As a rule, it’s a good idea to be particularly suspicious of defenses of censorship that — coincidentally — materially benefit the people espousing them. In this case, the argument in favor of censorship is coming from founder and CEO of AI image generator Midjourney, David Holz. And Holz makes clear that he is willing to exempt Xi Jinping from the tool’s capabilities to retain Midjourney’s viability in China. 

That’s right: Xi Jinping, one of the most powerful and repressive government officials in the world and most deserving of political skewering and mockery will be one of the few exempt from it, at least where Midjourney is concerned. Some other terms are restricted, though Holz won’t make the list public — “Afghanistan” for example, and now some depictions of arrests after the fake Donald Trump arrest fiasco — but Holz reportedly treats China as a unique case.

His quote about it is a doozy. From The Washington Post:

But the year-old company, run out of San Francisco with only a small collection of advisers and engineers, also has unchecked authority to determine how those powers are used. It allows, for example, users to generate images of President Biden, Vladimir Putin of Russia and other world leaders — but not China’s president, Xi Jinping.

“We just want to minimize drama,” the company’s founder and CEO, David Holz, said last year in a post on the chat service Discord. “Political satire in china is pretty not-okay,” he added, and “the ability for people in China to use this tech is more important than your ability to generate satire.”

He wants you to simultaneously believe that his program is so important that it must do whatever is necessary to remain accessible to people within China, but so unimportant that it doesn’t matter if fundamental political expression about one of the most powerful authoritarians in the world can’t be created on it. It doesn’t add up. 

It’s no surprise that a tech CEO would be willing to make trade-offs for the Chinese market. At this point, it’s more surprising if one won’t do so. But Holz’s position is particularly careless and reveals an increasingly serious threat to free expression on and offline today: individual countries’ censorship laws, particularly those of powerful countries like China, are setting global rules sometimes enforced by tech companies anxious to display their compliance. It’s not just Midjourney’s China-based users that can’t satirize Xi Jinping — that rule applies to users everywhere, even in the United States.

Local laws are suddenly not so local anymore, and people like Holz have no qualms about aiding their illiberal international spread. 

What this means in practice is that authoritarian leaders don’t just get to subject their own countries to repressive laws limiting political speech. They also get to set the rules for global communities which are not, and should not be, under any expectations to abide by them. Zoom engaged in such practices in 2020 when it applied Chinese law to users outside mainland-China, shutting down online Tiananmen memorials held by users in Hong Kong and the United States. In response to well-deserved criticism, Zoom announced it would no longer allow Chinese law to dictate policies outside mainland China. Midjourney took notes, it seems, and learned a different lesson.

Holz’s exact words were “the ability for people in China to use this tech is more important than your ability to generate satire,” but his meaning was clear: Midjourney’s interest in being accessible in China is more important than its users’ interest in engaging in political expression. 

This acquiescence signals to authoritarians of all sorts that if they want to control their image on the global internet, ramping up repressive efforts at home will be rewarded. As if they needed more incentive. Oversee a large enough financial market and censor enough people and you, too, may be able to control your reputation on the global internet. 

Will Midjourney stop with just Xi Jinping? Or should we expect satire of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for example, to be next on the chopping block if Midjourney wants access to an increasingly unfree India? 

Lastly, Holz may argue that he’s helping Chinese citizens — and not just his own company — by attempting to ensure that Midjourney will be available in China. But his claim that he wants to preserve “the ability for people in China” to use this tech is paternalistic in a way Holz doesn’t seem to realize. Chinese citizens, after all, may themselves want to use Midjourney to satirize their own government. Why does their freedom to satirize their ruler matter less than the freedom of the rest of the world to mock their leaders? 

In fact, in the later months of 2022, protesters in cities across China held up blank sheets of paper in country-wide demonstrations to protest not just the country’s restrictive COVID policies, but the many things that Chinese citizens aren’t allowed to voice. This censorship is a result of oppressive and wide-ranging governmental control over what they can say in every forum, online and off. But it’s reinforced when foreign companies, in this case a U.S.-based AI image generating tool, are all too eager to do their part in enforcing those restrictions — not just on the population legally bound by them, but on the rest of the world, too. 

