Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - The Global Internet Is Dying: America Is Repeating China's Biggest Mistake

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenz       Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 IT'S FREE SPEECH FRIDAY!!!!!For years, the United States villainized China for its restrictive internet landscape and mass censorship of online speech. But lately, things are changing. The U.S. and other western countries are careening towards authoritarianism and seeking to pass laws that mandate invasive surveillance and extreme censorship of online speech. The pattern is very similar to what we saw in China and have seen in other authoritarian countries. Mass censorship and surveillance is ushered in with justifications about "child online safety," governments seeking to ban VPNs, removing anonymity from the web, constructing walled gardens, and so on. James Griffiths is a Hong Kong based journalist who has covered China for over a decade. He is the author of the book The Great Firewall of China: How to build and control an alternative version of the internet. He joined me to talk about what China's internet is really like, the mass erosion of free speech on the western internet, and why the situation we're in right now is so dangerous. Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz              https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0              https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz 

I would not hold up China's internet as a positive vision of what we want our own online environments to be. For years, the United States and the Western world villainized China for its restrictive internet landscape and mass censorship of online speech. In many ways, the Chinese internet with its great firewall and extreme content restrictions was positioned in stark contrast to America's free and open version of the web, where access to information was unrestricted and people could speak and express themselves freely. But lately, things are changing. The United States and other Western countries are careening towards authoritarianism and seeking to pass laws that mandate invasive surveillance tech and extreme censorship of online speech.

The pattern is very similar to what we saw in China and have seen in other authoritarian countries. Mass censorship and surveillance ushered in with justifications about child online safety, governments seeking to ban VPNs, constructing walled gardens, and so on. James Griffiths is a Hong Kong based journalist who's covered China for over a decade. He's the author of the book The Great Firewall of China, How to Build and Control an Alternative Version of the Internet. Today, he's joining me to talk about what China's Internet is really like. The mass erosion of free speech on the Western Internet and why the situation we're in right now is so dangerous.

Hi, James. Welcome to Free Speech Friday. Thank you. So to start off, I kind of want to explain to people a little bit. bit about how China's internet works. I feel like we all have an idea of how China's internet works and that it's slightly different from America. I feel like the first time I learned about any country not having like free and open access to the internet, I heard about China because a friend of mine went to study abroad and like couldn't use certain services. And I was like, wait, you guys don't have Facebook? Like what's going on? So can you tell me a little bit about

how their internet is structured? Yeah, absolutely. We often use the term the Great Firewall when we talk about China's censorship apparatus, that's his huge censorship and surveillance apparatus that's been built up over the last around 30 years. But it's useful to think about the Great Firewall in kind of two broad parts. So you have the traditional firewall, which is what a lot of people in the West think about,

which is the, that's the technology which blocks things like Facebook, YouTube in China, so that if you're in China and you try and load YouTube, it doesn't work, you try and load Google services, none of them work. And that's the thing that really affects foreigners, right? Because you go to China and suddenly, like, none of your usual apps work. you can't go on social media, all of that.

But that's been the case in China for decades. And while it obviously affects what people in China can see and read online, it doesn't affect people so much on their day-to-day lives because people have got used to it, right? They're not trying to use these services because they've never been available. When we talk about censorship in China, a lot of what's really happening, kind of what's really affecting people, affecting their ability to speak and organize and do anything online,

that's happening within the firewall itself, within Chinese internet companies, within Chinese internet services. So as well as blocking websites from overseas, blocking people from accessing both, you know, kind of content like social media, but also banned content, things to do with anti-government speech. You have censors who work within Chinese internet companies, Chinese social media, who are blocking what people can say. They're monitoring chats. They're monitoring posts online. And that's where the real kind of hard censorship is happening. I want to dig into that a little bit more because I want to sort of explain to people how much censorship and how much surveillance is happening. Can you give us an idea of the Chinese internet landscape?

I feel like they have like their equivalent of Uber, their equivalent of like every app that we have. I guess Waybo is the equivalent of social media. I don't know. It's sort of, I don't know if it's really one to one. They have Doin, which I guess is similar to TikTok.

But in terms of like the products that people use day to day, like to express themselves and communicate and connect, what are those platforms and what does the censorship regime look like on those platforms? And how has that evolved over time? Yeah. So China's really interesting because, It's both obviously very different system, but also weirdly something of a mirror, so that just as we're, you know, kind of seen some fracturing and competition within the Western social media landscape in the last few years, we've seen the same in China. So if we'd been having this conversation like five years ago, we'd mainly have talked about Weibo and WeChat, which are the kind of two big social media apps.

Weebar, we can kind of compare to Twitter. WeChat is more of a messaging app, but kind of messaging plus social media, we don't really have an equivalent in the West. But now people also use as well as Waybo is still a big platform. People are using Xiaoheng Shu, which I think a lot of people came across in the West after the TikTok ban looked like it might happen. That's called the Little Red Book. People join that platform, Red Note. So you have Xia Heng Shu and you also have Doyim, which is the domestic version of TikTok.

