How far removed are we from the Chinese with respect to social media monitoring/punishment

WSJ

quote:

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HONG KONG—China’s Communist Party is amping up efforts to control its image around the world by jailing Chinese citizens, many of them ordinary people with little influence, who use foreign social media to criticize Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his government.

Chinese authorities have sentenced more than 50 people to prison in the past three years for using Twitter and other foreign platforms—all blocked in China—allegedly to disrupt public order and attack party rule, according to a Wall Street Journal examination of court records and a database maintained by a free-speech activist.

The growing use of prison sentences marks an escalation of China’s efforts to control narratives and strangle criticism outside China’s cloistered internet. In the past, the suppression of views on foreign social media was enforced mostly through detentions and harassment, rarely by imprisoning people, human-rights activists say.

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snip

quote:

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Twitter has emerged as a propaganda battleground for China as it seeks to strengthen its global image and influence. Beijing has promoted its narratives on Twitter through a growing network of diplomatic and state-media accounts, as well as what cyber-policy analysts describe as state-supported troll campaigns that trumpet Chinese government viewpoints and attack China’s critics.
China’s toughened enforcement efforts have coincided with a noticeable rise in anti-Communist Party discourse on Twitter over recent years, amplified by U.S.-based operatives like fugitive Chinese businessman Guo Wengui, said Gabrielle Lim, a researcher at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.

“The government knows well from its domestic experiences that propaganda only works when it is coupled with censorship of opposing views,” said Yaqiu Wang, a China researcher with the advocacy group Human Rights Watch.

In each of the past two years, at least 25 people were sentenced to prison for offenses directly related to their activities on foreign social media, compared with eight known cases in 2018, according to court records reviewed by the Journal. In one 2019 case, the sentence was suspended.

Most of these cases involved Twitter, though some were related to activities on Facebook and YouTube, which are also blocked in China. Some cases involved a mix of foreign social-media services, as well as Chinese platforms like WeChat, Weibo and QQ that are widely used in the country. Most of those imprisoned were convicted of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”—a vague charge often used to target the government’s critics—while some were convicted of libel or inciting subversion of state power. Their sentences ranged from six months to four years.

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At the moment the censorship is limited to scrubbing posts, deplatforming, and blocking accounts under the guise of preventing "misinformation"...a term that is both vague and highly subjective. Then there are the calls for public safety...a conveniently used term to rationalize all sorts of limitations on individual liberty.

I'm just not sure we are all that far from this sort of thing. At the moment, it's "big tech" leading this charge; it doesn't have a police force. Will the tech firms and social media platforms be expected to report behavior deemed to be “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” in the future?