Show HN: Babble – Communicate privately on state-sponsored social media 14 by yvbbrjdr | 1 comments on Hacker News. Thanks for checking out Babble! You might wonder why this app is even useful and why not just use Signal/PGP. This app's target audience is actually ordinary people in China or similar countries who are under severe government surveillance and censorship, where access to Signal and similar E2EE messaging software is blocked by nationwide firewalls, such as the Great Firewall of China (GFW). Chinese people have been deprived of freedom of speech even before the COVID-19 pandemic. Li Wenliang, who was among the first to notice the spread of the virus and warned his colleagues about it in a private WeChat group, was admonished by the police for "spreading rumors"; his punishment was then aired on the national TV channel. After Wenliang passed away due to getting COVID-19 himself, discussions about it on China's public Internet were highly restricted; mos