And so people are using a lot of different platforms now. But what's consistent is that those platforms are quite heavily censor. And the reason they do this is kind of one stroke of genius that the Chinese government had quite early on was rather than try and censor everything themselves, which they used to do, used to be kind of state security internet sensor brigade, as it were, they put the responsibility onto these platforms to avoid having illegal content or risk being banned. So there was a very early Twitter clone about a decade and a half ago that was quite lax with its censorship, attracted a lot of users, but then got hit with massive fines and eventually went out of business. And so because

there's this heavy responsibility on these platforms to censor content and, you know, be overly cautious, essentially, rather than risk being fined, they all employ a lot of sensors. They employ AI tools. So within these platforms, you have a lot of human sensors and AI programs that are monitoring what people are saying, blocking keywords, blocking, you know, certain types of speech. And that is happening across the board. And there is a massive financial and business incentive for these companies to do that. It's kind of crazy. Some of the stuff you're saying, and we're going to get into this later, is already sounding very dystopian and also extremely similar to what we're starting to see now in the West. But let's talk about the stuff that is censored.

I think there's a lot of maybe misrepresentations of what censorship looks like in China. I see this all the time of people saying, oh, you can't even post a picture of Winnie the Pooh, you'll get arrested, or some other things. What does it really look like there? Like what kind of content is actually restricted and what kind of content do you think that Westerners imagine is restricted that is, actually allowed. Yeah, it's quite interesting because, yeah, like you said, people often have a skewed view in in two different directions as it were. So it's a skewed view of kind of, oh, it's way more sensitive than people than it really is. So yeah, things like pictures of Winnie the Pooh,

you know, some things like that, that's some of that stuff's going to get through. Talking about top leaders is very sensitive. You generally can't post about Xi Jinping. You can't use his name in posts because it's so sensitive. And so there is a lot of overreach in that extent. But then there's also quite a lot of content that I think people would find surprising online. quite critical content, quite, you know, sometimes, you know, competitive content online. But what the real target of the census is, the most censored topic or type of conversation that happens within the Chinese internet is not actual specific discussions or incidents or people. It's when people try and organize around that issue.

So if there's any hint of mass organization around a specific issue, that's when the censorship kicks in. So to give an example, there's been a long historical problem with pollution. in China and with environmental regulations and things like this. And you can pretty freely talk about, oh God, it's horribly smoggy outside today, or this local power plant, you know, doesn't seem to be complying with regulations and they're polluting the groundwater. And that won't get censored and that, you know, might get quite popular, might get widely shared. But if you then follow that up with, let's go down to the local government office and have a word

about this or, you know, let's take to the streets. That immediately gets censored. And so what it's really effective at doing is stopping organizing and stopping protests. And that's kind of the key priority, you know, from the government all the way down because that's the thing that threatens their power much more than someone sharing some dumb meme about Xi Jinping. I feel like a lot of what you're describing actually this like the government not wanting people to organize. I mean, a lot of that is so reminiscent to me of what led to their original TikTok ban of Trump, you know, seeing people organize on TikTok wanting to ban the app because of that.

you saw Congress increasingly want to ban the app because of its capacity for a mass organization. And you saw sort of criticisms of Twitter the same before Elon Musk took over and then they just sort of stopped caring about Twitter. I guess like how bad is it that they're doing this stuff? Because I feel like, you know, there's this trend, especially lately, of influencers going to China, saying how amazing it is. I've never been to China. It does seem pretty cool in a lot of ways.

But you see people say, well, on China's internet, like they only give, you know, young people educational content and they don't have our brain rot version of TikTok. They have like educational TikTok that turns off at 8 p.m. And like actually China's internet is something we should aspire to. It's actually really great. And I think China does a ton of stuff really well. They provide a lot of social services to their people. Like there are good things about China. There's a lot of really bad propaganda, especially in America about China. So I don't want to write that off. But I guess like what is your take on their internet? Like have they built a healthy, healthier internet? Is this sort of censorship machine and surveillance machine that they've created? Does that lead?

to a healthier online environment? There is so much slop and brain rot on the Chinese internet. You know, this idea that it is a paradise, you know, you have the censorship and you get the bad content and you keep the good content, it's just not true. There's so much AI crap, there's so much just general kind of discord, people fighting on Weibo about stuff. There's a lot of very hyper-nationalist content,

kind of racist content. You know, China is not a perfect internet in any way. And there is a little bit more, maybe kind of heavy-handed, when it comes to content that's not political, that maybe gets rid of some of the worst stuff that we see on the Western Internet. But at the same time, that is the same system which is getting rid of a lot of the good stuff which we see on the Western Internet of people, you know, being able to organize and express themselves. You know, China is very conservative from a state level when it comes to LGBT issues and, you know,

censors kind of LGBT content. There's been a recent crackdown on a lot of women who writes fan fiction and particularly kind of gay themes. fan fiction recently. And that's, you know, that's not a political thing at all, right? No one was organizing around like, Yowie, porn online. They just want to be able to kind of share stuff and, you know, be quirky and express their sexuality or express their interests, but that was decided that it was somehow not what we want to see in the modern Chinese states, and it's been quite heavily censored recently. I would not hold up China's Internet as a positive vision of what we want our own online environments to be.

Yeah, it's this weird, like, orientalism. I feel like that we see from so many pundits in America where they're like, yeah, they just act like it's all educational content and, you know, this just amazing internet that they've created. And it's been a recent phenomenon because as you mentioned, you know, they've had this censorship regime for decades. And for decades throughout my childhood and even when I first started out as a tech reporter, it was always like China internet bad. The great firewall is bad. And we are bringing free and open communication to the world and like we have this vision of freedom and this could never happen in China because of this censorship machine. And then I guess.

