You could also note that today people are turning to Internet instead of traditional media and what do we see there? A monopoly: Google controls almost all search, advertising, mobile phone and user-generated video market (except for adult video), Facebook owns all major Western social networks. So if the government makes a deal with these two companies, they will be able to control what majority of Internet users see on their screens. Wouldn't it be nice if they would see only positive things about one candidate and negative news about others? Both Facebook and Google are private companies and they are free to moderate and censor content as they wish. In exchange for a good service, for example, the government could make legislation more favourable for them.

But no matter how bad is this situation, it cannot be even remotely compared to authoritarian countries.

The US isn't China (or Russia, or Sweden), but when the number of conglomerates in the US has shrunk from six to five, and those conglomerates and their subsidiaries are all run by an elite class of billionares and hundred-millionaires, all with strong ties to and from various politicians, let's be honest that, organizationally, the US doesn't look totally different from China where there are also only a small handful of companies that control everything, the people that run the are ridiculously wealthy compared to the middle class?

Especially since China's internal media companies are now run as for-profit businesses, just like Comcast, Disney, AT&T, FOX - not the parts that Disney bought, and CBS/Viacom, the five media conglomerates in the US.

It is necessary to do the comparison between authoritarian regimes and democratically elected governments where all citizens are subject to the rule of law, because if you squint, they can look similar, and in these trying times it is extremely important to be aware of the key differences, even if some things can't be 100% proven inside or outside of a court of law, or haven't been yet.

Both candidates give giant piles of money to Facebook and Google, and the real power isn't in pushing one or the other, the important thing is that we don't look too hard behind the curtain. I'm all for adding select Internet companies to the list with the five media conglomerates.

Amazon is paying people to post anti-union propaganda on Twitter. Walmart is firing people for making pro-union posts online. Google controls what pops up when I type in antifa and Facebook controls if I see my friends' activities about political rallies in my News Feed.

What's the principled, moral stand going on in Hong Kong right now standing against the Chinese authoritarian regime?

What's going on in Portland?

Right. And since it's all about the dogma of Hong Kong these days, no one spends another analytical moment beyond dogma to look at the fact that Hong Kong 'press' is a monopoly too [1][2]. And such is the political nature of the 2 tiered colonial society whether it's in Ecuador or Chile or South Vietnam. An imperial unelected governor (now chief executive) together with a small group of elite ruling families (who control the functional half of the legco), each overseeing a monopolized industry, dominates the political discourse and wealth. Hong Kong never had their populist leader like Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew to decolonialize and socialize their society. And it's not for lack of trying. The first chief executive made a whole bunch of attempts to reform the Hong Kong's economy (which can no longer just skim off the top of all China trade like it could for the past decades). Productive sectors like digital park, silicon park, medicine parks were all turned down. The colonial oligarchy instead turned inwards to monetize their unregulated political and legal systems, focusing on elite sectors like private banking, wealth management, real estate etc which does nothing for the common people and the youth where poverty rate is 20% and cost of housing per median annual income is double that of San Francisco.

An extradition system strikes right at the heart of the private bankers' clienteles but the moment the popular protest starts turning towards societal or class problems like the lack of housing and breaking their House of Lords++, a _single_ tycoon bought out all the newspapers' front pages urging restraint for the protest [3].

[1] https://beta.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths/five-myth... [2] https://chinaworker.info/en/2013/10/21/4789/ [3] https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Hong-Kong-protests/Hong-Ko...

Ya, excellent points. I'd probably still make minor pedantic arguments about whether brave new world or 1984 is easier to defeat but I generally agree otherwise. i.e. if the people's lives are going down the tube, you know there's specifically one person to revolt against. If lawmaking has a zero percent correlation with popular opinions [1] and your elected officials spend 2/3 of the time fundraising [2], what do you revolt against?

[1] https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...

[2] https://fortune.com/2016/04/04/john-oliver-congress-fundrais...

> "Why do you think the US has a free press?"

That's a fairly extreme claim particularly in the context of discussing Chinese state run media and the near total control that state exerts over the flow of information. Here in the US, there has been a lot of reporting about how one media conglomerate (funny how that reporting is allowed in a country supposedly without a free press...) influences the current executive and his public policy [1][2][3].

There is also plenty of criticism over the consolidation in the media landscape and the slow death of traditional journalism [4].

[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/the-making-of-... [2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hannitys-rising-role... [3]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/03/magazine/rupe... [4]: https://billmoyers.com/story/media-consolidation-should-anyo...

China is worse, but that says nothing about the major conflicts of interest plaguing our media right now.

It is not very free.

It’s free and chaotic, you can read anything. If you try to read anything in China you go to jail.