Here, our press is also "defined by the vision of the oligarchy and information is carefully controlled to produce a desired set of beliefs." We just believe that it's free.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

The U.S. media system vigorously debates stuff that falls within the elite spectrum of opinion. But on issues that fall outside of that it is quite propagandistic. In fact that vigorous debate masks the ultimate bias of it. For example, major media is usually very nationalistic about U.S. wars. There may be some debate about how costly they are (to us) but rarely over their morality. That's why you can hold up Snowden as an example, but not the U.S. wars in the Middle East.

    > doesn't fall outside of oligarchical perspectives

    > within the elite spectrum of opinion. But on issues that
    > fall outside of that it is quite propagandistic

    > major media is usually very nationalistic about U.S.
    > wars

edit: some good resources on the history and nature of western media manipulation are the BBC documentary "The Century of Self" and Noam Chomsky's book "Manufacturing Consent".

In China and Russia you cannot do these things. Published mdeia are strictly monitored and censored. The state employs thousands of astroturfers to flood social media with pro-government messages, trash anti-government messages and even directly hook into messaging platforms to delete messages the government don't like. Be persistent at it, and you'll get a visit from the police, or just get beaten up a few times.

The very fact that the BBC could publish that report, and Noam Chomsky could publish his book, is strong evidence for freedom of expression in the west. There are no such equivalent sources published in Russia and China exposing their government's manipulations. Why do you think that is?

> In China and Russia you cannot do these things.

It's not as bad in Russia yet. But we are going there.

He never was. And as seen from the outside, you're completely making his point.

EDIT: I don't understand the downvotes. It is both relevant (it refutes that you can "Post whatever you like to Reddit, or any other discussion platform." without punishment), and correct.

Unfortunately there are less and less white spots in "the west."

https://index.rsf.org/

In my view it is an authoritarian trap to defend direct political censorship by pointing to the inevitable force of group think called culture (including, of course, the media), as the latter always necessarily exists everywhere but the former can be abolished.

Manipulation is simply part of any culture. The more interesting question is what other forces there are in a culture to counter that manipulation. Political censorship is an attempt to suppress such counter forces, not a replacement for manipulation. Censorship is supposed to make maniuplation more effective.

You see it even with more mundane cases in subtle differences in headlines even when they run the same articles. Many of the changes are perfectly reasonable and simply reflects differences in language or relative importance to different audiences. But a lot of the time there are blatant biases being introduced.

There certainly is a difference: In democratic countries people can get alternative viewpoints easily without risk of imprisonment if they want to. But unless they are already questioning the status quo, most people simply doesn't bother, so it doesn't make much real difference if they're censored or not.

As someone who has travelled quite extensively to the US for business, turning on the news channels when I arrived was always a shock, no matter how many times I did it, because even between the US and the UK, the difference in mainstream media world view is massive, and clearly one or both is heavily distorted (I'd go for both...).

(Well, I suppose that's an odd start, since half the problem with politics is people trusting their personal thoughts overmuch rather than gathering evidence. Then again, those who do gather evidence in politics, the softest science, rarely seem to find any that upsets their preconceived notions. Anyway-)

...that this would happen with or without any overt government interference. I'm sure that the soft pressure described by Mr. Chomsky plays a part, and that most government officials in democracies are happy that it exists.

But just look at smaller scales: say, at the umpteen "camp A vs. camp B" divisions that come up in one capacity or another on this site. JavaScript is a horrible language that's killing the web, or it's a cool language with some flaws. Go is a language firmly stuck in the 1980s with the goal of treating its programmers like disposable pawns[0], or it's a fluid pragmatic language with an emphasis on maintainability. Apple has a track record of producing shiny overpriced crap, or perhaps innovative products that usually beat the competitors'. Google is an advertising company and absolutely everything it does has some direct connection to invading its users' privacy, or it's a geeky paradise, tech culture's truest representative among large corporations. The NSA is a villainous organization through and through that's killing everything important about American freedom (common opinion on this site, not as pervasive elsewhere) or it's just doing its job and has little, if anything, to answer for. Feminism... well, I think that word is enough.

These are just some of the biggest examples; there are countless others, and obviously you can get far more examples by broadening the scope from tech. In each case, people tend to divide themselves based on their opinions into one of (usually) two opposing groups. Each group is self-reinforced by memes spreading through its echo chamber, each is very confident it's right, and importantly, eventually members of the two completely fail to understand each other, speaking with different terminology about different principles and both almost certainly far from objective neutrality. Some of the camps have some potential equivalent to Chomsky's cited explicit manipulation - c.f. the recent Fear of Apple post. Most don't. People self-manipulate, and they're rewarded with positive emotions generated from discussions with other people that share their views.

In politics, the camps form within political parties, geographical areas, and often entire countries. It would be interesting and powerful to think of ways to reduce this; on the other hand, I don't think it's fair to blame Western governments for what's basically human nature. My suspicion is that people look at the distortion of reality in democratic country X's politics, compare it to censored country Y's, find the proportion too large, and blame the government of X... but miss that a large portion of each side's distortion is natural, and if you subtract that from each side, the proportion gets far smaller. YMMV.