I guess citizens in the West started criticizing the government, and now they're like, actually, there's no brain rock content over there. It's just kids getting educational stuff. And, yeah, I've heard from many people that that is absolutely not true. Well, and there's always been this kind of weird simultaneous criticism, but also a certain level of jealousy in the West from officials about Chinese Internet. You know, in the 2000s around the War on Terror era, when there was obviously a lot of organizing and protests and criticism of the government in the U.S.

You had people like Lindsay Graham talking about how we should have an internet off switch, essentially, and pointing to China as, oh, look, this is a model for us. They can do it. We should be able to do it as well. You often had what they would call, you know, children's protection campaigners, you know, anti-porn campaigners, points at China as, oh, they do this, why can't we do this? So it's always been that simultaneous, oh, this is terrible and they don't give their people freedom. But also maybe we have slightly too much freedom and that we could learn from them. Yes, of course. I know the government always thinks we have a little too much freedom. But it seems like things are really escalated in the past couple years. I mean, I covered Vasta Sesta here in the U.S., which I think was sort of the beginning of this backlash to an open internet that was targeted against websites like Backpage.com that allowed for sex work to happen online safely and in an accessible way. But, you know, I feel like especially since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, when the whole public was sort of forced more online. And the, you know, I feel like especially since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, when the whole public was sort of forced more online. And the, internet became a more powerful organizing tool, you really started to see the backlash from these governments. And then, of course, it's really escalated, I would say, in the past couple of years, with a lot of Westerners learning about things like the genocide and Gaza. When did you start to notice things starting to change in the West in terms of how political leaders and even just the public viewed the internet? So I think you really start to see a shift around controversies like Cambridge Analytica with Facebook, you know, that kind of, as you shift from people having quite a positive view of,

big tech of Silicon Valley towards having a much more negative view, you know, that awareness of people have that, you know, if you're not the customer, you're the product. And, you know, the Edward Snowden leaks, you know, just general kind of growing suspicion, you know, quite accurate, well-founded suspicion of big tech. And that maybe gives an opening to officials to also be more skeptical. And I think they are responding to some, you know, desire from the public for more regulation of the internet. But the problem is that often what starts at a grassroots level as a, you know, desire for regulation and more moderation becomes at a top-down level, much more akin to censorship, and it gets trans-mortified.

You know, like concerns around TikTok were originally around, you know, I don't want my kids swiping brain rot for six hours on end, but then became actually I don't want people organizing on this app and there's seen too many videos from Gaza. So it gets hijacked very easily. Yeah. The whole tech clash, I mean, I would argue it really started with Donald Trump's election, where suddenly people, and Facebook was really blamed for that election here in the U.S. press. And I think people started to be like, wait a minute, maybe social media is not all sunshine and rainbows.

Like the Obama administration was so sort of techno-optimist and was like, yeah, like Uber is going to deliver amazing jobs to Americans. And then I think like you saw simultaneously with people realizing these social platforms were not 100% good, the sort of VC-backed startup economy, tech economy, all like in terms of the delivery apps, So the D to C world also sort of fell out. You started to see depression of wages. So I feel like, I mean, what you said is so correct that that was leverage very effectively. I was infuriated as someone that reported on all of that that the lesson wasn't data privacy. Like the takeaway from all of that wasn't like, wow, Cambridge Analytica, Facebook's harvesting all our data.

Let's crack down on Facebook's ability to harvest data. Instead, it's become let's mandate that Facebook can collect even more data, even on children, to make sure that, you know, children actually can't organize a climate protest on there. something. Like, it was just so effectively leveraged. I read this horrible piece by Ezra Klein today, just sort of pushing a lot of these same talking points saying that, like, these big tech platforms are causing harm. And that's why we need online censorship. And the reality is, is that online censorship doesn't actually hurt these platforms, right? I mean, like, you can have mass online censorship, case in point China, and still have very successful tech platforms. Yeah. And it is very similar

to the Chinese model where you are kind of private. and outsourcing your government-level censorship to these massive companies. You know, in China we see, so Tencent which owns WeChat and owns a number of other key internet services in China, it's to the Chinese government's benefit that Tencent grows and controls more companies because they are a trustworthy company. They have a long legacy of, you know, doing what the government wants. And you see a similar thing. We saw this with, you know, the TikTok ban and the TikTok kind of sale. The US government eventually kind of settled down this idea. They were like, well, no, it's fine if TikTok exists. we want it to be owned by our friends and we want it to be owned by a company that we can trust

and we can wield influence over, rather than saying, here are the problems, legitimate problems with TikTok around privacy, around, you know, potential government influence on it. And we should act to make sure that you don't have that on any platform because, like you said, all of the problems on TikTok existed on every other social media platform. And instead, they just said, oh, no, let's just let, you know, Larry Ellison run it. And then we don't have to worry about it anymore. Yeah. It seems like a lot of this censorship and these efforts to represent.

apply China level of control of the internet are also pushed in the name of children's mental health or think of the children. Obviously a lot of like anti-porn, anti-LGB anti-adult content falls under this, but also this idea that like, yeah, social media is sort of uniquely harmful to children. There was that show, Adolescence in the UK that honestly people were treating as a documentary. It was a scripted show about like, you know, this teen and there's online radicalization as a part of it. And obviously those things are problems. But how do you sort of view the response to them? especially in the UK, it seems like the UK is a little bit ahead of us. And Australia is a little bit ahead of us in terms of, like, cracking down on speech.

