We were talking about people being banned/censored/"de-platformed" from social media companies, in China and in the west. I'm aware that, otherwise, human rights abuse are way worse in China.
As for the idea that abuse only matters when done by a government, it's absurd. We're seeing now private companies talking about censoring the US President, so it's pretty clear who has most power. You can hide behind technicalities like them being private companies or whatever (I note that this argument does not hold when a small mom and pop company refuses to bake a cake, but apparently much larger companies can do whatever they want), but it just means that those companies have the power to censor speech _in practice_ (which is what actually matters in the end), and at the moment they're following angry mobs and not elected officials to define those censorship policies.
I certainly agree people are being hypocrites if they only support freedom of speech for speech they agree with. Of course that isn't everyone. Or even close to a majority. The big tech companies tend to have extreme left-leaning leadership nowadays, presumably due to their location in SF/Seattle.
We were talking about people being banned/censored/"de-platformed" from social media companies, in China and in the west. I'm aware that, otherwise, human rights abuse are way worse in China.
As for the idea that abuse only matters when done by a government, it's absurd. We're seeing now private companies talking about censoring the US President, so it's pretty clear who has most power. You can hide behind technicalities like them being private companies or whatever (I note that this argument does not hold when a small mom and pop company refuses to bake a cake, but apparently much larger companies can do whatever they want), but it just means that those companies have the power to censor speech _in practice_ (which is what actually matters in the end), and at the moment they're following angry mobs and not elected officials to define those censorship policies.