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China Social Networks

China Deletes 1.4 Million Social Media Posts in Crackdown (reuters.com) 88

Posted by EditorDavid from the unfriending dept.
Reuters reports: China's cyberspace regulator said 1.4 million social media posts have been deleted following a two-month probe into alleged misinformation, illegal profiteering, and impersonation of state officials, among other "pronounced problems"...

Beijing frequently arrests citizens and censors accounts for publishing or sharing factual information considered sensitive or critical of the Communist Party, the government or the military, especially when such information goes viral. Of the 67,000 accounts that were permanently closed, almost 8,000 were taken down for "spreading fake news, rumours, and harmful information," according to The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). Around 930,000 other accounts received less severe punishments, from being removed of all followers to the suspension or cancellation of profit-making privileges.

In a separate campaign, the regulator recently closed over 100,000 accounts that allegedly misrepresented news anchors and media agencies to counter the rise of online fake news coverage aided by AI technologies.
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China Deletes 1.4 Million Social Media Posts in Crackdown More

China Deletes 1.4 Million Social Media Posts in Crackdown

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  • How the west wishes they could do that, too (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28, 2023 @02:54PM (#63557721)

    Too bad we still pretend to have free speech.

    But we're getting there! So many things you can't say these days. You just won't get arrested for them, yet. But it might cost you just about everything else.

    • even if you do get arrested you still have the right to trail by jury.

      • Re:How the west wishes they could do that, too (Score:5, Insightful)

        by chas.williams ( 6256556 ) on Sunday May 28, 2023 @04:01PM (#63557805)
        Why don't you ask the guys in Gitmo about their right to trial?

      • Don't forget jury nullification (Score:5, Informative)

        by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Sunday May 28, 2023 @04:19PM (#63557835)
        It's often been abused, in particular it made it possible for white supremacist terrorists to act with impunity in the South and even parts of the North, but it can also be used to prevent unjust laws from being enforced.

        There's a push going on in the far right to treat women who get abortions as murderers. They're gradually mainstreaming the idea and eventually the more right wing States will push it through. The same goes for banning birth control. Interracial marriage is also being worked on. For things like that that's why jury nullification exists.

        For those who don't know jury nullification is one of jury refuses to convict without giving any reason. In those cases the reason is they disagree with the law and refuse to allow it to be enforced. In America you can't compel a juror to explain why they ruled the way they did. So as long as you refuse to give a reason beyond your interpretation of the facts then there's nothing the legal system can do. It's basically our last line of defense against and out of control legislation.

    • wishes?

    • Re:How the west wishes they could do that, too (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jacks smirking reven ( 909048 ) on Sunday May 28, 2023 @03:22PM (#63557761)

      You just won't get arrested for them

      Well that's kinda a very, very important distinction, almost the most important one, can't just breeze past it so flippantly.

      I and I think most other Americans left or right think our very strong freedom of speech laws are pretty great and wouldn't advocate for measures like this.

      The case law in the USA is pretty clear on this, the way we lose this is because we vote for people that don't believe in it... cough.

    • Re:How the west wishes they could do that, too (Score:5, Interesting)

      by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Sunday May 28, 2023 @03:36PM (#63557773)

      Too bad we still pretend to have free speech.

      But we're getting there! So many things you can't say these days. You just won't get arrested for them, yet. But it might cost you just about everything else.

      Indeed. There are those who want to take control of everything and force people to believe what they believe [imgur.com].

    • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

      by larryjoe ( 135075 )

      Too bad we still pretend to have free speech.

      It always amuses me that such pretensions about the absence of free speech are pronounced so confidently on a platform that allows exactly the free speech that cannot be recognized. The author should try posting such thoughts in a country where there truly is no free speech.

      But we're getting there! So many things you can't say these days. You just won't get arrested for them, yet. But it might cost you just about everything else.

      There are indeed Western government officials trying to do their best China impression. For example, DeSantis in Florida is trying to make certain things illegal to say based upon his personal preferences, and he tried to financially p

    • Old Twitter posts and Facebook pictures get people cancelled every day.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Petersko ( 564140 )

      Freedom of speech is overrated. I've seen what people do with it.

    • Free speech without consequence seems pretty damned free to me. Too free.

      You can pick one: Consequences or Less Speech.

      Can't have both.

      • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

        by Uberbah ( 647458 )

        Free speech without consequence seems pretty damned free to me. Too free.

        There's already consequences for defamation and direct threats of violence, so what are you talking about? And why is anyone still talking as if censorship is a good thing, when FBI and DHS have been revealed to have been working with tech for years for censoring speech that was CORRECT???

        China a'int got nothin on the US.

        • There's already consequences for defamation and direct threats of violence, so what are you talking about? And why is anyone still talking as if censorship is a good thing, when FBI and DHS have been revealed to have been working with tech for years for censoring speech that was CORRECT???

          It's pretty simple actually. You either learn to live within the community, or you will be removed from it. You aren't entitled to anything that harms the majority, no matter how many layers of fecal matter you want to hide it under.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Uberbah ( 647458 )

            Does that fascist word salad come with ranch or thousand island?

