LGBTQI groups found rare freedoms online, but this year, many were shut by censors. It feels like slowly being sanded down, said one member.

Across China, queer college societies, which had been rare spaces to safely push boundaries, were being swiftly erased from the Chinese internet. In July, 14 of the largest and most prominent accounts were banned, cutting connections between thousands of members scattered across the country and casting them adrift.

The struggle has worsened. Things that were acceptable to speak about online before can now open you up to attack. It’s not just LGBTQI issues, in Mei’s view. Anything rights-related is now a target.

When the country went online in the 1990s, so did many queer people who wanted to find others like them. Gay sex was decriminalized in China in 1997, but by then, there was already a thriving online community. (…) “Censorship wasn’t as strict,” he said of those early years. “It gave you the false belief that things would get better.”

Though these apps present themselves as allies to the gay community, they have aligned with the censors. Blued assigns each user “rainbow credits,” which they deduct if users violate community regulations. Leo has found this includes trying to organize an activity. When a user loses credits, their profile faces more restrictions, the final stage of which is being frozen. Blued’s parent company is increasingly gathering a monopoly over queer online interactions — in August 2020, it bought the largest lesbian dating app, Lesdo, which it shut down this year.

  • southerntofuOP
    3·
    3 years ago

    Thanks for the insight. To be fair, i don’t know this Sophie Schmidt but if restofworld.org is her project then she deserves some recognition for making one of the only techno-political publications online, and for directly betraying the interests of her father/class in maintaining the status quo of technological fascism.

    As for the article you link to about techno-colonialism in Africa (actual link from twitter), i really don’t like the phrasing because it’s a nationalist perspective (“digital sovereignty”) which does not concern with free/open science and software and schematics. However, the article paints a good picture of how African continent is badly underserved technologically, and of the power imbalance due to who controls the tech stack. The article also points out the same issue applies with US tech:

    Africa has less than 1% of total available global data center capacity, according to Xalam Analytics, and about 17% of the world’s population. (…) “This feeds into the myth that storing data locally makes it more secure, even if the whole technical and support package is provided by foreign firms.” The U.S. has supported similar plans, with the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation

    The article also acknowledges the difficulties faced by eg. Huawei due to western Empires closing down their borders on them:

    “The world is becoming a lot smaller for companies like Huawei that are being pushed out of Global North countries,” he said. “So regions like Africa, even though nowhere near as lucrative, have become much more important.”

    The conclusion is very reasonable and advocates for local development:

    African governments should learn from China’s own experience (…) these governments should ensure there is significant knowledge transfer, retention of corporate control, and sharing of IP. “We should be requiring joint ventures with Chinese tech companies, as China did with the likes of IBM and others in the 1980s”

    All in all, and although i partly disagree with the framing of the issue (because as an anarchist i strongly disagree with national sovereignty at all) that’s clearly not anti-chinese propaganda as we have seen in some western media during the Huawei ban stories.

    Now, to broaden the debate a little, i think it’s important to point out the scale on which the Chinese empire is slowly building/acquiring infrastructure on the African continent. It’s not just about new datacenters/airports but also about existing infrastructure such as ports being bought off from western Empires (eg. Bolloré as French neo-colonialism). This enterprise is draped in the same “win-win” humanitarian colonial narrative that the western empires have used to colonize Africa in the first place (“they need to be civilized and can’t build their own societies”), and the local relationships are tense, not only because Chinese companies are importing tons of workers instead of employing a local work force, but also because of the overt racism (you may have seen those viral videos of chinese people in Africa calling the locals “monkeys”).

    Fuck all empires, burn all borders! Death to the Nation States, long live the internationalist Commune!