It’s more sinister than simple censorship.

The point is brainwashing.

Case-in-point of why we shouldn't have approached China like we did over the last few decades. It normalized totalitarianism in some segments of Western society.

I mean, they say it’s not censorship when it’s not the government doing it even when the government has embeds with “suggestions” ala facebook, twitter and reddit somewhere around 2020…

> Which used to be seen as "Ew, China has their own version? Crazy censorship"

It used to be marketed as that by "China evil" people. Western politicians have always seen this as an arms race. They claim infinite brutal censorship and suppression in China in order to claim that not having it here is a strategic disadvantage. Meanwhile, China's "social credit" is just like a US credit score, which in most countries is an illegal thing to do.

This is completely bipartisan, both US parties take turns shitting on their two greatest enemies: the Bill of Rights and (almost completely defeated at this point) antitrust law. Those are painted as China's advantages: that they don't have to respect anyone's rights and that their government directly runs companies. 1) Neither of those things are true, and 2) they just ignore that China manufactures things and invests in infrastructure (which US politicians as individuals have no idea how to do because they are lawyers and marketers), and pretend that everything can be reduced to gamified finance and propaganda tricks.

It's the "missile gap" again. The US pretended and marketed that Russia had an enormous amount of nuclear weapons in order to fool us into allowing US politicians to dedicate the economy to producing an enormous amount of nuclear weapons.

The result, the child of the Oracle guy owns half the media, and uses it for explicitly political purposes that align with the administration (whichever it may be.)