            • I see your projection and hold up the mirror of reflection.

              • Re: (Score:1)

                by Uberbah ( 647458 )

                Riiight. The fascist is the person who wants free speech for everyone, not the person who wants people to be silenced for opinions they disagree with. If Slashdot supported embedding images, I'd whip up a "no, everyone else must be wrong" meme with Principle Skinner.

                • uh huh. Free speech for anyone that can afford it. Or maybe if you're the right color and have the right friends?

                  Seems to me the party of so-called free speech is just as busy cancelling/boycotting every single thing they can point their totally un-woke hive mind at, at least when they aren't claiming victim status.

                  • Re: (Score:1)

                    by Uberbah ( 647458 )

                    You have some left brain/right brain issues going on? You're trashing Democrats, but Democrats have been the ones who have jumped on the censorship bandwagon, not Republicans.

                    • Brain is working just fine. I have doubts about yours. You definitely have the "throw shit at the wall and see if something sticks" act that the right love to do down.

                      “If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.”

                      Nope. Never saw that before.

                    • Re: (Score:1)

                      by Uberbah ( 647458 )

                      You're so far out in space you can see Pluto from your house. Democrats, not Republicans, demanded Big Tech work with government to censor covid, conservatives (see: Trump & Parlor), Hunter laptop story, etc.

                    • Ummm all of that is complete bullshit so I should hope they 'censored' it. More like laughed their asses off while dropping it in the recycle bin.

                      The left has it's problems, but they currently pale in extreme comparison to what the right and especially the far-right has become, which seems to be pure fucking evil.

                      You all are literally supporting every criminal of convenience that comes along, including the biggest of them all, dumptruck. So drunk on hate you are blind to everything else. Everything is a con

                    • Re: (Score:1)

                      by Uberbah ( 647458 )

                      Your bullshit. Everything I just said is an indisputable fact, loser fascist.

                      The left has it's problems

                      The right. Not only have Democrats always been a right wing party, they've moved farther to the right than Republicans. Never moreso when when they all lined up to support Biden, who's worse than Trump and Hillary on any issue you can name, save number of sexual assault victims.

      • You can't falsely yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater or falsely scream "Bomb!" in an airport or on a plane, you can't incite people to riot, you can't phone in false police reports, you can't broadcast classified information.

          There were already restrictions on free speech from the start.

    • I see western & media from other regions along a scale from free to report anything no matter whether it's verifiable/reliable or not to high-quality, carefully & thoroughly investigated journalism supported by verifiable, reliable evidence. Obviously, news towards one end is a lot cheaper & easier to put out & get advertising clicks than the other. The news marketplace as it stands is designed to favour low quality news. Do we have to scream "Censorship! Oppression!" in some knee-jerk respo

    • True. Hacker News is controlled by censors who arbitrarily insult people, hellban them, and tell them what they can and can't talk about. No discussion can be had there unless it's one of the "approved" themes. That's as dishonest, infantile, and cowardly as deplatforming people or shouting them down. Makes them reddit but with nerdier assholes who never learned what free speech and debate was about.

      • If only they got off their aging, yellowing Windows 95 machines, stepped outside and smelled reality.

        I'm sure they are the same gatekeeper types who waited on Usenet for someone to post with an @aol address so they could swarm on that person and eat him alive, and help nurse their bad fee fees from spending so much time stuffed inside their own high school locker.

    • Too bad we still pretend to have free speech.

      But we're getting there! So many things you can't say these days. You just won't get arrested for them, yet. But it might cost you just about everything else.

      Fiorst post claiming that the West is worse than China, who just squelched 1.4 million posts/

      Dammit Chin Ho, you better get more creative, or Poo will be selling your internal organs. So unless you can do better, report for extraction in 3 days.

    • America is rapidly developing it's own "social credit" scoring system and the alpha stage is already in place. Just give it some time.

  • How is this news?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by jonadab ( 583620 )
      Yeah, I think what they're really trying to say is, it was Tuesday.

      (Except I think the article actually came out on Saturday, but whatever.)

  • Just porn?

    Nah, probably *also* removed with all the misinformation. :-)

  • Modernization and demographics are catching up (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Sunday May 28, 2023 @03:31PM (#63557771)
    As countries modernize their birth rates drop. The one child policy wasn't that big a deal because it was easy enough to get around it but they now have a lot of people who are well educated and well educated people tend to have fewer kids then you need to maintain a population. Basically they have the same problem Japan has and the same problem the United States would have without immigration.

    Automation driven productivity improvements are actually enough to keep their economy going but the problem is in a purely capitalistic economy like theirs (there's nothing communist or socialist about China) there isn't any mechanism to keep that economic output from just going straight to the top except for a large population growth.

    This is the trap of every modern capitalist system right now. You get a lot of economic output and you get a ton of productivity and with that comes increased education, but then the birth rates drop and since you built your entire economy around endless growth you can't maintain it. When that hits what you really need is something like the Nordic model but the problem with that is without a homogeneous population you end up with an upper cast using divisions to prevent a shift to that model.