Companies like Midjourney may be the vanguard of new technology and the changing internet. But censorship is nothing new, and they won’t change the game by willingly conducting reputation management for authoritarian governments. 

That, one might say, is “pretty not-okay.”

Sarah McLaughlin is Senior Scholar, Global Expression at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Since time is a concept with increasingly less meaning, you may have forgotten that it’s been only five months, not five years, since the NBA’s dustup with China over Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey’s “Fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong” tweet.

In response to that controversy, a number of business-conscious — to put it generously — major sports figures distanced themselves from Morey’s tweet. Some went so far as to suggest that it wasn’t their concern or responsibility to discuss human rights violations outside their own country.

At the time, these responses were clear examples of craven, self-serving statements from people who were more interested in preserving their investments than speaking honestly about human rights in a country in which they have major financial interests.

But given the current moment, it’s clear that they weren’t just wrong on the ethics of the situation. Because while there are many unknowns about COVID-19 — like when this nightmare will end — we do know this: China censored information about the outbreak, which helped accelerate its spread. Suddenly the chasm between American citizens and China’s silenced whistleblowers doesn’t seem so wide.

The Associated Press reported this week that China’s top leadership became aware that COVID-19 would likely be a pandemic in mid-January — and sat on that information for nearly a week. As early as December, China was censoring keywords about coronavirus on social media. Reporters Without Borders chronicled the impact China’s stranglehold on information had on the pandemic, from threatening doctors trying to warn the public to arresting whistleblowers for “false rumors.” Dr. Li Wenliang, who lost his life to coronavirus, has become a martyr in China, his experience a warning of both the seriousness of this pandemic and the cruelties of the Chinese government’s repression.

None of this absolves other governments of their failures to adequately respond to COVID-19. Every official, whether in China or the United States, is responsible for their own actions. But had China not censored vital information about a deadly pandemic and hid what it knew, its people could’ve been better prepared and slowed the spread of COVID-19. According to Zhong Nanshan, “one of China’s most highly regarded epidemiology experts and the leader of the National Health Commission’s task force on the epidemic,” if China had taken appropriate action early on, rather than obfuscate and censor, “the number of sick would have been greatly reduced.”

China’s citizens — and people across the globe — would have had more time to respond. Whether that time was or would have been utilized responsibly is another question.

Back in October, no one in the NBA could’ve known what awaited the world just a few short months later. But revisiting that debacle now casts into even sharper relief the disgrace of it all.

After Morey’s tweet, Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr stated: “None of us are perfect and we all have different issues that we have to get to and saying that is my right as an American…The world is a complex place and there’s more gray than black and white.” Suggesting Morey wasn’t “educated” on the situation, LeBron James warned that, even though we have freedom of speech, we should “be careful” about what we say.

And the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan said, “I want to have an opinion in America, there’s a civic duty to engage and do the right thing, but having an opinion on sovereign matters in other countries, it’s for those people to decide,” and concluded that “you have to respect the norms” of China. (Khan’s comments were particularly baffling given that many Chinese people have faced extreme consequences for “having an opinion on sovereign matters.”)

Shaquille O’Neal was one of the few to get it right. Shaq stressed the right to free speech, and added: “Whenever you see something wrong going on anywhere in the world, you should have the right to say ‘that’s not right,’ and that’s what [Morey] did.”

We should care about Uighur prison camps, forced disappearances, crackdowns in Hong Kong, suppression in Tibet, censorship of women’s rights activists, the Great Firewall, and mass surveillance simply because caring about human suffering is the right thing to do, regardless of its proximity to us.

But if basic morality doesn’t persuade us, maybe our current situation will. Censorship in China may seem like a faraway problem, but its effects will be felt globally for a long time to come. If that doesn’t convince us to care, it’s not clear what will.

Sarah McLaughlin is Director of Targeted Advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. The views expressed here are her own.