I believe that the Chinese government think that the Uighur nationalism issue has been stoked by the US, which is an interesting...
I believe that the Chinese government think that the Uighur nationalism issue has been stoked by the US, which is an interesting parallel to the “Russian bots” issue.
And then there’s the “Rohingya as poor refugee victims and not rightfully repelled hostile invaders” issue, who knows where the government of Burma thinks that comes from.
People hoping to tame social media back towards Official Narratives for the sake of maintaining national security and social integrity really haven’t grappled with that example enough
Hostile invaders?
I caught slightly less than the average about that one. What happened here? Someone invaded Myanmar?
/Though my personal favorite in this vein is: “Russia invaded Georgia in 2008”..
I mean, according to the local government, yes, Bangladeshi migrants who had been settling in Myanmar launched a wave of violent attacks as part of an attempt to colonize sovereign land and the country mobilized against them, including on Facebook
According to most of the US establishment, no, Myanmar cranked up the oppression on a Muslim minority that has been an integral part of the country since its founding but severely repressed ever since by encouraging communal violence towards a goal of ethnic cleansing, including on Facebook
@poipoipoi-2016 the de-facto border between Georgia and South Ossetia in 2008 did not follow ethnic lines; the Ossetians had been ethnically cleansing Georgian villages on their side of the line and the Russian “peackeepers”, who were not authorized to be there by the UN anyway, had not been doing anything about it. So while the John McCain version of what was happening at the time might be wrong, the “Georgia started it” narrative is also not exactly accurate.
@kontextmaschine you seem to be implying that the local version is more accurate. Do you have evidence for this, or is it just contrarianism.
It’s not that that’s a more accurate account but that that’s the understanding sincerely held by Burmese government and normie civil society. If you asked them how social media could contribute to maintaining a healthy culture, national security, and social stability, they’d tip the online rallying against the Rohingya as an A+ model to imitate.
And really, what’s the alternative, the platforms for everyone’s National Conversation are explicitly patrolled to uphold the US Establishment line, with the ability of national establishments to mobilize against perceived existential threats subject to veto by the people who wanted to Stop Kony (or even more cynically, the people with higher K Street lobbying budgets)? Any government with any sense would ban that immediately.
What I’m saying is, people talk about government and civil society pressuring social media to control information flows to create a “healthy culture” as if the question is the relative influence of domestic culture war factions, but it’s really worth remembering that America, and the first world in general, represent an increasingly narrow slice of a user base relative to places like, say, India, where the government and civil society is more and more holding that a healthy culture is an explicitly Hindu supremacist one