Post: #1

This is an interesting study with findings that we can apply to censorship in the West.

If you don't want to read through the abstract, the short of it is that these researchers were able to determine what types of things the Chinese government censors. They censor any calls for collective action but do not censor criticism of the government. The Chinese government fears collective action.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6199/1251722


Reverse-engineering censorship in China: Randomized experimentation and participant observation

Introduction

Censorship has a long history in China, extending from the efforts of Emperor Qin to burn Confucian texts in the third century BCE to the control of traditional broadcast media under Communist Party rule. However, with the rise of the Internet and new media platforms, more than 1.3 billion people can now broadcast their individual views, making information far more diffuse and considerably harder to control. In response, the government has built a massive social media censorship organization, the result of which constitutes the largest selective suppression of human communication in the recorded history of any country. We show that this large system, designed to suppress information, paradoxically leaves large footprints and so reveals a great deal about itself and the intentions of the government.

Conclusion

Censorship in China is used to muzzle those outside government who attempt to spur the creation of crowds for any reason—in opposition to, in support of, or unrelated to the government. The government allows the Chinese people to say whatever they like about the state, its leaders, or their policies, because talk about any subject unconnected to collective action is not censored. The value that Chinese leaders find in allowing and then measuring criticism by hundreds of millions of Chinese people creates actionable information for them and, as a result, also for academic scholars and public policy analysts.

How can we apply these findings to the West? We can apply these techniques to narrow down what types of discussions governments or other entities are afraid of and thus censor.

The Zoe Quinn scandal and how the MSM/SJW gestapo hustled to bury it are just begging for this type of analysis.

How about government censorship? What do Western governments appear to censor online? How about forum commentators who are government agents, what agenda do they push?

Are Western governments as organized as China's government? Maybe we can find multiple factions in Western governments working for different purposes online.

In China, the media is controlled by the government and the people know it. In the West, the media is controlled by the government and the people have no idea.

Post: #2

In the west, the media is controlled by the corporations, who also buy up all the seats in government

Post: #3

(08-22-2014 11:11 PM)edtf Wrote:  In the west, the media is controlled by the corporations, who also buy up all the seats in government

If you really believe that then I have a beautiful bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. That is just an old canard that useful idiots throw around to divert your attention from the mind behind the curtain. Corporations, some of them, are just some of the many competing interests fighting for influence in the government. The media is indeed owned by the government, that is de jure ownership. But that is not the same thing as control.