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China Says US Uses Facebook To Spread Political Unrest

Posted by kdawson on from the yeah-and-if-you-don't-watch-out-we'll-twitter-too dept.

crimeandpunishment writes "A Chinese government-backed think tank says the US and other western governments use Facebook and other social networking sites to spread political unrest. Their report says, 'We must pay attention to the potential risks and threats to state security as the popularity of social-networking sites continues to grow,' and calls for increased scrutiny of the sites."

1 of 274 comments (clear)

  1. At the risk of being labelled flamebait. by rainmouse · · Score: 4, Informative

    Murder rate in the USA is 42.8 per 1,000,000 people (freedom of speech and right to bear arms) Murder rate in the UK 14.0 per 1,000,000 people (freedom of speech) Murder rate in Hong Kong is 5.5 per 1,000,000 people (some limits on freedom)

    I'm not saying that freedom of arms and speech turn people into hate filled psycho's (certainly other countries with limited freedoms have very high murder rates) but culturally people are very different all over the world and a murder rate more than 8 times lower than the USA is not insignificant. We have no idea what the effect of radically altering someone's culture might have and like it or not, ceasing all forms of censorship in China will have a shock effect on many of the people living there. I am preferably interested to hear what people in China feel about these issues more than people in the West demanding on behalf of people in China.

    Please note that I had to use the rate for Hong Kong because China was apparently so low down as to not even be on the list of 62 highest murder rates, I note also that places under Sharia law were also absent from the list

    http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-crime-murders-per-capita

    Please note that I cannot vouch for either the accuracy or how recent these statistics are, but then you can say that about any posted statistics.

    Personally I believe in as much personal freedom as we can get, but I felt the need to provide some kind of balance to the discussion and sometimes I wonder if we really have the right to demand and impose our freedoms on other places that work in a very different way, despite what the above poster said that all humans are basically the same and want to kill steal and rape all day, I'd like to think otherwise.

    I would also like to quickly address the above poster who said "In the U.S., our constitution (or what's left of it) was written specifically, to prevent government from serving itself instead of society. It has managed to slow the progress of greedy and ambitious people who seek to limit people in order to enrich themselves."

    I would like to draw attention to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States which states quite clearly "Americans have the highest income inequality in the rich world and over the past 20–30 years Americans have also experienced the greatest increase in income inequality among rich nations. The more detailed the data we can use to observe this change, the more skewed the change appears to be... the majority of large gains are indeed at the top of the distribution."

    Like I said, freedoms are good, but our own implementation of them may not necessarily be the best method when considering some of the results.