    If you want to see what it looks like it's Japan. I never ending 30-year-long recession and counting... America and Europe are both next on the chopping block. America will probably fall last because of immigration but eventually declining birth rates in the other countries mean that they're not going to keep sending us their young to work for us.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      >there's nothing communist or socialist about China

      Real Communism has never been tried, take n where n is a very large number.

      For those that don't know, Communist zealots have it in their fundamental dogma that Communism is defined as "... and it leads to utopia". Ellipses are flexible, everything after them is not. So every time its tried, it leads to atrocities, slavery, genocide, failed economic systems, mass corruption, etc. And that means it's never real Communism, because those things don't lead to

      • Utopian communists really just have one thing that could be called dogma and that's public ownership of the means of production. Utopia isn't part of that dogma it's just what's supposed to follow it.

        That said I think what you're thinking of isn't a run of the mill communist but a group called Nazbols. It's supposed to be short for nationalist Bolshevik. They're what you would call the authoritarian left or stalinists. They're not actually what Marx would have called communists. They are not for example

      • I'm sure you also think North Korea is democratic. After all, they have it in the name, right? Just like the NSDAP: good old social democrats, really.

        Communism hasn't been tried all over the globe, it has been tried exactly once in a modern setting and then had to fend off 11 foreign and 3 internal armies, leading to its collapse and a successful counterrevolution lead by Stalin. Everything after was a variation on Stalinist policies, which were right wing policies in red drag.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          I don't "think". I know. It is factual that DPRK holds elections. The fact that you don't know this tells us how little you understand about politics.

          Because in your ignorant mind, you think that "democracy" only means "modern representative liberal democracy with universal suffrage for adults". You don't understand even a little bit that the important part is actually not "democracy", but all the other descriptors that go around that word. Because DPRK is a typical authoritarian democracy. It has open ball

          • Russia is a beautful country but their politics always sucked.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

              Most people tend to also forget that Marxism is a German ideology.

              • The late 19th century produced a lot of awful things such as eugenics. The beginnings of Nazism began in the late 19th century, and if you read why the German people adopted it the way they did, it will literally turn your stomach. The physical, mental, and sexual abuse that German children went through during the late 19th and early 20th century and was considered accepted child rearing practice decreed by medical experts was truly monsterous. It literally warped their minds. It wasn't just the "The Jews r

                • And I want to add that I'm sure that almist all of the the milquetoast proto-Nazis we have in America today didn't go through even a fraction of the hell that the average German child who grew up to be an actual Nazi went through.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                  Actually, nothing special was happening in Germany in 1800s when Marx developed his ideology. And nothing special happened in 1900s either, other than the rapid development and improvement in quality of life that was continued move from harsh field work to harsh large factory work.

                  You're once again applying the morality of a weak, decadent, ultra-rich modern human being to living during history when they didn't have iphones or modern dentistry.

                  And you think it's "abuse". The level of feebleness of mind requ

                  • Tell me if this was "improving the quality of life".

                    GERMAN AND AUSTRIAN CHILDREARING BEFORE THE HOLOCAUST
                    Before I describe the actual psychodynamics of the Holocaust, let me give you a brief tour of what kind of childrearing your ancestors were subject to at the turn of the 20th century. What conditions of childhood were routine in Central European families during this period that led to raising children who were time bombs set to go off in the Holocaust and World War II?

                    First of all, parents openly express

                    • Re: (Score:2)

                      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                      Yes, because during this time, just like during the modernity, people flee the rural farming life to live this horrible city factory life. I don't need to even go to historic examples. We are seeing the exact same stupidity from your types today.

                      You see, there are countless of examples of feeble minded westerners with white savior complex such as yourself "saving" such children who live this kind of life and worse today in many cities in South-East Asian nations. Where these people and organisations they pu

      • Humans are not Smurfs and will never be Smurfs.

        If the Smurf villiage was scaled up to country size, Papa Smurf would be acting like Joseph Stalin.

    • in a purely capitalistic economy like theirs (there's nothing communist or socialist about China)

      They're authoritarian. Xi has said that ideologically, having a single leader make decisions is more efficient. He believes things change too fast for democracies to handle. https://www.newsweek.com/joe-b... [newsweek.com]

  • They haven't "deleted" a thing: They're too much a bunch of control freaks. Everything they've suppressed stays recorded, in case they want to use it against someone later. But it will end up being used against them.

  • GENERALIZED UPCOMING/ONGOING FASCISM TOPIC REPLY FORM

    (If article applies to other countries as well as the US please list them here)___

    [] Place an "X" here if it hasn't happened in America yet (shocking) but could very well happen (activates -America)

    This ___ goes along with the general "Fascism is cool, freedom is for dirty criminal animals" mindset that has been increasing in (X-)America (and any listed countries) for many years now. People (X-)here (and any listed countries) are being monstered into acce

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