It seems like it's gone. Like, I don't know, we've lost a lot of speech rights really quickly. Yeah. And it's kind of typical lazy legislating, I would say, that there is a legitimate problem, there are legitimate concerns. But to address them in a way that balances the concerns and the problems with free speech protections, with, you know, human rights protections is very difficult. It's much easier to just say, no, we're going to ban all children from social.

media, we're going to ban porn sites, we're going to introduce age verification checks, which they've had in the UK and made using the general internet in the UK and nightmare. And often we see this in the US as well. You have legislators who don't really understand this technology. You know, I think everyone's seen clips of Congress people and senators interviewing Mark Zuckerberg and other tech officials and just kind of, you know, it's essentially how do I rotate PDF? They just don't understand what they're trying to legislate.

And you see the same in the UK. I'm originally from the UK. and there there was the introduction of age verification checks for adult sites. And because that's been such a disaster and made things so complicated to use Internet, lots of people are then using VPNs to get around it. And then, you know, inevitably then you get legislators to say, oh, well, we need to ban VPNs. And banning VPNs is something that China has even struggled with.

It is not an easy thing to do. The idea that the UK could do it in a way that remotely protects free speech and privacy is laughable, but probably just couldn't even do it. they'll probably just spend a lot of money, create a system that has tons of loopholes, drives people towards dodgy VPNs and things like that. And so I think that's a big part of the problem is they're looking for easy fix or even technological fixes for something that's much more of a societal community-based system problem. And so rather than engaging with people that know how to do this,

even the companies themselves, let alone pro free speech groups like the EFF, they are just slapping some legislation, let's just try and ban it and not think about it anymore. I feel like we're seeing this just increasingly fractured internet too, where each country has its own restrictions and regulations and you can't access certain services. I experienced this, I guess, initially when the TikTok ban existed for a very short time, it went into effect, right? I think it was the night before, or no, on the day that Trump took office, right, the inauguration day. And people in Canada had TikTok, so people were like trying a VPN from Canada. It was just caused all this chaos. But I was trying to do something with a friend of mine in Australia to create content recently.

And she couldn't access a bunch of these links that I was sharing because she hadn't validated her identity, which I try to stress to people. It's not just age verification. It's a lot of time identity verification where you have to prove that you're an adult through verifying your identity. And it seems like just we're constructing a lot of firewalls increasingly around each Western country. What other parallels do you see when you look at the developments lately in the world? Western internet versus China. Yeah, so these age verification checks and like you say ID checks, they're very similar to China. China's for a long time had a real name policy for a lot of its social media

platforms so that you, you know, you might have an alias that you're posting under, but the platform knows your identity and that's linked to your national ID card and things like that. So that if you are stepping out of line, it's not just your account gets banned, you potentially get a knock on the door from the police. And so we're seeing these systems rolled out all over the place. You know, China too justifies a lot of its censorship. surveillance by on the grounds of protecting children and protecting, you know, getting rid of adult content. And one of the things that China's had a major effect on, it's not so much any

particular policies, but it's kind of the existence of the firewall acts as a almost like a load star for potential sensors around the world because they can point to this very successful system of censorship that's been in place for decades now. And not only is it effective from a political control level, but it's also effective from an economic level, you know, China has a booming domestic internet market, technology market, some of these Chinese tech firms are so successful that they're now breaking into Western markets. So it's, you know, in the old days it was always said that, oh, no, there will always be kind of a cheap carbon copy of the West and, you know, people won't want to use these services. And, you know, and it used to be true. Like, when Google

left China, it was a major blow because Baidu, which is the major Chinese search engine genuinely was a very, very poor imitation of Google. Like you were using an inferior service. But that's just not true nowadays you're often using equivalent or, you know, superior services or services like Doy and TikTok, which are influencing how Western social media develops. To have that really successful walled off separate internet shows legislators, lawmakers around the world, well, maybe we could do something similar if we're a nice big market, you know, if you're the US, if you're the European Union, you can kind of say, well, we could probably cultivate some domestic competitors to these services. We could put up walls around national or international internet. And it won't

necessarily have a massive negative impact. Some of that is, you know, maybe positive in terms of, you know, encouraging more competition. You know, it'd be great if there was European equivalents of a lot of these US services, particularly as the White House has sought to influence these services. But it becomes concerning, obviously, when you want a domestic competitor because you can influence them more easily than you can influence Google or Facebook or Microsoft. And that's where things are really dangerous. And it's also a departure from this kind of older, much more utopian vision of the internet as somewhere that was separate from traditional geographic borders and boundaries that was a thing above kind of petty international politics. And we've really lost that. And it's

just seen as the internet is an extension of whatever country you live in. Yeah. I mean, here in America, I think also what's so concerning is that, as I've written about for The Guardian and Ziteo, a lot of these laws that Congress is pursuing would actually entrench the power of big tech. It would make it harder for competitors to emerge and challenge meta. Google Twitter to a lesser extent, like these big sort of behemists that have the sign off from the U.S. government. Blue Sky, which is a competitive service to Twitter, talked about this where they, and they have funding. It was co-founded by Jack Dorsey. It's not like some random app, but they've really struggled to compete with X under Elon, in part because now they have all these

burdensome identity verification rules in place for certain states like Mississippi, which they actually pulled out of for a short time because it was so expensive to operate there. And so it makes it harder for these upstarts to even challenge meta and Google and stuff. And then you have the big tech companies that are just completely in the pocket of the government. And in that sense, it feels very like China-like in terms of just the way America is managing the internet and the way that our government sort of is able to directly influence these massively powerful platforms. Yeah, absolutely. And that's why I always trying to make a point of talking about censorship within China

as happening mostly within these private companies, right? that your main censors in China are not so much the government. They are Tencent. They are ByteDance who is doing the censorship on behalf of the government, because then that's much more likely what we'll see in Western countries. It's not going to be some government-level Internet task force that is seeking out improper content and getting rid of it. It's going to be platforms like X.

