Different Internets.

The internet we get in the USA is not the internet other people get.

 You can't read Breitbart.com in Vietnam. They think it might give you dangerous ideas.

We are used to the idea that Fox News viewers have a different sense of reality than people who read and watch mainstream news.  Fox celebrates it.  They say they balance everyone else.

What is not obvious to Americans is that the internet can be censored.   I am currently in Saigon, Vietnam.  (I know people say not to publish one is out of town.  My house is alarmed, boobytrapped, and has nothing worth stealing.   Do you really, really want a watercolor portrait of me at age 60 in a business suit?  Dillon doesn't even want it and he's my son, and the art is the only thing that cost anything much.)

Traveling gives me the chance to re-learn that my internet isn't everyones internet.

We can get Fox News on the internet here, but cannot get Breitbart.   When I click on breitbart dot com the computer just sits there and after thirty seconds I get notice that the connection failed.   I do get access to my blog site at peterwsage.blogspot.com.   

My blog host company is social media and writers might say something dangerous, but the People's Republic Is letting freedom ring.

In China, non approved social media sites simply do not load--they stall out and the reader gets a notice that the computer failed to load.   On the China mainland a person like me using English,who attempts to go to a censored site, gets a notice, in English, that the site is not available.  It reads like there is some sort of technical or hardware glitch.   If a person in China and using the Chinese language attempts the same thing and tries to go to a social media or political site the person gets a pop up warning: RESTRICTED!  You have attempted to go to a forbidden site considered dangerous to the people of China.  

An American or European thinks the internet is glitchy and has problems; a local knows he or she is being watched with a disapproving eye.  Scare the locals but don't give foreigners ammunition. 

Americans do not all share the same internet search experience.  My Google searches are different from your Google searches.  Google tracks the interests of each device, it reads our email, and it makes search suggestions based on what it knows about us.   For me, using my computers "Medford" means Medford, Oregon and defaults to that, not Medford, MA or Medford, NJ.   Google searches seem so intuitively appropriate because theyitnknows my past searches and which choices I clicked on.   "Fox" brings up political media, not wild foxes or fox hunts.  

Google, like Santa, knows when you've been sleeping, it knows when you're awake, it knows when you've been bad or good.  It--and Facebook--know if you are likely to resend chain letters asserting that Hillary is running a brothel in the basement of a pizza joint.  Democrats cannot blame that on Russians.  Americans did this to ourselves.  We have freedom of speech.  We can say what we want and pass it to our friends.  Freedom.

Russia used our freedoms against us.  China and Vietnam know freedom of speech can destroy nations.