Literally noone could have seen this coming. /s
edit: XCabbage better explains what I was trying to say. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21191253
That is so completely obvious that it boggles the mind that I even needed to say it.
What I'm saying is, China is co-opting modern liberal censorship in the West to do it's own political censorship (edit: in the West).
There is no "liberal censorship", unless you can point me to an instance where a bunch of liberals imprisoned someone for offending them.
When people complain about liberal censorship, they're really complaining that other people have the right to respond negatively to what you say. Cancel culture is also not censorship, and it would be childish to conflate those two things.
Censorship is the simple act of not allowing someone to say something.
Companies censor all the time. Movie studios. Recording companies.
I've noticed this trend with people, they identify something as negative, in this case censorship, and then they try and contort definitions to excuse their involvement in it. Because that's a bad thing and they're good people and good people don't do bad things.
I'm going to come in with a hot take: censorship isn't inherently bad. It just is. Censorship can be used to focus discussion on what's important. To keep garbage out of discourse. Those are good uses of it. Yes, it can be used to simply silence dissent. That is a bad use. But just because it can be used in a bad way doesn't make it bad itself.