China’s information dark age could be Russia’s future

 

When Russia blocked Facebook and restricted Twitter this month, many Chinese netizens were surprised. Wait a minute, they said: could the Russians  use Facebook and Twitter? Both social media platforms have been banned in China since 2009. By blocking online platforms, shutting down the last vestiges of  independent Russian media, and criminalizing labeling the fighting in Ukraine  a war, the Kremlin has made it nearly impossible to Russian people  get independent or international news after invasion. an alternate reality. This is exactly what China has been doing to its 1.4 billion people for years. Almost all major Western websites are blocked in the country. A generation of Chinese grew up in a computer environment very different  from others. , they have to believe  what Beijing tells them.“When people ask me what the information environment is like inside the Great Firewall,” Yaqiu Wang, a  Human Rights Watch researcher in New York, tweeted about internet censorship. in China, "I say, 'Imagine the whole country is a QAnon giant'" After years of trial and hesitation, Russia is moving towards tougher internet censorship similar to the Great Wall of China to better control its people. China's information  could be Russia's future. "What is darkness? Weibo media platform. "You can't tell the truth and you don't 're not allowed to see the truth. The two countries tend to learn the worst from each other. Russians and  Chinese have been deeply scarred by disastrous times under communism, which produced tyrants such as Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong, gulags and artificial labor camps, and  famines that starved millions. Today, Russia is learning from China how to exercise control over its people in the age of social media.The Ukrainian crisis has only accelerated a process that began years earlier. At the end of 2015, China and Russia signed a strategic cooperation agreement on Internet governance. A few months later, two of China's most notorious censorship proponents traveled to Moscow to preach their ideas on the internet to their Russian counterparts. "Unlimited freedom can lead to terrorism," China's internet czar  Lu Wei told his Russian audience at a forum at the time. "If borders exist, they also exist in cyberspace," said Fang Binxing, known as "the father of the Great Firewall. China was not always  as tightly controlled as it has become. under its  leader, Xi Jinping. Over the '90s and 2000s, investigative journalists have told many stories that have led to the downfall of government officials and reforms to the justice system. The internet and social media enabled the public to exchange ideas, debate important issues and pressure the government to respond to their concerns. having expressed their political views. But there was some room for free speech, as there was in Russia for much of Putin's government.Then, under Xi, a new era of control set in, which did not stop at the media and social networks. He has made everything that touches the human spirit: books and cartoons, films and television, music and classrooms. The country regulates the textbooks used by children, the types of novels writers can publish, and the types of mobile games people can play. And all of this is  possible because the vast majority of Chinese people live in the huge information bubble inside the Great Firewall. The effects are clearly demonstrated in the overwhelmingly pro-Russian, pro-war and pro-Putin sentiments in China following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February. A large number of Chinese netizens have accepted the misinformation that  Russian and Chinese propaganda machines are feeding them. Weibo, China's Twitter-like social media platform, was once the place to discuss democracy and freedom. Today, the biggest influencers on Weibo are state media  like People's Daily,  Global Times and China Central Television. young nationalists known as the little roses. It takes a lot of perseverance for someone with independent thoughts to maintain a presence on Weibo.A lawyer I know created 343 Weibo accounts from 2009 to 2014, only to have them deleted one by one. Some of them only survived  a few minutes. Many people left social media because they couldn't stand the abuse from government trolls and little roses. They also don't want to risk being imprisoned for a position. The media  suffered an even greater setback. After the great earthquake that hit Sichuan Province in May 2008.