Absolutely.

The only fair way to handle it is to pay lip service to the free flow of information, and then get your friends who own every mass media platform with reach to push your own agenda, burying the rest in lawsuit threats and filtering algorithms.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m not defending the Chinese government as saints, but I think at this point we can safely acknowledge EVERYTHING sucks. If there’s a country fairly managing to promote truth while keeping dangerous nonsense from propagating, I sure haven’t found it.

We just ping-pong between these “coal is dying” and “coal is thriving” articles and I honestly can’t keep up.

The Japanese goodbye “yoroshiku onegaishimasu” could reasonably be translated as this.

$42 million dollars. Basically nothing in terms of Google’s bottom line.

They’re doing this because they WANT to.

I think you might be misunderstanding the point.

It’s the idea that social media, in its current incarnation, in and of itself, conceivably CAN’T be rid of these problems. It’s an emergent property and it’s entirely possible there is NO way to deal with manipulation or misinformation. Even federation doesn’t eliminate the problem, and it’s far past time to talk about the possibility that the only way to avoid the negative impact of social media is to not have social media - at least not in ANYTHING like its current form.

What could possibly go wrong with pushing the two most resource rich and populous countries in the world onto the same team aligned against you? I’m surprised nobody’s thought of such a winning strategy before.