[0] opinions on Go aren't usually that strong, I think, but I've heard exactly that claim from one firebrand on Twitter.

That knowledge, sadly, doesn't prevent from believing propaganda made by the same media. I know a lot of Russians, and most of them (even otherwise smart ones) honestly believe even the most absurd propaganda statements.

Perhaps you ought to read the retracted preface from Animal Farm [1].

[1]: http://home.iprimus.com.au/korob/Orwell.html

You obviously haven't been there. I think Chinese gov have the same level of control over its citizens as France: very erratic, sometime works well, some people try to play with fire, but overall the Chinese are all but lobotomized robots in the hands of a few puppet masters. There's over 500 strikes a year in China, not counting all the ones not big enough to be counted. I have seen streets of pedestrians walking against policemen, who were sweating of fear. Right now the prez is quite appreciated and trusted by the people, so he probably has some level of control, but this is earned by its fight against corruption, and not by some matrix-like brainwashing system.

You're misinterpreting the nature of control. Yes, there are protests, mostly because the government lets them happen. It helps people let off steam, it gives the government an indication of how people feel, and quite often there are conflicting interests which the Party can rise above (remember, government and the Party are not the same thing). So, often it's a bunch of workers protesting against a company, or a corrupt local official in one department - the Party can let that happen, and choose sides later when they've decided which way the wind is blowing. Policemen are shitting themselves because the Party mostly sides with the security apparatus but today they might let the protest get a bit wild if they want to allow the protesters a bit of leeway, and then those untrained, poorly equipped policemen will be screwed.

When stuff he Party doesn't like happens, they shut it down using methods you (on the whole) cannot do in France, the UK, and the U.S. Try introducing political censorship of material critical to Hollande. Try censoring books and courses in university. Try locking up journalists and writers (on tax evasion charges of course) when they say stuff you disagree with. Try rolling out the tanks when a protest gets out of hand. Etc.

So don't be fooled by the seemingly light hand of the gov - they've intentionally backed off from the Cultural Recolution level of control because they know that most people don't give a damn, and if left alone they will do nothing. How about an experiment - I'll hold up an anti government sign in front of the French parliament, and you do the same in Tiananmen Square and we'll see how much control the Chinese gov has ;)

Actually, i did just that 10 years ago, in front of the elysee ( white house french equivalent), alone, american style with my street sign ( although i didn't shout any sligan, i remained silent), and one policeman asked me my ID, went somewhere with it, gave it back to me, and told me to leave, saying "this is is not the US here".

But, yeah, nothing else happened. I wasn't beaten up or followed or spyed upon after that.

How can you know?

I don't think so. I am just taking the other angle, from the people's perspective, and want to debunk the cliche that Chinese people are easy to control. They've had much more revolutions than any other country in their long history. They're all but easy to control. In French we say "like boiling milk", which means they can easily and suddenly get out of control and wash out anything on their way. Just blocking a few topics on social network is certainly not enough. As for things that are allowed or forbidden, it seems more cultural than anything else: In China direct verbal confrontation is very rare, while it is very common in the West, and this holds in families, in companies and also at the country's level. Not very surprisingly, in France insulting the head of state is not forbidden, and even something like a national entertainment. However, in France we have laws telling people if they are allowed to work on Sundays, which seems extremely weird and borderline "totalitarian" to the Chinese, which believe people should be allowed to work whenever they need to or want to.

Also, when talking about China, it needs to be reminded that in fact the core Western values (i.e. Enlightment values) and the core Chinese values (i.e. Confucean values) are very similar, and quite compatible. (See how fast Chinese immigrants adapt to and adopt Western values.) For instance, secularism and religious tolerance, equality of rights and before the law, meritocracy, etc.

I think the world is going very badly these days, and a big chunk of it is in the hands of people whose values are really opposed to the core of modern humanist values, and this chunk is not China. We'd better team up and fight (with ideas, not with guns) what really threatens humanity as a whole. Just my thoughts.

I know what you mean in terms of "boiling milk" - in that respect I agree. I keep thinking these days of that old saying of China as a sleeping elephant; instead I think the people are the sleeping elephant. I think the government's strategy relies a lot on ignorance and apathy, but if even half of these stories we read as standard on NYTimes etc made it into the public consciousness, there would be huge issues.

About the laws - I guess it's not the actual content of the laws or relatively different values that illustrates control. Eg in your example about working on Sunday's - if you decided to fight one of those laws, you could do it openly and publicly and in principle it would be a fair fight. You might even embarrass the government or a political leader, but here there's so little chance of that - that's the different nature of the Communist Party control. The government/party has taken away avenues to legitimately discuss/debate/fight, so the options are either total apathy or explosive revolution. That's scary!

> if you decided to fight one of those laws, you could do it openly and publicly and in principle it would be a fair fight.

