Imperialism does not mean “of empire”. It is an economic system, the highest stage of capitalism.

Source: Trust me bro.

OH BOY VOAT

Yeah. Free speech absolutism does not attract a good crowd, and once you attract that crowd you will not attract any other crowd because the content output they produce is repellant to any normal person.

Alright I’ll bite.

As you move down the wealth ladder you eventually reach a point at which there is a culture change. There are significant differences in the culture of the average middle-income anglo with guilt about their privilege compared to the people who are really, genuinely struggling. Once you cross a certain threshold, I’ll call it the poverty threshold for the sake of this reply but it’s not really a strict line but more of a broadly intersecting spectrum where there are many people who can blend into both groups, you reach a behavioural change point. This behavioural change, both in speech and in attitudes, is generally driven by those of us below a certain income level genuinely not giving a single fuck about how someone speaks but rather what they are saying.

Take for example my home of Liverpool. If I go down the council flats I’ll find myself hundreds of people who will speak in ways that the middle-income liberals of america would find abhorrent. They will cuss you for a minor thing that makes it seem like you just killed their dog. This is normalised culture for them, and among their peers it is perfectly fine behaviour - but to the sheltered middle income person who sees it as an overreaction? It’s shocking, and they don’t like it.

This trend occurs towards the lower income groups because frankly their is less and less incentive to ruin relationships with people over social policing. Far more is put up with and accepted because everyone’s got it rough and nobody’s interested in making someone’s life harder by getting overly emotional about a few swearsies.

I fit into one of the blending people, seamlessly transitioning between the two and speaking both ways. I grew up in squats, but I also got a very fortunate break that led to me getting an education in what many would regard as the ruling class side of our education system, which is split between schools for the workers vs schools for the bourgeoisie.

Anyway. The point is that the tone policing has the effect of shutting out these people from participation. The reason you don’t see the majority of these people in participation online isn’t because they don’t have access, it’s because they’ve had the experience of getting banned everywhere for not speaking like a cultured middle income liberal, and they’ve frankly got bigger priorities in their lives than learning how to speak like the people they fucking despise.

It is classism because it explicitly shuts out this class of people from participation. Almost everywhere online the tone policing functions as a tool of class discrimination that bends internet culture towards privileged middle-income groups over the poor. It’s not explicitly intended to do this, but it is the outcome of it. Much like for example having a “no hoodies” rule in a shop doesn’t function to keep out middle-income people but keeps out the “chavs”, if you’ll forgive my use of a classist slur for effect.

You wanna get aggressive and go at it? Go ahead. Do it. How something is expressed is not important compared to what is actually being said. The issue with this form of classism is that a section of society goes completely unrepresented online because of it, people whose politics almost always align with my own socialist views once they’re well educated in what their interests are.

Tone policing is classist and is the reason I stopped using this instance. It’ll be popular with the liberals who will weaponise it against those saying things they dislike but it’ll cause situation after situation where leftists get punished ultimately driving away the base of people that supported the site and platforming up to this point.

“Whataboutism”. Bruh.

If you say something is bad you are INHERENTLY making a comparison to other things. You can not call one thing bad without benchmarking it against other things and gauging a comparison of a range of good to bad.

It is important to benchmark this because it highlights unexamined chauvinism, sinophobia and internal hypocrisy that you have. You have an extreme emotional reaction to anything Chinese and make the claim they’re horrific but you don’t actually compare the reality of the west with what China is. You claim they are the worst, you have done this multiple times in the thread, this is YOU making the comparison to others so OF COURSE I’m going to examine whether your comparison is remotely accurate.

I will end this interaction by pointing you to this list of US atrocities, managed by Dessalines himself.

Tell me again how China is the worst one here.

Do you spend this much time attacking America? Or the rest of the west? No you don’t. Despite the fact they are objectively and measurably worse. Because you’re a chauvinist that has never done one ounce of self crit or examined your own contradictions.

The US government has backdoors into every single US-based tech platform (which is basically all of them) and you’re concerned about China doing mass surveillance?

You are under mass surveillance. Five Eyes and other intelligence sharing alliances are a means of circumventing national privacy laws, the US has Britain do mass surveillance on US citizens and then that data is shared to the NSA and stored, the US does mass surveillance on British, NZ, Aus citizens and then that data is shared to them and stored by their intelligence services. The collective west has the largest and most comprehensive global mass surveillance apparatus in the world and yet you’re utterly obsessed with China. Why? Five Eyes, Nine Eyes and it’s now all the way up to Fourteen Eyes.

Take off the propaganda goggles and look at the immense proportions of the western apparatus first. You seem to be utterly blind to the fact everything you see about China is MASSIVE projection from the west who are 20-30 years ahead of China in terms of this apparatus.

And to answer your question, China’s law does not exempt the government. They require a warrant to access that data unlike in america and parts of europe.

which is like the most anti-privacy organization on the planet.

China passed new data privacy laws that are as strong as Europe’s GDPR at the end of last year, when is the last time America improved data privacy instead of harming it? Their data protection is much much stronger than America’s and much like europe they dump fines in the millions on companies that break it now. It’s arguably stronger than europe.