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Reddit, Banned In China, Is Reportedly Set To Land $150 Million Investment From a Chinese Censorship Powerhouse (gizmodo.com)
Reddit is about to get a huge new round of investment of up to $300 million. As Gizmodo points out, "the first $150 million is reportedly expected to come from the Chinese tech giant Tencent, the first ever Asian technology company to pass a $500 billion market value." The investment is complicated since Reddit is banned in China via the Great Firewall of China. Also, "Tencent is not merely a resident of China's internet -- the company is one of the most important architects of the Great Firewall," reports Gizmodo. "It's an interesting source of cash for a Silicon Valley company whose product is essentially speech." From the report: Tencent is, at great cost and ultimately for great profit, literally reinventing censorship in China. The Great Firewall was not built by the Communist Party in Beijing, it's built by the tech giants all around China. This opaque but clearly powerful relationship between the $500 billion company and the Chinese government raises interesting and unanswered questions about Tencent's forays into the West, including questions about Reddit's future.
The pending Chinese investment in Reddit, a social media company with relatively little Chinese-language community, is a richer twist on that old tale, and it's a part of Tencent's expanding global investment strategy. The Chinese company owns about 12 percent of Snap, for instance, even though Snapchat is banned in China. Tencent also owns a piece of the chat app Discord even though, you guessed it, Discord is blocked in China. If Tencent does kick in $150 million on a nearly $3 billion valuation for Reddit, as TechCrunch reports, it will be interesting if we ever find out exactly what it means. What kind of influence and position, if any, will Tencent gain at Reddit? Neither company responded to Gizmodo's questions.
The pending Chinese investment in Reddit, a social media company with relatively little Chinese-language community, is a richer twist on that old tale, and it's a part of Tencent's expanding global investment strategy. The Chinese company owns about 12 percent of Snap, for instance, even though Snapchat is banned in China. Tencent also owns a piece of the chat app Discord even though, you guessed it, Discord is blocked in China. If Tencent does kick in $150 million on a nearly $3 billion valuation for Reddit, as TechCrunch reports, it will be interesting if we ever find out exactly what it means. What kind of influence and position, if any, will Tencent gain at Reddit? Neither company responded to Gizmodo's questions.
There wasn't any way to prove BEFORE that any controversial moderation decision wasn't forced on them by outside pressure. You have to rely on whistleblowers to tell you.
Tencent will fit right in at Reddit. Reddit isn't some kind of free speech platform. In fact, they censor daily and with great enthusiasm. The top admin was caught red-handed altering people's posts in the database. The problem with youtube, google, facebook, twitter, reddit... we took this open platform of the internet where anyone could do anything and we gave control over our behavior to a few big players because their products were slick and had a lot of cash invested in them. We centralized... and in centralizing we gave control over this free wheeling space of the internet to a handful of companies.
And now we're seeing the problem with that. The same problem we had before with the handful of media companies that provided our TV, Newspapers, Radio, etc...The freedom is gone if you centralize.
Wikileaks released emails which showed that Shareblue/Correct the Record was astroturfing many subs on Reddit.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
It's nearly impossible to have any sort of civil discussion there since anything posted either:
1) Gets removed by the moderators because your opinion doesn't align with their own
or
2) You just get banned by the moderators because your opinion doesn't align with their own
The moderators basically control the microphone. I liken it to folks calling in to some talk show host thinking they're going to argue with the
host on the air when they can silence you with the push of a button.
IF the moderators don't get you, the users themselves will down vote into oblivion any opinion that clashes with the echo chamber group think.
Hopefully. China is increasingly growing more powerful, influential, and interconnected with the rest of the world. Love or hate the Communist Party of China and their authoritarianism and human rights stance, they're a major player on the world stage. It would be chilling if a country as increasingly powerful as China was able to get the IP information of those posting comments anti-CPC comments, and could then trace those comments to individuals. I do not trust Chinese investment in social media platforms.