Lily Kuo in the NY Times:
China’s censors are moving to stamp out more than just political dissent online. Now, they are targeting the public mood itself — punishing bloggers and influencers whose weary posts are resonating widely in a country where optimism is fraying.
The authorities have punished two bloggers who advocated for a life of less work and less pressure; an influencer who said that it made financial sense not to marry and have children; and a commentator known for bluntly observing that China still lags behind Western countries in terms of quality of life.
These supposed cynics and skeptics, two of whom had tens of millions of followers, have had their accounts suspended or banned in recent weeks as China’s internet regulator conducts a new cleanup of Chinese social media. The two-month campaign, launched by the Cyberspace Administration of China in late September, is aimed at purging content that incites “excessively pessimistic sentiment” and panic or promotes defeatist ideas such as “hard work is useless,” according to a notice from the agency.
“In reality, we all experience fatigue and anxiety as a result of work and life, but these real emotions deserve respect and should not be deliberately amplified for traffic. The internet is not a dumping ground for negativity,” China’s state broadcaster CCTV said in an editorial about the campaign.
I am very curious as to whether something like this might work. Certainly it did not work in communist Eastern Europe, where relentless government positivity only made the people more cynical.
But if a tweak of social media algorithms to feed people good news and positive takes made people happier and less angry, would it be worth it?
Probably not.
2 comments:
The beatings will continue until morale improves
But if a tweak of social media algorithms to feed people good news and positive takes made people happier and less angry, would it be worth it?
Bread and circuses is only ever a palliative. And it worked a lot better in Antiquity, when people's expectations were so much lower - and then only temporarily, as the underlying problems the government was working to get people to ignore persisted, worsened, and led to calamity.
But what you are suggesting is not really what is happening. They aren't tweaking the algorithm to promote good news over bad. They are cracking down on dissent - in the same way the Romans started to around the time of Augustus, and with all the same predictable results. It may not have calamitous results right away, but it inexorably moves a society slowly in that direction.
When you point a gun at someone and tell them to applaud the glorious leader or else, they applaud - but all you are doing is turning them against the system. When people have legitimate grievances that the government not only refuses to redress, but refuses to let them even speak aloud - those grievances only deepen. When you try to force people to work harder and be more productive, they nevertheless find ways to cut corners and do less - see chattel slavery and its massive inefficiencies. When you try to force people to have more children, birth rates actually fall - because you instill in people a terror of childbirth as tyrany that leads them to avoid it even more. And so on.
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