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.
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.