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this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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This is objectively wrong though. There are many degrees and methodologies for censorship. A private company choosing the scope of its own products is very different from censorship imposed by fiat from the top down.
Baidu is also officially private company. So where is that objective difference?
Ok, then it should be as easy to find a less censored version somewhere on the Chinese Internet, as I've done for the US internet in this thread. Or even simply find such information at all on the Chinese Internet, chatbot or otherwise.
But I think you know perfectly well what I'm talking about and why you're begging the premise pretty hard.
No, nowhere did I say it would be easier. It just doesn't matter. If there is no viable alternative to a given service then it doesn't really matter if it's self-censorship or state censorship. Even the European Union is slowly discovering that some company have to large influence on Internet.
I don't beg for anything because I have no need for it. You have your opinion and I have mine. I'm open to being convinced otherwise but you haven't given any reasonable argument.
But there is a viable alternative. In this very thread I supplied images of the ostensibly censored prompts from a different generative website. Unless those images have ironically been censored from the lemmy instance.
The point is that in the western media model, the existence of the Disney channel doesn't mean that HBO can't exist. And even if popular sentiment means that HBO doesn't exist now because of some market force, it can certainly exist in the future if those consumer preferences change. I'd argue that western media has easily, about 200 years demonstrating this very principle.
If an autocrat bans content, it will never exist. Or rather, the only examples I can really think of where a monarch or autocrat has willingly chosen to liberalize media control, are the handful of European monarchies which ceded political authority to a liberal constitution. Whether you believe this reflects your own reality is inconsequential - it's trivially simple to demonstrate that western society has become more permissive over time compared to its illiberal counterparts.