The US has made pretty similar demands from Google and Twitter and Facebook not too long ago, in the context of "Russian election interference" and even before that on the basis of "terrorist radicalization".
The big difference here is that if the US demands it, it becomes the de-facto global standard. The results of this are subtle, but creeping. [0]
At this point, the aforementioned three are subcontracting a whole little industry of "content moderators" in places like Manila in the Philippines. Where hundreds of people do nothing but "moderate" social media content, they literally "okay" or "delete" videos and pictures on social media.
French channel ARTE made a really interesting, and quite creepy, documentary about it called "The Cleaners" [1]. Sadly it's only been available in French/German, and has been depublished by now, but an English version was shown at Sundance, so that should exist.
[0] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wnxdv5/the-artist...
[1]https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/069881-000-A/im-schatten-der-n...
People within the industry expect China to win the AI race by 2030 simply because they have a huge data source advantage which leads to better results. It was not a coincidence that Google significantly ramped up their data mining activities when they decided to switch from a "Mobile first" to an "AI first" company. Why do you think Google and Facebook are suddenly willing to bend over to the Chinese government demands just to establish their presence there?
> A prototype search engine that Google is designing to meet the scrutiny of Chinese officials links users’ phone numbers to the searches they perform
> This report adds to earlier news, also broken by The Intercept about the search engine, codenamed “Dragonfly,” which eliminates from results a number of terms and topics, like freedom and democracy.
http://fortune.com/2018/09/14/google-china-search-engine-lin...