So, in 2014, China created a special ministry — the Cyberspace Administration of China — to coordinate all government regulation of its cyber realm and guarantee that Beijing was in charge there as much as in Tiananmen Square.
Now, just as you cannot publish an anonymous critique of President Xi Jinping in The People’s Daily, you cannot do it on Sina Weibo, China’s combined version of Facebook and Twitter, where all users must be registered under their real identity. Facebook, Google, Telegram, Twitter and The New York Times are all blocked in China by the Great Firewall (although there are illegal ways around it).
I believe China will pay a price for having choked off even the smallest outlets, like the new audio drop-in app Clubhouse, for its people to let off steam and discuss important issues, like a spreading pandemic, but the regime believes otherwise.
“Each country gets to pick how its old physical governance system and values get projected into the new cyberworld, and China said its would be cybersocialism with Chinese characteristics,” explained Craig Mundie, the former chief research and strategy officer of Microsoft. “We just didn’t pick.”
Indeed, as big American cyber companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and Google emerged, they argued that the best governance of cyberspace would be if no government was in charge. That way their business models would be in charge — and they would grow bigger, faster.
They were also able to grow quickly thanks to a U.S. law that was actually enacted when Mark Zuckerberg was 11 years old — long before he helped start Facebook in 2004 — Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act.
It stipulated that internet/cyberspace companies, which at the time were mostly crude search engines and aggregator sites to help people ferret out recipes and movie reviews, could not be held liable for defamatory or false posts by people using their platforms, the way The New York Times or CBS could be. These companies were treated like printing presses, not news organizations. This did help the internet grow fast, but it was later used by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to escape from having to heavily edit the content they published.