Anyone who have spent some time on the social media in China interacting with people from the IT sector would know, the petition is clearly genuine, not propaganda.

Currently, Google's launch of Dragonfly creates an interesting disagreement in public opinion. In the U.S, the opinion in the "technosphere" is overtly negative, due to its implication of supporting censorship and oppression of the general public.

But in China, the public opinion from the "technosphere" is completely the opposite. The dominate search engine, Baidu's reputation has became notorious after the death of Wei Zexi, the 21-year-old cancer patient, after finding misleading treatment information on search engine Baidu. Citizens on the social media became aware of the existence of Putian Medical Group, a special interest group in the profit-driven healthcare market for its questionable medical treatment. Baidu was believed to be the largest supporter of the multi-billion-dollar industry, they may have contributed 12 billion RMB (1.8 billion US$) to Baidu's ad revenues. (See this article for the background: https://www.whatsonweibo.com/behind-baidu-scandal-baidu-puti...)

But it's not the only scandal. Baidu is known for its predatory and invasive advertisements, including consumer support fraud, visa fraud, medical fraud. Most of the time, entering any common keyword, people are confident to say that the first three results of the search list are the ads, and highly likely to be frauds. The daily victims of these ads is likely to be hundreds, if not thousands. Baidu is doing little, if not actively supporting the false advertising.

The public opinions of the IT workers in China, in my own words, is basically: if Google is a criminal, then Baidu is a maddog. The politics is authoritative, changing it is out-of-question. Then at least you can replace a wild maddog with an ordinary megacorp, which at least has a well-defined bottomline and more or less under the public supervision of the citizens.

I don't know what to say. On one hand, censorship and oppression surely causes long-term damage, but on the other hand, the damage of victims by these frauds is also a large number. Even if I take an utilitarianist approach, then what is valued greater?

u(free from censorship and oppression) x Google's contribution?

                                           ^likely small

or

u(free from ubiquitous frauds from Baidu)?