It's worth noting that American censorship in, say, 1960, was at close to the same level.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_censorship_in_the_United_...
replies(6):
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_censorship_in_the_United_...
(reading that again I discovered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Film_Corp._v._Industria... ; the idea that movies were not counted as free speech for several decades in the US may come as a surprise to other HN readers)
Homosexuality actually became less tolerated in the 19th and 20th century through Western influence. Now the West has done an about face in the span of one or two generations and China is comparatively less tolerant.
All this to say that it's difficult to quantify since
- assigning a teleological direction to social mores is perilous at best
- comparing entire societies means you overlook specific cases that often aren't even evaluated along the same axis
- Societies ebb and flow at unpredictable rates and with meandering paths and influence each other in often bizarre ways
Social progress is inherently subjective (because progress in one value system is actually a regression in a different value system), and the observer always grounds their claim of 'behind' or 'ahead' in their culture's viewpoint.
Of course our incarceration rate now has nearly tripled to 640/100K, so thank God they're not following us.
Yes, not government censorship, but it’s almost worse when a private, unaccountable, entity is imposing its own moral values, especially when they reach the size that Blockbuster did during its heyday.
That's not exactly right. Blockbuster simply had a policy not to carry X-rated films that became a no NC-17 rated films when the rating changed.
The video distributor of Bad Lieutenant created an R rated version of the film. The end result is still a wrecked/censored version of the movie, but it wasn't Blockbuster doing the silent editing. It is the choice of the film maker/studio/distributor to get the extra money from Blockbuster.
I personally tire of this pattern:
1. Article submitted to an international forum about X country doing Y bad thing
2. "Well the USA is just as bad, they also did/doing/will do Y bad thing"
Well yes, that is true, but people are voting up the submission because they found that X-doing-Y-today was interesting and don't care to rehash the history of the US every single time. YES the US has plenty of blemishes in its history. Yes it has censored, warred, raped, extorted, and imprisoned. Yes the US persists in directly doing some of those today, and through malice or ineptitude it fails to prevent others.
But the regularity with which this pattern repeats feels so much like state sponsored astroturfing I'm just tired of it.
The argument wasn't even made that it was a violation of the first amendment (which would have only applied to laws by Congress, not states). The argument was more about things like whether it was a violation of interstate commerce to have to have different versions of a movie for different states. They did argue that it violated the Ohio state constitutional right to free speech.
I don't think it implies that, but to be honest, the general implication here on HN is that China is the current Big Bad and everything they do is uniquely bad. It's not spelled out, exactly, but that's how I read many comments here.
It may be just me, but that' s the vibe I get from HN in relation to China.
> But the regularity with which this pattern repeats feels so much like state sponsored astroturfing I'm just tired of it.
I think this is unfair. I also don't think you truly think people asking about US behavior here are Chinese agents. That's just silly. China hasn't infiltrated HN.
Oprah used to cover sex topics all the time.
Maybe my thinking is misguided, but this is exactly what I think. China has an abundance of labor and a strong appetite to perform just such tasks.
> That's just silly. China hasn't infiltrated HN.
It's not like you have to "infiltrate" anything here, it's an open forum and China would need to do little more than pay 2 people to take rotating shifts and they have essentially full coverage to counter any content critical of the country.
Since the readership of HN likely holds much more power than the average American, I'd think China silly to not make that investment.
This kind of assumption is naive (no offense) and reminds me of the denialism regarding Russian disinformation. You do not need to "infiltrate" the site with "agents". It's fairly easy to write a script checking the front page for mentions of China and manually checking the thread to possibly respond with a comment. Before dismissing concerns like this as conspiratorial or silly, you should do some research on the topic:
[1] https://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/50c.pdf?m=146479...
[2] https://www.info-res.org/post/revealed-coordinated-attempt-t...
[3] https://www.techdirt.com/2021/12/15/how-china-uses-western-i...
[4] https://www.state.gov/prc-efforts-to-manipulate-global-publi...
[5] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/05/dozens-of-fake-news-websites...
[6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/28/china-m...
[7] https://www.lawfareblog.com/understanding-pro-china-propagan...
[8] https://mediamanipulation.org/case-studies/astroturfing-how-...
> the general implication here on HN is that China is the current Big Bad and everything they do is uniquely bad
The CCP is hostile to many Western values (e.g. free speech) and they are a primary geopolitical antagonist to the U.S. It's not unreasonable for a mostly U.S. user base to see the worst in CCP behavior or be biased against the CCP.
Jeesh - many reader of hn are in the US and if X interesting is happen elsewhere, they are reasonably interested that X is happening in the US. Also, many hn readers are India, they may describe X happening in India also. And notably, censorship in India is noted in a different post that seems properly to be getting attention as well.
And, of course, American censorship deserves mention because the USA has often presented as bastion of free speech. Just as much, something like a "feeling of freedom" is a big export of the US - in the sense that it's media products give people in more traditional societies that sensation. This was a big motivation of the original article after all.
Not all American media products are pro-American propaganda. Some are even anti-American. But the overlap/gray-area is significant and so the qualities of the USA aren't irrelevant to say the least.
> The CCP is hostile to many Western values (e.g. free speech) and they are a primary geopolitical antagonist to the U.S. It's not unreasonable for a mostly U.S. user base to see the worst in CCP behavior or be biased against the CCP.
That's neither here nor there. This is what I'm actually replying to:
> Did the article imply somewhere that China is unique in it's censorship?
And my answer is: maybe not the article itself, but everything that gets said here on HN (where the article got quoted) has that implication. In fact, your very answer has that explicit implication! So you are proving my point.
American site with mostly American-lens topics. Maybe 50% American readers? Rest International.