior. The Hayes code certainly never said anyone was lying.

          It's hard to censor lying because you very quickly get a Streisand effect going if all you're doing is banning folks from telling the truth. But with morality there's so much grey area you can confuse people. Hence the reason governments prefer to lean on it.

          • It's hard to censor lying because you very quickly get a Streisand effect going if all you're doing is banning folks from telling the truth.

            Or a conspiracy effect if you try to make it look like you're hiding something. Banning certainly helps the process along.

            • the conspiracy nutters like Qanon got their start long before any attempt was made to ban them. This has been well studied and we know what the mechanism is. It's people with limited capacity to process information trying to make sense of the terrible things that happen in the world. Often times looking for big conspiracies because the alternative (that the problems are a lot of people acting horribly together) isn't a truth they're willing to swallow.
        • It is very difficult to set rules for others. But it is almost inevitable set the rules for yourself. Big tech is doing that (small tech probably is too, but who cares?). The situation in America is the same as it has been for decades: Legally you can say almost anything, but in practice market forces influence the size of your megaphone. We can have a larger discussion about the competing values at play, but the "public forum==public trust" camp needs better poster children than the Qanon Shaman and MyPill

      • No, in China, private companies can tell the President of the United States and his supporters to fuck off also.

    • Here is a rock. It has mass. Here is the planet Saturn. It also has mass.
      The two are similar!

       

  • In Fascist China "interrogation" means torture and, if your family is lucky, having your body dumped outside for them to take home. After any useful organs are removed, of course.

    • I not saying it isn't true, but ... how the fuck would you knoe *any* of this?

      Got a hotline to Winnie Xi Pingpong, or what?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by nagora ( 177841 )

        I not saying it isn't true, but ... how the fuck would you knoe *any* of this?

        Got a hotline to Winnie Xi Pingpong, or what?

        I suppose the last forty years of reports coming out of every region of China might be wrong.

    • And charge the family for the bullet used to kill you.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by nagora ( 177841 )

        And charge the family for the bullet used to kill you.

        They seem to be mostly electrocuting people to death these days. Since they built the three gorges dam it's all renewable, so it's eco-friendly mass murder.

  • Ignore. Next story.

  • New York Times says chats are the next misinformation spots. We shouldn’t be using chats that cannot be controlled by a single organization.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/technology/personaltech/telegram-signal-misinformation.html

  • Ye olde public privacy delusion again. (Score:3)

    by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Sunday February 07, 2021 @04:21PM (#61038096)

    I'm sorry but they will all end up in Chinese concentration camps.

    How can one be so stupid, to enter an open chat publictly hosted by some random business, and think any of this is private because of some shoddy non-end-to-end non-perfrct-forward-secrecy encryption and because it is invite-only.
    Like the Chinese NSA-equivalent could not send out invitations and play man in the middle...

    • What you should ask yourself is: How fed up are people that they are willing to end up in Chinese concentration camps to discuss these subjects?
      You have to be pretty unsatisfied with the status quo for that to occur.

  • Let's send those right wing Trump supporting Falungong and their hate speech back to China!

  • Not all Internet connections in China are subject to such blocks and even if I use a one that is, /. isn't block, even though there are regular and openly anti-China discussions.

    Perhaps they don't really care so much any more. The vast majority of Chinese seem extremely supportive of their government, and the CPC, probably because the party is largely made up of regular Chinese people.

    • Just because they don't block it out completely or some folks have access to VPNs doesn't mean they don't have the power to shape public opinion. Would you say the average citizen actually support the Uyghur concentration camps or forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience? Or are they more likely to write those off as western conspiracy theories. Western media is becoming much more favorable to the CCP recently. In other words, our elites are adopting a China model. Living in the west is star

  • Isn't it about time someone developed a distributed chat system rather than relying on central servers which can be blocked?

    I suspect that the hard part would be designing a distributed index service where every node holds a tiny part of the total index, but the whole index is searchable. So when A wants to talk to B, it issues a query to nodes C, D, E who all return 'not found' responses, index the hop count and forward the query to F, G, and H. Eventually one of the queries finds a record for B, or they a

  • Agora, the Chinese-founded company is powering Clubhouse. So how exactly is anyone avoiding Chinese censorship?
  • Hey Beijing, hey China shills (both paid and 'useful idiot' types), you can try to shove your agenda down everyones' throat, but the fact of the matter is that all your billion-plus citizens want democracy and want Freedom of Speech and Expression. Eventualy, these philosophies will win and you will lose. Just give up now, it'll be less painful for you that way.
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