It’s a meme circulating from somewhere. I heard the first 2/3rds of that quoted portion almost word for word from a building maintenance who was about as non technical as it comes while still being able to function in that job in 2024.

Would be curious where it’s sourced from.

You can’t regulate and legislate your way out of social media propaganda campaigns by foreign adversaries. Congress as a whole didn’t even begin to really understand tech until post-COVID.

The rest of my post was a copy/paste from a message to a friend the other day. My point is that the risk of foreign propaganda campaigns do much more damage to societies with open & free Internet access. Good luck running propaganda laps around Vkontakte users the way Cambridge Analytica did in the US. Vkontakte is Russia’s state owned Facebook clone. It’s the difference between the abuse team at a company, and the intelligence arm of a country.

From the PoV of the intelligence community, open internet access is a serious threat to national security. But they can’t openly just shut down free Internet access or they’d have a civil war on their hands (maybe literally). So they’ll use justifications. Iran WMD’s, not stopping pearl harbor from happening, Tunguskee experiments, our leaders are good at justifying their reasoning and it doesn’t take a bunker baby to understand this.

Sounds like something you’d like for voting

If you think you can sus out my voting preferences by my ability to foresee something that’s fairly obvious when you stop and think about it, then you’re about as useful as GenAI generating realistic hands.

why not the same for social media so we can identify the Russian trolls more easily?

That’s what I’m talking about. How would you propose that’s done, in a way that actually works from a security perspective? Photo IDs can be stolen (or generated). You can buy USA fullz and a photoshopped selfie+ID from some Russian hacker for cheap in bulk. A few thousand dollars for a few thousand “ID verified” accounts. Real-time cryptographic ID keys is the only way one could realistically ensure that type of system works without being easily gamed. If it happens that’ll be the end of the Internet for me. Bring on Briar and shortwave radio.

This is a good resource on the subject then.

To summarize, the “problem” here was created by the US, which funded separatist militants like the ETIM in Xinjiang through Afghanistan to destabilize China, which eventually led to these groups attacking cities in the region like Urumqi. China has responded by integrating the region better into the Chinese economy, connecting infrastructure, building vocational training centres etc. It’s stable now, specially with covid being mostly over in China and Xinjiang being open to tourists with no additional restrictions than other regions in the country. It gets double the annual visitors than Spain now apparently at 260mil annually. You can look up travel videos on YouTube, or really just visit it and see it for yourself.

US is banning travel to Xinjiang now though, and have pressured companies like Volkswagen into pulling out of Xinjiang to keep the narrative alive as long as possible.