The conversations are amazing
this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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Chinese users use VPNs all the time. Additionally, western countries deliberately distort search results so the most approved sources are front and center.
I've been to China. VPN access requires jumping through insane hoops and disguising your traffic as different traffic. Tor is blocked. Most commercial VPNs are IP blocked. HTTPS proxy or HTTP proxy over SSH tunnel gets blocked very quickly due to traffic analysis.
You're also not, presumably, a Chinese citizen, who know better how their own internet works. Why would you immediately jump to doing what you know?
My point is that there is no such thing as a truly "free" internet, whether it be by corporations or governments. You might as well be defending unicorns.
The US government literally just effectively banned a social network through government mandate.
US users make up about 17% of TikToc's global user base. Selling their addictive algorithm to keep a small number of users was never going to happen.
And what hand waving? It was banned because the US government could not control the flow of information to its own people like it can with all the other US corporate/state owned media. The data collection nonsense is just that. If they cared they could have regulated data collection across the board. Foreign countries abide by host countries laws all the time, see GDPR and similar. But that would have cut into the profits of other corporate/state controlled media outlets like Meta and Google.
Id consectetur dolore eiusmod culpa.