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The campaign involves not just promoting pro-Beijing information, but discouraging negative reports. Censorship extends into social media, and is strengthened by Chinese platforms' suppression of content that authorities deem negative. For example, some U.S. citizens have recently had messages or entire accounts censored on the popular Chinese messaging app WeChat, owned by the firm Tencent.
"It's quite shocking to me that China's Great Firewall is coming to the U.S. in digital form," says George Shen, a technology consultant from Newton, Mass., who had his WeChat accounts banned last month. "It's a very stealthy, sophisticated censorship. ... They are filtering out your messages without even telling you," he says.
Bankrolled with billions of dollars of government funds, the strategy goes beyond establishing Chinese media entities abroad, to leasing or purchasing foreign news outlets and hiring foreign reporters. This tactic, known as "borrowing a boat to go out on the ocean" – or buying a boat, as the case may be – is aimed at offering a cloak of credibility.
Even as China expands its channels to American audiences, it is increasing restrictions on U.S. media in China. Last month, Chinese authorities blocked several more U.S. media outlets from the internet in China, including the websites of The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and NBC News.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 09 2019, @07:47AM
Your snark assumes an inherent direction and movement towards progress. I don't see any real reason to think that this is the case. There are just so many uncontrollable actions that lead to social changes. For instance the black death reshaped Europe in so many ways. It emphasized, for those of belief, that the church clearly did not have the favor of god. And showed everybody that nobody how much they prayed or self-flagellated or whatever else, their god did not care. Beyond this the mass die off also brought forward an era where the huge increase in demand for labor started laying the foundations for the movement away from feudal systems altogether. It does not seem a coincidence to me that the renaissance, and its hinting at previously taboo philosophy, really began to spring to life not that long afterwards.
For some sort of contrast imagine an earthquake ripping through Mecca not only taking the great mosque into its bowels, but also thousands of worshipers. This would reshape Islam in a completely unimaginable way and, in my opinion, would likely set the religion on the path that Christianity followed. But there is no reason to think that such things inherently happen, or happen naturally. Indeed there's no reason to think Christianity could not even return to militancy in the future. Viewing history and change as directional is very dangerous because it, in many ways, removes agency and urgency from issues. If people of the past were more convinced 'things will work themselves out', paradoxically - they probably would not have.