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Showing posts from February, 2024

Embracing Freedom, Navigating Sensitivities: My Journey from Silence to Speech

I wanted to share some of my real experiences and thoughts here. I grew up in China and moved to the United States when I was around 30. I've always been critical of the Chinese government. However, under China's repressive political climate, with internet restrictions and speech control, people hardly have any means to express their political demands. The only option within China is to use what the government deems "illegal" VPNs to access social media like Twitter and YouTube. After arriving in the United States, I embraced freedom of speech and various social media platforms, frequently expressing my political views or criticisms of the Chinese government and the CCP (The Chinese Communist Party). However, the United States is a melting pot of cultures, with 5.4 million Chinese people ("2023 Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month: Key U.S. Census Stats"), not all of whom disapprove of China's authoritarian regime. In fact, some even admi

Reflections on 'The Social Dilemma'

I was pleased to see so many former top employees of tech giants expressing their pessimistic views on today's social media and giving warnings to the world in this documentary. This is an excellent documentary shot in 2020, but four years later, such a "dilemma" has not been solved and is even more serious.         Firstly, the documentary raised the issue of phone addiction, which I can refer to as "artificially created opium." The goal of software operators is to get users addicted to increase user retention time. The "culprit" here is the online advertising model. Rather than saying social media provides feeds for you to get more of the information you want, it's more accurate to say that the time users waste on social media is the real "feed" for platforms or vested interests, enabling them to earn more income.          Secondly, why are users addicted to different types of social media? The documentary also mentions artificial i