For an essay by Nathan Gardels about how China’s state controlled media balances the relationship between the government and the people.
On the one hand, it serves a conventional coercive function by keeping tabs on 1.4 billion people and letting them know it. On the other, it facilitates public polling, responsiveness, oversight and probabilistic forecasting enabled by massive caches of aggregated data on individual and group-level behavior.
AD Amara Higuera