It's going to be Facebook that are adopting standards where they delete content. I think maybe the one thing that will be the saving grace for users in the West is that so far Facebook particularly has shown itself absolutely unwilling to invest in moderation whatsoever. So that even if there are requirements, they'll, you know, they'll underfund it so much so badly that it maybe won't be so effective. But it still could be. And as somebody that has lost three Instagram accounts because of community guidelines violations, like I think the fact that they underfund it makes it even harder because you can't appeal. And I, for instance, got a big strike recently. And at this point, I'm a successful enough tech journalists, somewhat successful.

At least Meta's still answering my emails for now and their comms person will like fix it and fix the problem with my account. But I think like part of these companies operating in this for-profit business models, yeah, they don't want to. They'll censor anything that the government likes and kind of do that. But they're not going to build any sort of like thoughtful moderation system that really takes into account, you know, what's being posted and what the context is. No, and that was the biggest pity. That was kind of the biggest loss, I think, from the tech clash, the post-Camprish-analytic post-Trump election scandals, was that you saw a lot of criticism and bashing of big tech in the media and in Congress and things like that. But we didn't really introduce any requirements on them to pave any better. You know, there was, I think, an opportunity there that was lost to say, okay, here are some good, solid moderation systems that you should introduce, that they should be transparent, that they, you know, should be funded to a certain level. and you need to basically have some kind of transparency publication and say this is what we censor, this is what we don't, this is a clear appeals process. And we didn't, you know, we got the Facebook Oversight Board, which right takes like seven years to issue a useless press press release on something.

And we got nothing else. And ironically, this is also a problem in China. There is, I've actually had a friend go through this where he lost a we chat account, which can be devastating China that's like losing your Facebook, Uber, X and Instagram all at once say and just cuts you off from so many services. You know, because people even use WeChat to like log in to like scan restaurant menus or, you know, book cars or book massage and things like it. You know, it could be really devastating. And like every other tech company in the world, getting through to WeChat customer services, a nightmare. It is ineffective.

But there is a like office in Chen Jen that you can go to where you go to in person and try and appeal these things. Bring in your IDs. So basically he got locked out because he'd lost his phone, lost his phone number and, like that. And he was able to go stand in a queue for several hours, show his ID to a physical person and get access to his accounts again. But, you know, that's not an effective system. That is a nightmare. You know, China's a big country. You don't want to fly all the way to Shenzhen to try and get one of your accounts back. Yeah, it reminds me of these activists that have, I mean, Laura Lumer famously changed herself to the front of Twitter's headquarters at one point

when she was banned. I think she was banned for good reason. That wasn't a locked out of an account type thing. But it, yeah, you increasingly hear of these people trying to go show up at tech companies headquarters and fix things. And that's hilarious that they've created their own little like DMV system. I mean, I think just like the points that you're making about like the censorship coming from corporations is so important too for people to understand when we look at the way censorship is going in America online. Because I think when especially like tech reporters or people that care about free speech activists are to call attention to these censorship. you'll often hear, well, it's not the government.

I mean, there are concerns of job owning and the government, you know, unduly influencing these platforms. But a lot of times the government doesn't overtly tell the platforms what to do or what not to do. We saw this even just with the tech CEOs all lining up behind Trump and Mark Zuckerberg, the minute that Trump is elected like going on being like, oh, we're for free speech. You can say racial slurs again now. Like, it's not like Trump told them to say that. It's just that they are sort of tacitly pressured, I guess, to do that.

Or you have someone like Elon Musk is a true believer and wants to. to censor, you know, any sort of dissent. How does that compare to China? Like, is there a more heavy-handed approach in China? And do you see a more heavy-handed approach coming to the state and the Western world? Or do you think that it will sort of be through these like sort of soft pressure campaigns on these companies? Because I think the soft pressure campaigns are actually even harder because you can't like directly

appeal, you know, or like there's no like way to sue the government to make something stop happening. It's just sort of happening tacitly. Yeah, absolutely. And there are definitely parallels, you know, obviously China is more heavy-handed to that the law is much stricter, but the law is still quite vague. You know, the law talks about extremist content or anti-government content. So if it doesn't, it doesn't, you know, obviously list out specific things you can't say online.

And, you know, there is kind of a tacit understanding of certain things you can't say online that are banned everywhere. But then also, to a certain extent, you have companies that are kind of winging it and deciding things on the fly. And, you know, we saw stuff with, like, at one point, Doyin Chinese TikTok was banning people just posting content in Cantonese and several other non-Mandran languages because they didn't have the censors to check it. They didn't have sensors that spoke those languages. So they were like, well, rather than risk that this is anti-government content, we're just going to kind of ban it outright.

