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Lately I’ve been thinking about how one major lesson of the last year or so is the importance of recognizing that censorship has consequences beyond the borders of whatever country is engaging in it. Two examples in particular come to mind.
The first is one I wrote about at @techdirt last year. At the height of the NBA/China debacle, some well-known people suggested (self-servingly) that it’s not your business to concern yourself with human rights issues going on in other countries. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200416/09435444312/chinas-nba-free-speech-debacle-turned-out-to-be-prelude-to-covid-19-denialism.shtml
While that’s wrong on a moral basis, COVID shows us how wrong that is on a practical one, too. As it turns out, it’s actually pretty important to the rest of the world if a country is censoring information about a viral outbreak as some countries — China most notably — have done.
The second example is the national security law. The law is troubling enough just for what it’s doing to Hong Kong, but it’s doing more than crumbling free expression there. It’s intended to chill speech globally, and it’s working.
The law is impacting online and academic discussion around the world, and is forcing even people who don’t live in China to think carefully about what they say/teach/share about China. That’s something to worry about!
Anyway, I’ll end here, but I think it’s vital that we understand the far reaching impacts of censorship, because they can often be broader than we realize.