Yes, but here you may have assumed that "openly and publicly" is a precondition for fairness. I do not think openness and publicity of fights is the only way to get fairness. Or at least this can be discussed and we should allow that, on one side openness is often faked, on the other that private and closed tractations may to some extent result in a decision or in a law that is efficient and corresponds to the long term better good of the concerned people (i.e. what they would really choose if given all the elements, and not disturbed by red herrings)

For instance, if the governing elite is composed of ("extracted from") people from all parts of society, attracting the best of them with some good rewards (e.g. not money, but something like "good fame") and they collegially discuss important issues using the powers of associations, it could very well be a sane way to distillate the will of the people. Maybe even a saner way than ours (where representatives are elected from their good-looking face, this has been proven).

China is weird because it's so closed, and it's often tempting to say that the elites here are doing a pretty good job of doing what's best for the people. Until you read about how much money they are making personally from abusing their positions.

I'd say most often than not, when a government lets a protest get wild it's because they want to justify the harsh repression that's coming or at least that when the time comes for decision, they won't side with the protestors.

Or they're just in over their head but in that case, they don't let it get wild, they just loose control.

Usually when you reside in a country for a long time, you don't think the government as a whole, big, flat thing. The size of the it is gigantic, so that anything you do, you might be interacting with government at some level. I'm not judging this but giving you an image of what it's like living in China, salt, gas, newspaper, movies, all the crazy stuff, are controlled by different departments of government.

But here we are talking about the internet, the thing that Chinese government cannot control, they tried, they tried hard to stop people from accessing free, open internet, from playing foreign games, from using foreign softwares, but much of them were failed. There were years that Chinese Expansions of the World of Warcraft were years late than the rest of the world, and yet, Diablo III is still not public, the stated reasons were, erotic and violence content, on the other hand, there are more bizarre webgames on Chinese market, trolling millions of millions of money from players pocket, and of course they are poorly designed, some of them even has copyright infringement.

With this event (DDoSed Github),the message is quite clear, China wants to fork their own internet, for their own people. This is certainly a very high "degree of control over their citizens."

That said, the reality is that most of what you are referring to is representative of "controlled dissent." It's not "martial law" or some kind of truly orwellian mind-control scheme... it's just the product of very tightly controlling the country's written/perceived history, with a significant focus on nationalizing "information" (ie, parse everything that comes in and out of the country via digital channels).

Once you see the way they handle the lesser-publicized issues (ie, Uighur/Han unification, Tiananmen, and Taiwan), you begin to realize that they do have the power to whitewash history on a generational scale, and considering that (as you mentioned) they take a fairly lax enforcement approach toward the "general populous," I'm curious to know what perceived ideological threats their best and brightest are working to mitigate. And how many people have simply "disappeared."

Does France has a Great Firewall on the Internet?

Does France allow people to study about their actions in Algeria, for example? They do.

(or you're part of the conspiracy, I can't exclude that)

I have to disagree with others that this part of your comment is a bit too strong. I lived in China for two years and many people I talked to would say something like "We admire America because it is so free, our country is just so corrupt" or whisper something like "when the US says our human rights are bad, we agree."

America certainly isn't the democratic ideal, however in contrast it's apparent how a sustained cultural ideal can eventually swing the legislative tide (LBGT rights, marijuana legalization, et al.). From my experience, even the Chinese protests are government-sanctioned ("order through controlled disorder") and the communication happening on platforms such as Sina Weibo is generally devoid of any cultural or philosophical taboos.

I'm hesitant to be too strong about this because truthfully I haven't spent much time there in the most recent years, however I can't say I've seen any indication this has changed--everything points to more of the same, and the most recent Hong Kong protests provided a rather interesting look at how this cognitive dissonance plays out in an environment where maintaining such control (due to its international economic relevance) is more difficult.

This. Except older, middle-class people are even more disillusioned than the young. As a rule, older Chinese people won't talk about their disillusionment, but those who lived through the 50s and 60s faced huge obstacles. They live lives of quiet desperation.

That's pretty much how I feel about the Fox-watching population of the US.

It's how I feel about everyone who gets their information from TV.

I used to think the same thing, and to some degree I think it holds truth. But after spending lots of time with my right-wing family, I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. Most avid Fox News watchers I've met fail to embrace the entire world-view or vision promoted on the channel, and share maybe 60-70% of the opinions elicited toward viewers. I know, it's just one data point, but I don't have a study handy.

And because we have free speech, there are multiple alternatives that act as checks and balances across our culture as a whole.

In other words, comparing Fox to the media situation in China or Russia is just ridiculous and irresponsible.

The point of "comparing" anything to anything else is to see how the things are alike, and how they differ, as in "compare and contrast." If such comparisons are to be verboten, even if by stigma and not by fiat, then we are giving up an essential tool of understanding.

https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Acompare&ie=utf-8&oe...

I'm using it in a valid way, and not in the way you suggest, and it's clear from context which meaning I am using.

You are delusional if you believe the above doesnt apply to US and EU countries.