Google+ Unblocked In China; President Obama's Page Flooded With Comments 187
An anonymous reader writes "Google+ has recently been unblocked in China and Chinese netizens have found their way to President Obama's G+ page. The result is that topic after topic has hit the limit of 500 comments, most of them in Chinese. Some express political views, but many are just everyday banter or showing off."
Widespread interest (Score:5, Informative)
Interesting how much of the world is interested in our politics.
Several years ago, I was walking around Porvoo, Finland, taking pictures. I talked to a few teenagers doing skateboard tricks. In their perfect English, they were very curious how we could have elected Bush II twice. It's all they wanted to talk about.
Not surprised. (Score:5, Informative)
I seem to recall plenty of people milling about when the Berlin wall came down. When you give people access to something formerly restricted, plenty of people will show up just to say they were there.
The Internet will be an interesting place on the day the "Great Firewall" finally gets shut down for good.
Re:Widespread interest (Score:1, Informative)
On the other hand, few Europeans can place and name all 50 American states as well as their capitals, yet they somehow feel Americans should be able to do this for Europe. They don't realise that the pride they take in keeping track of what happens in Germany when they live in Spain is just like an American reading news about the state next over.
Re:Widespread interest (Score:2, Informative)
Hi, UK here.
We had a third party, the Liberal Democrats.
It all kind of went downhill when they did the exact opposite of the thing that they explicitly said that would do. [telegraph.co.uk] They pretty much do everything our highly unpopular Conservative Party tells them to. In doing so, they forfeit the tiny bit of credibility that fell to them mostly by default, after our previous highly unpopular Labour government departed.
Re:Widespread interest (Score:2, Informative)
In Finnish election system, when electing president, we have second round where we have the only two most voted candidates from first round.
This year top 2 candidates got 37% and 19% of votes on the first round. On the second round they got 63% and 37%.
Re:China unblocks Google+ (Score:2, Informative)
G+ has ~54mil daily users. Nothing to sneeze at, but still small compared to FB's 400+mil daily users.
Re:Widespread interest (Score:5, Informative)
It could easily be extended to more rounds, where the least popular candidate is eliminated in each voting round until there is an absolute majority for one candidate, but it's usually simpler to just take the top 2 winners and have one more election between them.