It might be helpful here to compare the situation to that in other countries. I used to think America (and by extension Australia, and Europe) were quite separate and distinct in this regard from China, where social control was authoritarian and draconian. If you spoke out in China, or were otherwise perceived as undesirable, you got sent to a re-education camp, where survival rates were often quite low. Your family members could suffer, too, if not from outright confinement and forced labor, then to a diminution of social and economic status, such that they could not attend University, or hold a significant employment status.

Lately, it seems that the U.S. is developing methods of political control, if not as worrisome as those of China, certainly sufficiently authoritarian enough to put the lie to the 1st Amendment and conventional notions of Freedom of the Press and Free Speech. These developments on Twitter and Facebook should be considered alongside the limitations and perversions of reporting, punditry, and communal discourse, wherein PACs and corporatist ownership constrain the flow of information to valorize the paymaster . Likewise, the specter of a Russian provenance is used to discredit information which runs afoul. Dissident portals not so branded [face a de facto blackist}(https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/01/18/cens-j18.html) from algorithms which obscure their presence on Google or conceal their posts to a Facebook timeline.

Twitter is of course banned in China (along with Facebook, Google, and the like), which on the surface seems an example of draconian censorship, but, in the context of Yasha Levine’s revelations about the nature of the Internet as a tool for government surveillance — combined with Caitlin’s observations here — suggest that any country which did not want untoward U.S. interference (or the interference of U.S. based corporations) would seek to develop its own internet platforms. How the respective governments would regulate these platforms— and how the public reacts to these “regulations” — then becomes a subject for comparative study. Such comparative study is more than casually important, because globalization suggests that the least common denominator of social control, as well as business practices, working conditions,, and other matters, may come to dominate in a world where national, cultural, and other geographic barriers, are rendered increasingly permeable.

In China, it has long been the practice to evade government surveillance through metaphor, or indirect reference. One talks about things by talking about something else, with the assumption that the receiver of the message is capable of intuiting the analogy. This is still the case, but works only so long as the government fails to catch on. When it does, it clamps down hard, detaining people for messaging in ways which would seem to the outsider as innocuous. Several examples of this are discussed in the Globe and Mail article linked here. One reads:

"Two women in Wuhan, Huang Fangmei and Geng Caiwen, were detained, according to the The Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders. Ms. Huang had uploaded a video of her cheerily chanting “qing zhuyi daoche!”, a warning that a vehicle is backing up — and, in this case, a reference to China sliding backwards."

Caught disobeying, your account doesn’t simply shed as many followers as it retains; it disappears, along with all your content. Your network vanishes, along with the virtual self, and others, therein. And if you want something else to worry about, China’s developed a social credit score evocative of Dark Mirror’s Episode 1 of Season 3, and has begun to deploy it for such seemingly routine transactions as buying train tickets. This to me does not seem to be a difference in kind, but only of degree, as it used to be the case that one could only get train tickets in China by having a good relationship with someone in the office which sold them. But the ability of technological developments to put a finer point on social controls does seem worrisome.

We can ponder the relative demerits of being branded a dissident and corporeally and otherwise punished, and the necessity to keep our views silent or secret when we know the firm hand of the State would smote us should we express them; versus the anomie of never gaining traction because our tree falls in a forest when there’s no one around. For the present, it seems that the Internet Lords of the Western Apps are confining us to our quarters, limiting the contagion of revolutionary or potentially disruptive discourse to a circumscribed following. Caitlin is proposing that we compare notes to monitor this corralling, with a view to seeing whether or not our woke perspectives will either be allowed to break out, or that we will be resourceful enough to break out of the constraints thus applied. While applauding these efforts, another hope is that the growing international character of these platforms will confound the censors, who as yet are culturally and linguistically specific in their methods of control.