When China’s prodigious tech influencer, Naomi Wu, found herself silenced, it wasn’t just the machinery of a surveillance state at play. Instead, it was a confluence of state repression and the sometimes capricious attention of a Western audience that, as she asserts, often views Chinese activists more as ideological tokens than as genuine human beings.
Why are they going after people who are supportive of them?
The short answer is that she reported a security vulnerability in a popular Android keyboard. It basically operated as a keylogger. The logical assumption is that the government was using that to spy on people (even people using secure messengers) and did not appreciate the secret getting out to the public.
Because they are fascists with power. You can praise them all day every day but when it comes down if you are different in any way they will see you as a deviant and a sickness.
Because of the reasons in the article?
Seems you haven’t read the second half of the title, as well as the second half of the article.
TBH I had trouble getting past
Just… Why?
It depends on whether you read it as meaning that it goes into more depth than people understand, or are capable of understanding.
I know that most people don’t understand how HEPA filters work. In a nutshell, they’re not just tiny sieves, but work via different methods: impaction, interception and diffusion (and sometimes electrostatic attraction). This means that e.g. a 0.3 μm N95 mask is better at filtering 0.1 μm virus particles than larger 0.3 μm air pollution because they advertise the size at which it’s worst at filtering.
This isn’t particularly difficult science, but hardly anyone knows it. I think that most people are capable of understanding the concepts behind it, like Brownian motion, but then most people I meet are fairly smart so I’m not the best judge.
Because it’s not enough.
She wasn’t enough.
She doesn’t fit the box perfectly.
And she was too popular to ignore.