throwaway8581

You're indulging in a huge fiction: that people freely choose what to read and what to believe. Your beliefs are a product of your environment, and your environment was traditionally mostly your family and broader community and country, but today your environment includes massive online oligopolies that have extreme power due to network effects.

If your country is consuming information through the filter of the American coastal elite, then they are likely to come to believe in the things that the American elite believes, to despise the things that the American elite despises. We can meaningfully speak of individuals having a choice to believe this or that, but as a society, that kind of domination of information will predictably drive people to believe what they are told to believe.

Do some research about exactly who is randomly attacking all of these Asians. You'll find that I'm right: it's basically just a huge uptick in black-on-asian violence.

"More racial tension in the US"

I've seen no evidence of increased asian-related racial tensions aside from black people cold-cocking more Asians than usual. I don't think black street criminals are taking their cues from Trump or Mike Pompeo.

So the question is who decides. Do you let rich coastal Americans determine what you're allowed to talk about or do you let local powers make those decisions? Indians aren't very fond of foreign rule, and no control is more potent than control over information and ideas.

They face a hostile media and political complex, as well as several thousand aggressively activist employees, that all demand that right-wing information be suppressed.

If Facebook doesn't do what those groups demand, they will be smeared in the media, suffer internal strife, and face punitive antitrust probes.

And of course, many tech executive are true believers in left-wing politics and like that they can use their positions to advance those ideas.

No good guys but the oligarchic silicon valley information complex is a definite bad guy that crowds out competing platforms where alternative views might flourish.

But maybe it will be run by Indian people, who will enforce Indian values, and who are accountable to their Indian families and Indian peers and Indian law.

Funny that no one was banned for saying, as many did, that it was impossible for it to have come from a Chinese lab. Those asymmetries in enforcement always seem to lean in the same direction.

No, it's because the platform policies enforce a foreign social order. In America, we have our own pieties and taboos and these social media platforms heavily enforce them. Transgenderism, homosexuality, racial equality, gender roles, not every country holds American or European views on those, but those are the only views that are fully allowed on American social media platforms.

India has its own social order. Why should it let its online discourse be controlled by the American social order?

The point is they dismissed it out of hand and banned anyone who said otherwise. Btw, liberal news outlets are finally admitting now that the lab leak hypothesis is probably right.