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Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet

chinamediaproject.org

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Re: Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet

#51

Post by pessimizer »

doubloon wrote: post #21
pessimizer wrote: post #3

[flagged]

it's a question of intent. 'the free world' loses internet content mostly because we are indifferent and don't value the humanities or social sciences as much as we used to. china loses internet content because it is a one party state dictatorship that is purposely trying to eradicate the cultural artefacts of it's victims and opponents, by hiring masses of people whose career goals are the purposeful destruction of…

I think this is a delusion. The threat that archive.org is under is that the government will shut it down.

Re: Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet

#52

Post by yterdy »

Cheer2171 wrote: post #45
tehjoker wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You think you are being a critical thinker, but you are just playing into anti-Western propaganda that makes it seem like there is no difference between the two. It should be pretty clear that China has the most sophisticated propaganda system in the world, and you have been ensnared by it.

Continuing to the next step of this argument that has been had before ad nauseum: the West is arguably worse in these regards because China et al. make no bones about preferring order to freedom, while we nominally tout our "opportunity" while actually limiting it to a degree such that conversations like the one we're having take place. (Your argument's only refuge is in casting your opponents in this debate as hysterical, which is ironically a hysterical position to take in-and-of-itself. Measure the actual merits, please.)

Re: Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet

#53

Post by tw04 »

asdasdsddd wrote: post #34
lelandfe wrote: post #7

> Within the selected date range of “May 22, 1998 to May 22, 2005” on Baidu, there is just one positive result for “Jack Ma” (dated May 22, 2024). [..] Click on the result and you’ll find it is an article posted in 2021 US Google: About 2,580,000 results A pretty remarkable scrubbing of history.

There's pretty much nothing in that time range on Baidu, I looked up Mao, George Washington, Yue fei (a popular chinese folk hero), Garlic bread, etc. But without the time filter, theres millions of search results.

It's probably easier to just blanket scrub everything beyond a small set of allowed information (like positive articles about the party) than to selectively delete. Why do they care if valuable information is lost?

Re: Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet

#54

Post by jncfhnb »

lostemptations5 wrote: post #33

Intentionally or not this is -- exactly -- what 1984 is all about: changing our perception of history by rewriting or erasing previous writings. Unfortunately alot of it from the article seems typical: blogs going off line as bloggers move to new technolgoies, social media companies going defunct or just not keeping old content. Alot of these things can happen in the west. Remember these books you could read? "The Fe…

I would guess that 99.9% of letters are destroyed

Re: Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet

#55

Post by yterdy »

Cheer2171 wrote: post #29

There are a few commenters in this thread making blatant false equivalence with the Western internet. This post is about how on major search engines in China, you now set the years to 1998-2005 and search for a non-controversial celebrity and you get zero search results from content actually published in that era. The loss of the early web due to web hosters not maintaining their own hosting and moving to walled gard…

[flagged]

Re: Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet

#56

Post by flir »

yterdy wrote: post #49
lostemptations5 wrote: post #33

Intentionally or not this is -- exactly -- what 1984 is all about: changing our perception of history by rewriting or erasing previous writings. Unfortunately alot of it from the article seems typical: blogs going off line as bloggers move to new technolgoies, social media companies going defunct or just not keeping old content. Alot of these things can happen in the west. Remember these books you could read? "The Fe…

Recently: Google refuses to turn up old pages. I was recently searching for a person who used to have a notable web presence before passing away about a decade ago. I had to dig to find a few links, through DDG and Yandex.

Yandex is getting more and more of my web queries lately. There's a definite irony there.

Re: Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet

#57

Post by akira2501 »

lostemptations5 wrote: post #33

Intentionally or not this is -- exactly -- what 1984 is all about: changing our perception of history by rewriting or erasing previous writings. Unfortunately alot of it from the article seems typical: blogs going off line as bloggers move to new technolgoies, social media companies going defunct or just not keeping old content. Alot of these things can happen in the west. Remember these books you could read? "The Fe…

> In the past the physicality of the letters would persist

I'm willing to bet that these physical letters have historically fared about as well as our digital letters are; otherwise, our world would be absolutely filled with the written detritus of the past.

> Those that love historical understanding should be very worried.

As humans we've always disposed of more than we've kept. It's just not worth the energy cost to operate any other way. Thankfully history is recorded as several overlapping collections and not as a series of single data points.

Re: Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet

#58

Post by pphysch »

Cheer2171 wrote: post #39
tehjoker wrote: post #37

[flagged]

Another false equivalence, not at all the same as in the West. This is government censorship scrubbing all search results from pre-2005. That Google update made it harder to search for groups that had put out misinformation and scammy SEO stuff, like googlebombing ("miserable failure" returns George W. Bush). Performing editorial or curatorial work is not in any way the same as a purge.

There is an active war on the Internet Archive, et al. in the West by private corporations seeking to monopolize information. How is this a false equivalence? Glass houses. Remember Aaron Swartz.

Re: Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet

#59

Post by kelnos »

pphysch wrote: post #58
Cheer2171 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another false equivalence, not at all the same as in the West. This is government censorship scrubbing all search results from pre-2005. That Google update made it harder to search for groups that had put out misinformation and scammy SEO stuff, like googlebombing ("miserable failure" returns George W. Bush). Performing editorial or curatorial work is not in any way the same as a purge.

There is an active war on the Internet Archive, et al. in the West by private corporations seeking to monopolize information. How is this a false equivalence? Glass houses. Remember Aaron Swartz.

The difference is that we can fight back in the West, and on this particular topic we are largely succeeding so far. The people of China cannot fight back against their government, have already lost, and have no recourse.

Absent a drastic change in human nature, we are always going to have people who want to do these sorts of crappy things, in any society. In China, those people have the backing of the government. Here, they're just corporations (not that we don't have crappy government propaganda machines too). Yes, I would absolutely agree that corporations have much more power than they should. But their power is not absolute, by even the wildest stretch of the imagination, and ultimately they're are just another set of people who can -- and do, often enough -- lose when they try to impose their will on others.

That's why it's a false equivalence.

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