https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/china-uses-disinformation-pretext-ban-more-online-joseph-klein/
The Communist Chinese regime is moving aggressively to solidify what it calls a “civilized” Internet for its citizens. The regime’s definition of a “civilized” Internet is one that adheres to “the guiding status of Marxism in the ideological cyberspace sphere, foster a common ideology among the whole Party and the Chinese people, and interiorize core socialist values.”
China’s rulers want the Internet to serve as their tool to disseminate their propaganda about “the great achievements of [China’s Communist] party in each historical period of revolution, construction, and reform.” The regime intends to crack down on what it characterizes as “misinformation” and to refute so-called online “rumors” with the government’s official party line.
The official Xinhua News Agency reported on an online summary posted by China’s State Council of upcoming proposed regulations. “The country plans to better regulate the production, publication and distribution of online content, classify the management of online accounts and build a national mechanism to stop and prevent disinformation,” according to the Xinhua News Agency.
President Joe Biden has frequently sought to contrast “autocratic governments” like China’s with “democracies.” But at least in the area of freedom of expression on the Internet, Biden’s declared line of demarcation is rapidly disappearing.
Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith co-authored an article with Andrew Keane Woods, a law professor at the University of Arizona College of Law, entitled “Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to Normal.” The article claimed that “China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong” during the last two decades when it came to the debate over whether Internet freedom or control of the network deserved greater priority.
“Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values,” the law professors wrote.
The giant social media companies in the United States are already doing much the same thing as the Chinese regime in terms of censoring online speech they don’t like. The difference is that China’s government is imposing censorship directly on what is posted on social media platforms in China. In the United States, left-wing Silicon Valley plutocrats are doing the dirty work themselves, under pressure by the Biden administration and progressives in Congress to clamp down even further on what they consider to be undesirable speech.