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IT'S FREE SPEECH FRIDAY!!!!!

For years, the United States villainized China for its restrictive internet landscape and mass censorship of online speech. But lately, things are changing. The U.S. and other western countries are careening towards authoritarianism and seeking to pass laws that mandate invasive surveillance and extreme censorship of online speech.

The pattern is very similar to what we saw in China and have seen in other authoritarian countries. Mass censorship and surveillance is ushered in with justifications about "child online safety," governments seeking to ban VPNs, removing anonymity from the web, constructing walled gardens, and so on.

James Griffiths is a Hong Kong based journalist who has covered China for over a decade. He is the author of the book The Great Firewall of China: How to build and control an alternative version of the internet. He joined me to talk about what China's internet is really like, the mass erosion of free speech on the western internet, and why the situation we're in right now is so dangerous.

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The Global Internet Is Dying: America Is Repeating China's Biggest Mistake

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User