Unfortunately things are not so simple. You can find satire of Xi Jinping on TikTok right now: https://www.tiktok.com/discover/xi-jinping-winnie-the-pooh?l..., but not on Midjourney anymore. So, ironically, banning TikTok would suppress speech critical to the CCP more than banning Midjourney, a US company.
> So, ironically, banning TikTok would suppress speech critical to the CCP more than banning Midjourney, a US company.
The ban would be outside of China. Speech critical of the CCP is only really effective if it reaches inside of China and banning TikTok outside of China would have a negligible effect on the other side of TGF.
If I may point out here that if we take the word "democracy" at face value (i.e. That the ruling entity needs to have the support of the majority of demos) then most countries are really not democratically governed:
The people in charge get voted in by a minority of the people who go to vote - which gets even worse if you account for people who are eligible to vote but abstain.
This paper discusses minority governments in Australia between 1989 and 2009, a period of two decades in which there have been at least ten examples of this political phenomenon in the Australian States and Territories.
If I was paying any attention at all recently it was on the fact that we've had at least a few minority governments since 2009 also.
Finland is having a minority government now too:
With all of the votes counted on Sunday, the right-wing National Coalition party (NCP) won 20.8% of the vote, with the populist, nation-first Finns party scoring 20.1%. Marin’s SDP took 19.9% of the vote. Voter turnout was 71.9%.
in almost any election in every European country the voter presence is 50% or below. I think that's what the comment was about... is just a small % of people that participate in voting and even smaller percentage that votes for the winner.
What do you mean by "voter presence"? And 50% of what? Of registered voters? Of people eligible to vote?
Because statistics would beg to differ. [^1]
It might hold for european elections [^2], as almost nobody seems to care about those, leading to a low turnout, but that definitely isn’t true about national elections.
The quote I responded to was explicitly about a minority of people who opted into voting. Other parts of the comment included nonvoters, but that's a different discussion.
> (i.e. That the ruling entity needs to have the support of the majority of demos)
There is nothing undemocratic about federalist republics. Or parliamentary democracies that require coalitions to rule. They are simply different kinds of democracy.
Principled arguments which can openly compete and evolve in the marketplace of ideas. Probably not state actors of any flavor, but this isn't necessarily exclusive of them.
