Aimi

My concern Colonel, is that this is not the first time that a thread has been immediately locked upon any mention of the current ongoing events in China, despite there being political comments preceding that. It reeks of political motivation, whether there is any, or not.

What you think it reeks of is not what is. Topics mentioning China almost always goes to shit almost immediately. Sufficient to say any topic talking about China, Hong Kong, Taiwan or any other politically based topic should expect to be locked. Its called preemptive moderative action. I live in central US I have no love for the CCP and I am fairly certain no one LMG or LTT Forum does either.

I'm not aware of any such cases, but one possible explanation (and I should emphasise that this is just speculation based on what you have said) is that a low level of politics mixed with tech was tolerated, because there was still productive discussion going on, but it was locked when that changed to pure political arguments, as discussions involving China tend to become very quickly. Alternatively, it's entirely possible that the topic just wasn't reported as being political until later, or that it took some time for a moderator to respond to a report.

We are a tech forum, so the rule is that political discussion is banned. In practice though, that line is pretty blurry, and sometimes a post that references politics is doing so in a tech context, without being too contentious, so as long as it doesn't lead to the topic becoming derailed we are sometimes prepared to let it stand. The problem comes when people, yourself included, act as a catalyst to derail those topics from tech that touched briefly on politics into politics that touches on tech. At that point, moderator intervention is required.

If we haven't yet locked a topic that has moved towards politics, that does not mean we are happy for you to continue discussing politics, and it certainly does not mean that you can drop all pretences and start posting stuff that has no relation to tech (such as discussing the relative merits Trump/Biden/Sanders/{insert political figure}, pointing out that China doesn't have the moral high ground because they are (allegedly) committing genocide, etc).

Topics are locked when you start discussing China, not because we are interested in keeping the Chinese government happy, but because if you're discussing China then you're not discussing tech - instead, you are discussing a volatile political topic.