Yes, if you completely minimize the level of bulk data collection the NSA and the US does through its partners, it’s completely different. You’ve left out all of the prism program, wherein the government had direct access to telecom and tech company servers.

What China does inside of China doesn’t have any bearing on the western internet. The topic at hand is the data collection that tic tok is engaging in, which already has plenty of precedent in the west, unfortunately.

It’s completely contrary to the values enshrined in the US constitution to make arguments like, “ah well but that person/group/country is bad and we aren’t” the entire political theory our nation is supposed to be built on is the notion that people with too much power will do bad things.

> watch every conversation happening in real time Eh.... are you sure? A lot of my childhood friends are now working in various ares of what you might consider 'authoritative post' or the infamous 有关部门 but I think it's still a bit too divorced from reality. Censorship and blatant blockage for sure but millions spying on billions in real time? I don't think that's how they work.

Yes, parent’s assertion is fairly preposterous. There is no way one could conduct surveillance on that scale in a non automated fashion. There are too many resources required.

It's a combo of both with automatic flags and manual live reviews.

Reporters without borders reports 2 million employed in government censorship in 2013. https://rsf.org/en/news/chinas-cyber-censorship-figures

The assertion was:

> watch every conversation happening in real time.

Even with 2 million people, you can’t follow even a fraction of the conversations of 1000x the population without automation doing most of the heavy lifting.

Peng Shuai was a recent censorship failure that has cost the party face globally.

You only has to shut down the major channels. Over 22,000 influencers were openly censored last year. Even in the past week, several Olympics-related hashtags have been blocked on Weibo. You can control the conversation even with just one person.

https://scmp.com/tech/policy/article/3159947/chinas-internet...

WeChat censors live, and automatically

https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/07/15/134178/how-wecha...

well I'm not sure whether the goal is to "save the party's face". To be honest it could be anybody, any hot issues of celeb big or small or could even be nobody can ignite some kind of sentiment, just like anywhere else. The difference is that domestically although censored, the social issues were sometimes genuinely flagged / monitored and led to change for better polices, in a sort of top down / authoritarian way, which to be honest surprises me.

It depends on how you define employed for censorship roles. On Douyin there are a lot of memes about passing censorship as a writer/reporter, jokes like 'night is dark' but it's actually 'night club'. Plenty of turks are just mechanically checking according to a theme. 'No brainer' as they call it. What's considered lighthearted there is probably horrifying sounding here.

You reduce the signal to noise ratio using automation, but humans are still king and validate particular targets before other humans get involved.

Algorithms handle the bulk, humans make choices where the algorithm flags things.