Amazon Partnered With China Propaganda Arm (reuters.com) 44
Amazon bent over backwards to sell kindle and cloud services in China, Reuters reported on Friday. The company attempted to curry favor with Beijing by promoting President Xiâ(TM)s books as "best sellers," censoring reviews of propaganda films and providing a dissident's IP address to authorities, the report said. From the report: Amazon was marketing a collection of President Xi Jinping's speeches and writings on its Chinese website about two years ago, when Beijing delivered an edict, according to two people familiar with the incident. The American e-commerce giant must stop allowing any customer ratings and reviews in China. A negative review of Xi's book prompted the demand, one of the people said. "I think the issue was anything under five stars," the highest rating in Amazon's five-point system, said the other person. Ratings and reviews are a crucial part of Amazon's e-commerce business, a major way of engaging shoppers. But Amazon complied, the two people said. Currently, on its Chinese site Amazon.cn, the government-published book has no customer reviews or any ratings. And the comments section is disabled.
Amazon's compliance with the Chinese government edict, which has not been reported before, is part of a deeper, decade-long effort by the company to win favor in Beijing to protect and grow its business in one of the world's largest marketplaces. An internal 2018 Amazon briefing document that describes the company's China business lays out a number of "Core Issues" the Seattle-based giant has faced in the country. Among them: "Ideological control and propaganda is the core of the toolkit for the communist party to achieve and maintain its success," the document notes. "We are not making judgement on whether it is right or wrong." That briefing document, and interviews with more than two dozen people who have been involved in Amazon's China operation, reveal how the company has survived and thrived in China by helping to further the ruling Communist Party's global economic and political agenda, while at times pushing back on some government demands.
Amazon's compliance with the Chinese government edict, which has not been reported before, is part of a deeper, decade-long effort by the company to win favor in Beijing to protect and grow its business in one of the world's largest marketplaces. An internal 2018 Amazon briefing document that describes the company's China business lays out a number of "Core Issues" the Seattle-based giant has faced in the country. Among them: "Ideological control and propaganda is the core of the toolkit for the communist party to achieve and maintain its success," the document notes. "We are not making judgement on whether it is right or wrong." That briefing document, and interviews with more than two dozen people who have been involved in Amazon's China operation, reveal how the company has survived and thrived in China by helping to further the ruling Communist Party's global economic and political agenda, while at times pushing back on some government demands.
I didn't realize (Score:2)
What is this? President Xiâ is president of China now? And apparently he trademarked his name? Intellectual Property things are getting out of hand.
Amazon Kowtows for Money. (Score:5, Insightful)
News at 11...
The almighty dollar is the true god of the people (Score:5, Insightful)
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What exactly did Saul write that has you so hot under the collar? Was it the bit about asking "Do the ends justify the means?" He said, authoritarians will always claim their ends justify their means, while claiming yours never do, so don't listen to them, listen to your heart. Wow. So terrible.
And that is the only halfway coherent criticism of the book I've ever seen. Everything else is pretty much politically agnostic methods for winning at community organizing, to make people's lives better by making the
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How does knowing you can't possibly get me to shut up make you feel?
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The problem isn't that corporations are evil, the problem is that they're expected to be capable of acting as moral agents. They're not.
Corporations are essentially machines, robots if you will. *Legal* robots, rather than mechanical; their hardware consists of groups of people and the rules that reward or punish those people for their individual actions within the corpporation are the software. If you built a robot to, say, mine gold, would you expect that robot to be capable of moral judgment if that is
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Corporations are legal fictions designed to permit men to do evil without consequences.
HA (Score:3)
and we want amazon to power us govcloud?
my comments are my own and not related in any way to my employer
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Well yeah, and now they're in a better position to because they've shown they'll do absolutely anything the government asks them to, no questions asked.
Xi's book has been a hit for years (Score:3)
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-100 Social Credits
Be more careful citizen
This is absolutely my favorite thing (Score:5, Interesting)
They're the worst combination of capitalism and government. What most would call fascism. But we've become so dependent on their manufacturing capacity we can't risk offending them, and their markets are so large even the NBA bows before them.
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even the NBA bows before them
odd example; i wouldnt consider the NBA a bastion of anything.
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>China is spreading authoritarian dictatorship to us. All while pretending they're Communists.
Communists are authoritarian dictators. The worst of the authoritarian dictators too, who esnlaved, tortured genocided people simply for trying to improve their own lives, and therefore trying rise about others. In Communist lingvo, this is the worst crime of all, "demonstrating Capitalist tendencies".
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Ah yes, the "not real communists" narrative of the modern communists. "I'm totally not supporting the most genocidal ideology. In fact, if you let ME do it, I'd do it right, unlike those Communists of the past who were Not True Communists!"
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who enslaved, tortured genocided people simply for trying to improve their own lives
You don't have to be communist to do this: the American government did it just fine with people who weren't even trying to "improve" their lives - Native Americans just wanted to live and be left alone.
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Don't forget American actions in central America. Espionage, coups and outright invasion to 'save' Honduras from 'communist' governments who objected to how American companies were systematically exploiting their country and their people.
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If you really believe these things to be even in the same ballpark, I recommend reading Gulag Archipelago.
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It may have been sold as a way to spread democracy, but I always thought it was a way to keep the USSR on its toes and engage diplomatically to resolve the issues with Vietnam and perhaps North Korea.
Contemptible (Score:3)
"Amazon's compliance with the Chinese government edict, which has not been reported before, is part of a deeper, decade-long effort by the company to win favor in Beijing to protect and grow its business in one of the world's largest marketplaces. An internal 2018 Amazon briefing document that describes the company's China business lays out a number of "Core Issues" the Seattle-based giant has faced in the country. Among them: "Ideological control and propaganda is the core of the toolkit for the communist party to achieve and maintain its success," the document notes. *We are not making judgement on whether it is right or wrong.*"
Not making judgement? Yes, you are. You judged that the life of at least one individual is worth less than any potential profit you might make, and you are overlooking decades of attrocities committed by the CCP against China's citizens.
My judgement is that I canceled my prime account.
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Not making judgement? Yes, you are. You judged that the life of at least one individual is worth less than any potential profit you might make, and you are overlooking decades of attrocities committed by the CCP against China's citizens.
Right?
By the time you've said "not making a judgement", you've already made a judgement, realised you're on the wrong side of it and are into the territory of making excuses. It would never occur for someone to flag that they're "not judging" when what they are doing is 100
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Like The Professor said, if you choose not to decide you still have made a choice. But that's not even the case, they have chosen sides... they chose money.
Tricky tradeoff (Score:2)
US co's have to follow local laws or be barred there. Do we really want to cripple US co's by forcing them to only follow US law? Non-US co's will slide into the void and eat our economic lunch.
No big deal. (Score:1)
Amazon is a for-profit enterprise. They are not in the business of promoting western values at the expense of their bottom line. Why hold them to that standard? If that's the cost of doing business, then people can vote with their investment choices and their purchases.
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not committing genocide is a "western value" now?
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Okay, let's make a list of countries with whom Amazon should avoid doing business on the basis of their government's questionable human rights activities.
Just for fun, let's start with the U.S..
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The US has plenty of historic genocides, but I'm not aware of any currently in progress. It does maintain economic and political alliances with a few countries that are, so at most it's a bit of tacit turn-a-blind-eye apathy.
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"Sir! I did NOT help a genocidal regime out of the goodness of my heart, I did it for MONEY."
That doesn't make it any better you know.
Doing business in China. (Score:3)
Zero stars, would not recommend.
Is Amazon committing treason, too? (Score:2)