And since then, they've invested in some censorship for larger languages. But, you know, if you're posting in a minority language in China, you're probably more likely to get censored because they just, they just don't want to take the risk and they definitely don't want to invest. And so you see this kind of, there is a legal requirement to do censorship and control, but also companies are working in a gray area of what should be banned or what shouldn't be allowed, and they generally overcorrect and ban content that maybe the government doesn't really like, but wouldn't say it was illegal. And again, like you said, there's no one that you can appeal this to because this is a private company acting on its own, you know, controlling its users and it's entitled to by, you know,

some user agreement that you scrolled through and didn't read when you signed up for your account. And, you know, even in, especially in China, obviously there aren't the kind of constitutional protections that you might bring a lawsuit under. But even in the U.S., right, these are private companies. They're entitled to control their private spaces online how they see fit. But it becomes very difficult. When you're censoring spaces online, when you're, you know, like you said, Mark Zuckerberg changing your policies for Facebook to curry favor with the Trump administration. And even if that's a complete 180 from how you were controlling content online when you were trying to carry favor with the Biden administration. I mean, I think in all cases, the tech companies have realized over the past couple years that, like, the government just wants power over the speech on the platform.

And I think that's actually a trade that they're happy to make if it means they can continue to profit, especially if that trade-off results in them being able to collect more data, which a lot of these laws will actually allow them to do. You know, YouTube can now start scanning our faces and doing biometric checks to make sure that, you know, there's not underage people using certain, you know, products in certain areas. And like you said earlier as well, it sets up even greater walls to competitors, right? Because it increases the costs, you know, and like Corey Docter has written a lot about like how these companies lobbied for laws that make it harder to like scrape Facebook so you can like take all of your followers with you and move somewhere else very easily, even though Facebook benefited from that when it was competing with Myspace. And so they're setting up walls around them and it's, yeah, it's in their interest to both to cozy up to the government so that you're the like chosen service. but also to, yeah, if you're going to lobby for something that for you will cost like a fraction of a percent of your like annual revenue to do, but for an upstart service like Blue Sky or the similar or, you know, one that hasn't been invented yet, that might be like 50% of their budget. And, and that's, you know, that's going to be crippling for them. Much less like all of these online forums and, you know, small services that are subject to the same laws, I wrote about, you know, the Online Safety Act in the UK after it went into effect. You saw Alcoholics Anonymous forums shut. down groups that were created actually for children to report instances of abuse and help young

women who were abused. So it's horrible. Like those are the type of like nonprofit communities. I think when we think of social networking, we think of these massive like behemoths. But there is still this like kind of indie web of social platforms and communities that are subject to these same regulations that will just be knocked completely out of business. And it bothers me so much that all of this is sold to the public as cracking down on big tech. Like, even you hear this from leftists in America. Like, you know, we've got to pass these censorship laws. That's really going to hold tech accountable. And I think your correlation with China is so important because like these, as you mentioned, China's tech industry has become really big and really powerful. And it has always embraced censorship.

So this idea that censorship is sort of antithetical to corporate domination in the tech landscape just seems ridiculous. Yeah. And all these Western tech companies that, you know, like to talk about free speech. They all tried their best to cooperate with China when there seemed like there was a chance to do so. Google was in China for years. Made a real good, you know, that was during the Don't Be Evil days as well. And Google was trying to break into China,

censoring their search engine, claimed that they were offering something that people didn't have, but obviously they were offering a censored search engine, which people already did. Facebook notoriously, you know, it never got into China, but Mark Zuckerberg spent years lobbying China. You know, he embarrassingly, like reportedly asked, Xi Jinping to like name his daughter.

I forgot about that. This was a huge effort. And you know, if Facebook had been allowed into China, which I don't think they would ever would because they wouldn't trust them to behave because, you know, obviously the main lever use against Facebook is the US market. It's never going to be the Chinese market. And so that's why the White House has influence over Facebook, but Beijing wouldn't necessarily have.

But if they'd have got in, of course they would have censored everything, just the same as everyone else. You know, this idea that these companies care about free speech is just nonsense. You know, maybe they did it way, way back. in the day, right at the beginning of these companies, when they were more optimistic young tech founders, you know, there was Jack Dorsey, I think at Twitter briefly did kind of like it as a platform of protests and things, you know, and it was linked to the Arab Spring and stuff like that. But the idea that these companies would sacrifice their bottom line to protect free speech

is just, has just been shown to be false over and over again. And of course, yeah, I mean, they love it when the protests facilitated by the platform align with the interests of the US government. You know, like the Arab Spring was praised, but the same sorts of protests regarding speech in Gaza or even the Me Too movement or the Black Lives Matter movement, you know, that was a huge thorn in, I think, the government side in 2020 and they were really angry about it and upset that people were leveraging Twitter and other platforms to kind of do that type of organizing. And that's also a similarity with China, right? Content about protests in China is very, very heavily censored, but protests that they like overseas that make the U.S. look bad or make them. other geopolitical enemies look bad. That's all over the place. Sometimes in China, the US is shown as this incredibly chaotic country that is subject to protest all the time. And that's shown as

