The last question i have is, what’s the point of banning something if you’re allowed to have it anyway?

Much of the purpose of the censorship is really just to have an independent platform. It’s not a big deal if a Chinese netizen uses a VPN to use YouTube because making it literally impossible for people to use YouTube isn’t the point.

If your country does not have its own independent media platforms, then everyone will use the media platforms of other countries, which that gives the foreign country immense soft power over your own country.

Imagine if you live in a country without its own media infrastructure so everyone uses Twitter for all social media communication. Everyone in your country will constantly have Elon Musk’s posts shoved into their feed, they will not be able to discuss anti-Israel stuff without risking getting banned, etc.

We know that the US government heavily works with these platforms to promote certain narratives. The US government runs enormous bot farms with the explicit purpose of manipulate public opinion on social media. When the attempted coup again MAS happened a long time ago, at least 68,000 fake bot accounts were created that did nothing but support it.

I even remember seeing some of these myself during the Cuba “protests.” Many “reporters” were false reporting pro-government protests as anti-government. You would then see accounts be like “hi I am Cuban and we want democracy and freedom and for the USA to liberate us” underneath the post, I would copy-paste their message and scroll through walls and walls of search results of dozens of different accounts having posted the exact same verbatim message without even capitalization changed.

I also remember distinctly that a “reporter” had used a photo a Cuban girl in one of these pro-government protests claiming there was some mass anti-government uprising, but that Cuban girl had a Twitter account and saw the post and just replied saying that it was her in the photo and the protest was pro-government not anti, and Twitter responded by banning her from the platform.

I also remember following a bunch of pro-Cuban accounts that used a hashtag (#DeZurdaTeam) that was popular amongst Cuban patriots. Many got banned because Twitter did a blanket ban of a bunch of these accounts calling them government bot accounts, but literally their only evidence presented was (1) they had Cuban IP addresses, (2) they said stuff positive about the Cuban government, and (3) they used a similar hashtag. They provided no evidence they were part of any sort of bot farm or anything.

Twitter also actively tries to suppress media from Cuba like going after the government newspaper Granma. Twitch used to ban people for even saying they didn’t believe in Zionism although they have softened on that a bit later. They still permit Zionists to outright break their rules, though, such as that Eristocracy streamer who outright has said on stream she thinks minorities who leave the country should be barred from reentry (a violation of international law) in order to promote racial purity, and many other extremist things, but Twitch permits it because she says it about Israel/Zionism.

Even the DuckDuckGo creator admitted that they manipulate the algorithm for political reasons to push certain narratives they deem the “truth” up and “misinformation” down, and the example they used of “misinformation” was Russian media, so we know for them “truth” really just means pro-western narratives. Even supposedly the “people’s search engine” DuckDuckGo ends up being a tool to manipulate public opinion.

I focus on Cuba-Twitter just as an example because it is what I had personally followed the most, but it is the same kind of things for other countries too, such as Twitter stripping the checkmark from Maduro to suppress his posts in the algorithm. They do this is with all other platforms as well. Facebook literally changed their rules to create an exception for calls to violence against Russians so you can call for killing Russians on Facebook without getting banned but of course if you say about any Ukrainians you’d get immediately banned. Twitter also bans people from Xinjiang for being government bot accounts if they speak positively of Xinjiang, again without any evidence they are bots except for the positive posts; some that were banned even posted regular videos so you can see they obviously lived there.

If this is the kind of media environment your entire country’s youth will grow up on then your country will end up being a puppet of the USA without an US soldier ever stepping foot in the country. It is important to have your own independent media platforms. Liberals pretend that this is somehow horrible censorship and they should open the floodgates but all that would do in practice is flood these countries with liberal propaganda (which is of course what they want) since the US has an incredibly tight grip on the global media infrastructure.

The tune of liberals would immediately change if the situation was flipped and most global media was controlled by China and Russia. They would be calling for a “great firewall” as well. I mean, this is easily proved by the fact that any of the biggest Chinese or Russian platforms that actually some minor influence like RT they immediately insist on banning because it says the wrong things, or just a large number of people; Russia and China having a large population means many will inevitably join western platforms and post there, and platforms like Twitter will call you a “bot” and ban you simply for your IP address and the fact you’re speaking positively about that country.

The point is less to make the media impossible to access but just to make it more difficult to access so most people don’t see it, thus the influence it has on society is negligible, and to promote domestic media institutions in its place. It basically downranks the media to the very bottom since it is the media you have to go most out of your way to access, and keeps domestic media platforms at the forefront of what most people in the country use. There is no way things like station b could be as big as it is if YouTube was freely accessible. Everyone would just use YouTube.

What’s the point of banning something if you’re allowed to have it anyway?

The point is to not allow people making money from things that are banned and make these things less relevant.

If you’re not allowed to legally purchase stuff, people won’t make much money from it.

You can access western social media through VPN but most people won’t bother and their influence will be negligible.