Chinese, U.S. tech firms not serving freedom

The New York Times recently ran an article titled “How China Walled off the Internet.” In it, author Raymond Zhong starts by quoting former President Bill Clinton, who once described China’s aspirations to police the internet as akin to “trying to nail Jell-O to a wall.” The thought at the time, as exemplified by President Clinton’s statement, was that the internet would be “the great democratizer.” To the extent that any would-be censor tried, it would be at the expense of innovation and creativity, right? “Wrong!” Zhong breathlessly announces. He then goes on to describe China’s internet companies as being the only ones that can “match America’s in ambition and reach.” The country is “years ahead of the United States,” with “a supernova of creative expression” online. In fact, Zhong writes that “American social media executives” are now looking to Chinese companies like TenCent, ByteDance, TikTok, Alibaba, Weibo and Baidu for inspiration on how to innovate, impress their customers and keep them “glued” to their devices. Buried in the effusive praise, however, are some sobering statements like this one: “All this, on a patch of cyberspace that is walled off from Facebook and Google, policed by tens of thousands of censors and subject to strict controls on how data is collected, stored and shared.” And this one: “In China, there is pretty much only one rule, and it is simple: Don’t undermine the state. So titans like Weibo and Baidu heed censorship orders. Unwanted beliefs and ideologies are kept out.” And that’s not all the companies do to make the Chinese government happy: “(T)he best way for tech companies to thrive in China is to make themselves useful to the state. Nearly everyone in China uses WeChat, making the social network a great way for the authorities to police what people say and do. SenseTime, whose facial recognition technology powers those fun filters in video apps, also sells software to law enforcement.” And companies collect and provide data to the Chinese government. In fact, the Chinese government is using technology like drones, artificial intelligence and facial recognition technology on a scale unmatched anywhere else in the world as part of its burgeoning “social credit” surveillance system, which seeks to monitor, catch and be able to “shame” any and all of its 1.4 billion residents for everything from serious crimes to jaywalking to cutting in lines. Penalties can include denial of travel privileges, like taking the train or purchasing plane tickets, or entrance of your children into preferred schools. Observers are predicting that China will have 300 million cameras installed around the country by 2020. Raymond Zhong marvels at China’s rapid pace of innovation, saying, “If people in the West didn’t see this coming, it was because they mistook China’s authoritarianism for hostility toward technology.” No, actually, we understood China’s authoritarianism to be hostile to liberty. All that’s happened is that technology companies are now making money selling out their fellow citizens to the communist state. And it’s bad enough that that happens in China. But it’s not much better here. U.S. tech behemoths Facebook, Apple, Google, Instagram and Twitter are aggregating staggering amounts of users’ personal data. Security breaches pose a threat, as does the prospect of selling that data to the highest bidder or disclosing it to the government. Scratch the surface of the Chinese government and the “progressive” leadership of U.S. tech giants and you find disturbing similarities: the desire to silence views with which they disagree in pursuit of their vision of collective virtue and social utopia; the willingness to use all technological means at their disposal to accomplish those aims; and a shocking lack of humility that comes from too much power. We may have thought that technology would bring freedom. Not anymore.