a way of saying that our model is much more superior and that, you know, democracy doesn't work and things like that. So there is no like moral integrity when it comes to companies and censors how they approach these things. They will take one thing, they'll allow one thing if it benefits to them and ban something else if it doesn't. They're not doing it on a moral grounds. I've talked about China very briefly in my free speech series, before and I always get the comments. I think because I have a lot of people on the left that are very progressive that that watch my channel that are like, well, but China's great. And so how dare you? You like, you know, but they're thriving. They're great over there. Whatever. Like, this is a good

thing. Like we should replicate. We should be more like China. And again, I will say, I'm with you in terms of like, yeah, more like China. If that means providing more social services, great. But like, what would you say to kind of that? Because I do think China is also simultaneously, even though I would, I vastly disagree with their, like, internet system and censorship. Like, it is villainized in this really aggressive way by the West. And I think we're increasingly seeing some of that stuff breakdown, actually, which is part of which is being used as justification for banning platforms like TikTok. But yeah, how do you sort of like respond to that type of stuff? And it's a difficult thing because, you know, people really always want like a simplistic story, right?

They want, you know, China, China bad, US good. And in China, you see the flip side, right? They want US bad, China good. And both countries, I think, are really guilty of seeing the other country as the only thing that exists in the world. So that when people in the US, when you're criticizing the US system or stuff, you'll hear like, oh, you want it to be like China, right? You want to live under an oppressive authoritarian state. And when you criticize things in China, they'll be like, oh, you want Donald Trump to you, as if that's the only thing that democracy leads to. And so it's problematic on both sides.

And obviously, you know, the reality is much more nuanced. There are lots of great things about China. there are lots of kind of fantastic things that people do in China, that, you know, there are good things the government does. There are lots of bad things the government does. There are lots of bad things that happen within the country. Like I said, it's, you know, this is not a kind of paradise internet just because it's censored and they don't have some of the bad stuff that we have in the West. But equally, it's not, you know, a terrible place where you can't say anything online. It's not some kind of like caricature or like, you know, of how people used to think of it. And, you know, what I always kind of say to people, especially, you know, because as someone who's covered China, you know, my whole career, I have a great affection.

this country have a great interest in this country. I care about it and I want to paint a nuance picture of it. And when you criticize China, you're often attacked for, oh, you're attacking this country or you know, you're some kind of stooge of the West. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, the West has myriad problems as well. And the thing I do, you know, the cynical kind of approach of this, I think is, you know, two things can be bad, right? The US can be bad and China can also be bad. And equally, you know, the flip side of that is that, you know, bits about both countries can be good. And, you know, I think that we are starting to see a shift on this, right? As China is becoming slightly more open, particularly to foreign tourists, we're seeing

like Western YouTubers go there and, you know, there are some problems in some of those things because some of those tours are being organized by like Chinese propaganda outlets and there are specific things that they're being shown and their specific kind of purposes that the Chinese state is using that. But the US would happily do something similar, I think, if they could get their act together. And also maybe if they cared about foreign audiences as much as China cares about foreign audiences, which obviously the White House doesn't. So we're going to We're starting to see more of a kind of nuanced vision of China, even on platforms that maybe didn't use to offer that before, right?

Used to be a stereo stuff on YouTube that you always saw these videos often produced by like Falun Gong linked outlets that were all about like China's about to collapse or, you know, Xi Jinping is secretly dead and things like that. And now you're seeing kind of Hassan walk around Shanghai and have a great time. And I don't think that's problematic. I think so long as we can have an awareness of the criticisms that exist within China from Chinese people about their own system, then that's fine. you know, sometimes the problem is that we only hear criticisms from the outside,

but all of those criticisms exist within the system and from the type of audience you're describing that would say, oh, you know, why are you bad-mouthed in China? The people that they would maybe feel solidarity with and get along with Best in China actually echo a lot of the criticisms that they are pushing back against. And I think that's an important thing to say is that, you know, sometimes when that media environment is very controlled, you're not hearing those critical voices, but those critical voices are there and people are feeling that sentiment even if they can't express it online. I know. And the US government is so opportunistic and there's like this whole class of people

on Twitter that will just amplify any bad thing. And as you said, I mean, I would love their high speed rail system. I would love a lot of things about China. I don't think I would take complete and total online censorship in exchange for that. But hopefully we can work to a world that has like both of those things like freedom of speech and personal liberties and the ability to dissent online and organize online and a free and open internet. and innovation and not be sending all of our money to, God knows what the government is doing with it, but actually, like, building a better America or all Western countries. I know I have some UK listeners too.

So, yeah, I think it's just so important, like you said, to sort of recognize it's a nuanced picture. And China and America are both very big countries. Europe is also very big. Australia is not as big, but their impact on the internet, I think they punch above their weight. Yeah, and it's interesting actually that Australia is coming back into this conversation because back in the kind of late 2000s and early 2010s, they were trying to do some of this, you know, a more sensorious approach again then, and it kind of eventually was dropped because it was such a backlash. Like, they tried to introduce essentially like a white list, like a,

great firewall essentially for Australia. And WikiLeaks managed to get hold of some of the documents around that. And, you know, it was supposed to be blocking adult content, right? And inevitably, every single time there is a program that's supposed to block adult content, you always find, oh, we coincidentally included a bunch of political websites in this. Yes, of course. Or we, you know, included, like, websites that are around LGBT identity and nothing to do with porn or anything like that. Or feminist content. Yeah.

