Apparently there’s an issue with some instances banning users for criticizing authoritarian governments. Is lemmy.world a safe place to criticize governments?

  • GarbageShootAlt@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    It’s also an article by Foreign Policy because I didn’t want to get into a spat about sourcing. Mostly it applies to businesses, not people, and unsubstantiated words like “draconian” are doing a lot of heavy lifting. FP likes to obfuscate that fact, but you can see even in what you quoted that they tip their hand on the rhetorical contortions they are doing when they list:

    These are often enforced by multiple agencies pursuant to joint punishment agreements covering such sectors as taxation, the environment, transportation, e-commerce, food safety, and foreign economic cooperation, as well as failing to carry out court judgments.

    hmm, what do these things all have in common? They all apply overwhelmingly or virtually-exclusively to businesses! E-commerce can, without further elaboration, apply to peer-to-peer interactions like on ebay, and “court judgement” is a similarly vague term, but you don’t get some normal private citizen on charges related to “food safety,” “foreign economic cooperation,” or – based on it not being titled “traffic law” or whatever – “transportation”, and the overwhelming majority of both tax payment and tax fraud is done by the rich.

    There is a social credit system for businesses, and their should be. Reddit memes about “-20 billion social credit score” for posting a meme with lego tanks has no place in reality.