alt Hacker News> This is mandating taking down content, not surveiling anyone.
As far as I understand, it precisely mandating to monitor EVERYONE.
They are not talking about removing a specific image from the platform based on its hash or something. They are talking about actions that involve automated analysis of all content on the platform for patterns arbitrarily specified by the government.
The technologies discussed differ from totalitarian surveillance by simply toggling a single flag on the platform, and are indistinguishable from such surveillance for the user.
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Imagine dang wrote a script to delete every HN comment that contains the string "velociraptor". Under your logic, this involves surveiling every HN commenter. This is true in the pedantic sense that every comment posted to the site would be checked for "velociraptor".
But most people understand the word "surveillance" to mean more involved information collection than just deleting content that matches certain criteria.
Every social media site is already reading, analysing, and filtering the content posted on their platforms.