Source: New York Times
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Hello, readers! Greetings from Hong Kong. I’m Li Yuan, Asia tech columnist, and it’s my turn to write the newsletter. This week, the tech world on both sides of the Pacific got embroiled in the topic I’m most passionate about: censorship. Allow me to indulge a bit.
In the United States, Apple, Google and Facebook removed the bulk of the content of the right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his Infowars site from their services for hate speech and other violations. Twitter left Mr. Jones’s posts untouched.
The actions created a hubbub over free speech. My colleagues laid out in this article what some of the tech giants allow and ban on their sites. These Times opinion pieces from Kara Swisher and from David French on the topic are also worth reading.
But as exhausting and exasperating as the debate about tech companies’ role in policing content may be for many Americans, I often watch it with envy and wish we could have similarly vigorous discussions about free speech and due process in China.
As many of you may know, China has the world’s most sophisticated and brutal internet censorship system called the Great Firewall. Over the past decade, the Chinese government blocked Google, Facebook and Twitter, along with thousands of other foreign websites.
In their places rose the homegrown search engine giant Baidu, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter called Weibo, and the Facebook-like app called WeChat. The government also carried out many crackdowns on tools that help circumvent the Great Firewall.I think a lot about how this affects China. This week I wrote a column about how a younger generation is growing up in China without Google, Facebook or Twitter. I found that many young Chinese have little idea what these websites are and have little interest in knowing what has been censored online. They are also genuinely patriotic and optimistic about theirs and China’s future.
I was surprised by the reactions (good and bad) to the column. Some readers were sarcastic. Not having access to Google, Facebook or Twitter? “Lucky them!” wrote one Facebook user. “They have not missed anything important!” said another.
The point of the column wasn’t about access to those websites, which, as flawed as they are, constitute much of the internet in many countries. It was about…
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