• archomrade [he/him]@midwest.social
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    8 months ago

    What’s funny about this is that the fear of Chinese Authoritarianism leads Americans straight into American Authoritarianism.

    It’s this close to self awareness and then veers straight into hypocrisy

    • nymwit@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      It does smack of hypocrisy but I’ve been feeling more it’s a paradox of tolerance thing. Which itself a sort of hypocrisy now that I’m thinking about it. Huh.

      • archomrade [he/him]@midwest.social
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        8 months ago

        nah, i don’t see it as a tolerance issue at all, I see it more through a Chomsky/Foucault lens.

        US social media has been used as a state messaging apparatus for going on two decades now, and a foreign-owned platform is simply not as responsive to US state pressure as a domestically-owned one. China was simply playing the same game as the US has been. It’s not at all surprising that the US would want to ban one that has gotten to be so widely used - but what’s funny about it is the messaging/logic used to do so.

        “A communist authoritarian actor is influencing civilian opinion through media curation, so we must take drastic authoritarian action to control media curation to stop foreign influence of civilian opinion.”

        I think seeing it through a ‘paradox of tolerance’ lens kinda misses the point of the irony I see in the response.

    • markon@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Well, they probably read Machiavelli and may not always have our best interests at heart so it’s not inconceivable it’s entirely intentional.