And you hear the same arguments that, oh, we can't have, like, transparency. We can't publish this as publicly because then we're publishing a list of porn sites, which means we need to keep it secret from you, which means we can add whatever we like to that list because people don't have any oversight. And Australia tried this before. We're seeing maybe a kind of more well-meaning approach this time with kind of the social media ban. I would say it's very not well-meaning. I don't know. Yeah, I think it has enormous problems in that it's, you know, obviously it's the age verification thing creates a huge problem because you are. And again, like we said earlier, that it's a SOP to a lot of these private companies that want to do this work, right?

You're outsourcing age verification to some company, which then becomes a big player and then sets up walls to competitors or to criticism of it. And also one thing we haven't touched on is, you know, when you force kind of big, platforms or mainstream websites to kind of monitor and censor their content like this, you do create a kind of dark ecosystem of sites that are just not going to do it, right? You encourage people to go to that. We see, you know, kind of really sketchy porn sites aren't doing a verification in the UK, because why would they, they're already hosting like pirated and potentially illegal content? Oh, the worst, I was on like a gore.

Just casually, yeah. I was at work for work. But I was talking to this. this guy who is a hacker, whatever, one of these, he's a source of mind, but he runs a bunch of these really horrible websites, like horrific. And I was talking about AI stuff because he's convinced people are up with some of the gore's AI now and whatever. But yeah, I mean, someone like him, first of all, he's not even based in the U.S., but like he's running the most vile, horrific sites imaginable and they're getting people in. I mean, I think of also some of these like

in-cell forums or places where we're, we're, truly will radicalize young people. And we see a lot of young people turning to these more extreme sites because, like you said, they're open. They're never going to follow the rules. And they'll constantly escape accountability, constantly be moving domain names and things like that. So, yeah, I mean, it's horrifying. And that's why when I would argue that these people who claim to care so much about children,

they don't really, the effect of these laws. I mean, they just don't. Every moral panic throughout time has been passed in the name of protecting children. And, you know, it's infuriating. And nearly all of them will say when you ask them, oh, we don't actually want, we don't want adults watching porn either. They will openly admit that this is a wedge. Yeah, and they believe, by the way, as you said,

porn is LGBTQ content, like reproductive justice content. To speak specifically about the UK, I mean, you know, we've seen this, you know, massive rolling back of trans rights in the UK, proven in a large part by groups linked to JK Rowling. And, you know, just recently we saw, like, the Women's Institute and the Girl Guides say they're going to ban trans women from participating in those things. It's really not difficult to see quite near future where discussion of trans identity and trans life gets classed as adults, right? Because this is somehow leading children astray and brainwashing them into changing their identity.

And then it will be banned online and you'll have to have some kind of aid verification, give you a driver's license to just read like, yeah, go on a forum where people are discussing being trans or go on a subreddit where people are discussing being trans. It expands so quickly. Well, that's already what they plan to do with the Kids Online Safety Act. We had a hearings last week here for the Kids Online Safety Act and 18 other horrible bills, including the Screen Act and the App Store Accountability Act, all of these act. They all have these generic names and they're for the most evil laws ever. But the Heritage Foundation, which helped draft the Kids Online Safety Act. Also, Elon Musk also participated in drafting the Kids Online Safety Act.

It's like the worst people ever wrote this law. But the Heritage Foundation is bragging about how they plan to de-platform trans people. Jonathan Haidt, who has become this, you know, really well-known figure and actually was crucial in pushing the social media ban in Australia has spread horrible anti-trans bigotry. So I think that that part of the reason, as Marcia Blackburn, one of the lawmakers who's co-sponsored the Kids Online Safety Act, she said it needs to be passed because kids are being exposed to transgender ideology online and they need to curtail that. So I don't even think it's like speculative or anything that's down the road. I think that is ultimately the goal of this legislation. and it bothers me when these people that say they're progressive and liberal and stuff just completely go along with it because they think, oh, well, censorship would crack down

on big tech, you know, censorship good or whatever. Yeah. And again, it goes back to that idea that, you know, we missed an opportunity. What we should have been pushing was kind of moderation, right? Like that you are requiring platforms to have some kind of moderation and transparent and some kind of oversight where you could have, you know, it's quite a radical view, maybe particularly in the US, but like you could have some kind of democratic, you know, influence over these companies where you have like a user's union or something that can have some kind of voice has a seat on the board. And, you know, we've blown past maybe, I think,

the opportunity to introduce those capital reforms. And instead we're introducing things that only, you know, disempower users and censor users while massively empowering these companies that we claim to be cracking down upon. Well, James, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me. That's it for this week's Free Speech Friday. You can support my work on Patreon, the link below or buy a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter usermag.co. That's usermag.com on subsec. I currently have no long-term brand partnerships. So every single dollar that you're able to provide and support makes such a difference. You guys are the only reason I can keep this free speech Friday series going.

It is not sponsored in any way. I'm just out here talking about civil liberties every single Friday on the internet, basically because of you guys and your support. So truly every single dollar makes such a difference, please click the Patreon link below or again, subscribe to my tech and online culture newsletter where I send bi-weekly roundups of everything that I'm reading and seeing online. You can also get the newsletter via my Patreon where I do monthly live stream, Q&As, behind the scenes updates about my reporting and take suggestions for content coverage and more. Thanks so much for tuning into this week's Free Speech Friday and I'll be back next week with a brand new episode. See you then.