Short story time.
Back when I was in university (circa 2010), I was sitting near the back of the auditorium, and one of the international Chinese students took a seat in front of me. I watched her boot up her laptop, and log onto Baidu.
For those unfamiliar, Baidu was/is the Chinese equivalent of Google (it still might be, I'm not sure), with the one caveat it was heavily censored in accordance with the Chinese government to remove "disinformation", the most famous example being the purging of any results about Tiananmen Square.
I remember being bit taken aback. I could not understand why this student, who was living in the "free world" outside of the Great Firewall, would willingly use a censored search engine when she had access to free and unfettered information by literally using any other search engine. She spoke perfect English, so it wasn't a language barrier. Being a Chinese national, she also *had* to be aware of the censorship. Maybe she was just searching for something mundane and unpolitical, or just didn't care about censoring, but either way I didn't get it.
At the time it was just a weird curiosity to me, and I quickly moved on with my day. I didn't know that as the years went by I'd find myself thinking about it more and more as a psychological case study.
2016 hit, and I watched as nearly every news outlet simultaneously dropped any and all pretense of objectivity, ethics, and journalistic integrity. To my surprise (and shock) nobody around me seemed to notice or care.
2020 hit, and again, I watched in mild shock as mass censorship was deployed across the net. Doctors and other experts in their field were muzzled. Apple (once famous for denying the government access to a terrorist's iPhone), jumped at the chance to remove and ban apps on political grounds. FB/Twitter1.0 *blatantly* suppressed information and users along political lines. Google results are now filtered, and only promotes activist sources. Let's not even talk about its laughable "Results are changing fast" blocker for current events.
It's gotten exponentially worse since then. To the point of absurdity, where we now have the Biden admin *openly* suing so they can continue censoring their citizens, and the Canadian gov't under Trudeau forcing through a law which effectively puts the viewability of *all internet content* within Canada at the discretion of 11 or 12 party members at the CRTC.
Yet without protest or much ado about anything, people still use Google. They still consume state-funded media (NPR, CBC, etc..). They still use Facebook. They still parrot lines about "conspiracy theories" and "dis/mis/malinformation" despite a large amount of it coming from their primary sources of news. Worst of all, it seems like they are tripping over themselves to give up their rights to privacy, speech, and more.
This has completely shattered my perception and understanding of people. Maybe I'm being a bit sanctimonious and self-righteous, but I really, truly believed more people were smarter than this.
And so I often find myself thinking about that student in my uni class. I couldn't understand it at the time, but I understand now. I just never thought I would see it happen in my own country, on such a large scale, and at such a rapid pace.
