Re:1M People Use Facebook Over Tor
by pmontra on Friday April 22, 2016 @11:43AM
(#11550014)
But if one of your friends is not really your friend, and you won't know until it's too late, they'll know you got past the firewall and that could be enough to get you into troubles. You better have to stay fully anonymous, which limits what you do on Facebook. You probably want different accounts for different groups and an empty timeline in every account.
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It may be that it just isn't that strictly enforced for a variety of reasons. China allows a number of VPN services that bypass the firewall to function. My guess is that it isn't a huge deal because the vast majority of people don't care enough to go out of their way to bypass the firewall; the social effects of having that firewall are still in place.
Start enforcing it heavily and the people that DO use those services may start protesting or moving into activist roles.
Which also tends to be the subset of people that have studied abroad, various repatriated huaqiao and college students at some of the more metropolitan colleges and I guess tech people/white collar workers.
Cracking down on college students seems like a really dumb idea.
And yet, that hasn't stopped them in the past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1...
I think this is a good reminder of why they would want to keep people just barely satisfied. China will go that far, but it's an expensive point to make.
Since Tiananmen, the party has basically bargained that people will accept economic progress as a substitute for political freedom. Now that the rapid growth of the last two decades is starting to slow down, we'll have to see how the CCP and Chinese people respond.