US Media Lament Internet Censorship—in China, Not US
by Julianne Tveten - FAIR
April 16, 2019
The New York Times invoked this trope last summer (8/6/18) when it fretted that “a generation” was coming of age without access to such US-founded internet companies as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram (a Facebook property) and Google, whose availability is restricted in China. Instead, Chinese youth were using Chinese-founded platforms, including social-media service Weibo, search engine Baidu and shortform-video application Tik Tok.
The New York Times (8/6/18) invites us to pity
the Chinese teens who are deprived of US tech giants.
By dint of their internet options, according to the Times, teenagers and 20-somethings living in China are excluded from the “Western liberal democracy” embodied on US platforms. The internet to which they’re exposed is censored, the Times contended—without elaboration of the forms said censorship took—and thus stripped of the values of free speech and expression employed on, say, Twitter or Google. The argument garnered an endorsement from Columbia Journalism Review (8/8/18) two days later.
The Washington Post (2/20/19) similarly wrung its hands via a February opinion piece. Written by a member of the historically US-aligned nonprofit Human Rights Watch, the op-ed expressed apprehension over the popularity of Chinese social-media platform WeChat, which it claimed censored posts containing “‘sensitive words’—such as Tiananmen Square, Liu Xiaobo and Occupy Central.”
A Washington Post op-ed (2/20/19) warned against “the Chinese
government’s use of WeChat as a surveillance tool”—ignoring
Edward Snowden’s revelation that “the National Security Agency
has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook,
Apple and other US internet giants” (Guardian, 6/7/13).
A month prior, the New York Times (1/23/19) warned that censorship was intensifying as China “appear[ed] to block Microsoft’s Bing,” and that “the Chinese internet was developing into a series of walled gardens, rather than the sprawling forum for ideas that makes online life appealing to many.” (Service resumed two days later; Reuters—1/27/19—indicated that this wasn’t an intentional block, but rather the product of a technical error.)
Corporate US media, it would seem, are ready to decry apparent censorship when it originates in what’s deemed an enemy state. Yet when US tech companies demonstrate clear patterns of restricting information—particularly from figures and outlets with adversarial positions on US policy—the mainstream press fails to sound the same alarm.
A number of left-leaning activists, media organizations, and governments have seen their presences flagged and minimized on US tech platforms. In one example, in 2017, a number of publications often critical of Western policy—AlterNet, Black Agenda Report, Democracy Now!, Common Dreams, Global Research and Truthout, among others—claimed that their Google-directed traffic sank as much as 63 percent in the wake of a Google algorithm change designed to bust the ill-defined specter of “fake news.” Simultaneously, many of corporate media’s heavy hitters—namely, the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN—appeared to have been spared.
Accordingly, and in contrast to their extensive consternation about China, these publications remained mostly mum on the issue. While the New York Times (9/26/17) published one story on these claims of left-media censorship, neither the Washington Post nor CNN appears to have reported on the matter.
Other examples abound. Last year, YouTube prevented videos rebuking Israeli militarism from being broadcast in such countries as the United Kingdom, France and Italy. Last month, Twitter temporarily restricted the account of TeleSur English, which has opposed the US’s attempted coup in Venezuela and US foreign policy more generally.
In February, Facebook suspended the account of digital video production company In the Now for its indirect connection to RT, a private media organization funded by the Russian government; Facebook eventually reinstated the account, contingent on In the Now disclosing its funding. (As Jim Naureckas observed for FAIR—3/1/19—such US and UK government-subsidized outlets as NPR, the BBC and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty aren’t required to disclose funding.)
The US corporate press not only fails to condemn this marginalization, but also actively enables it. In July 2018, Facebook announced that, in response to panic over Russian election meddling, it had “removed 32 pages and accounts from Facebook and Instagram because they were involved in coordinated inauthentic behavior.” Multiple pages related to anti-colonialist subjects, and at least one of those pages was that of an anti-fascist coalition—Shut It Down DC—raising a red flag regarding Facebook’s shadowy vetting procedures. Publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, Vox and Mother Jones parroted Facebook’s narrative (In These Times, 8/2/18), providing no evidence of a connection between these groups and Russia.
Another Washington Post op-ed (2/25/19) complained not just
about China’s censorship but about its “onerous privacy rules,”
which discriminate against US companies whose business models
depend upon invasion of privacy.
This skewed coverage stems from a sense of chauvinism; outlets like the Times and Post imply that the freest, most democratic internet paradigm is the one developed and used by Westerners. Exemplifying this point, a February Washington Post op-ed (2/25/19) maintained that China was putting the “future of the global internet at risk.” The piece went on to suggest that, in prioritizing the development of its own tech platforms over Western ones, China was further instituting a policy of “censorship” and “digital authoritarianism.” Further, it cited the NATO-championing Council on Foreign Relations to portray China’s tech sector as an impediment to “foreign competitors”—i.e., the US.
A similar sentiment appeared in a New York Times editorial (10/25/18) that warned that, in the future, “America’s [internet] won’t necessarily be the best.” In the wake of news that Google may be developing a Chinese search engine known as Dragonfly—a move Vox called “bad for humanity” (8/17/18)—the board bemoaned the notion that “American companies that once implicitly pushed democratic values abroad” may want to do business with the Chinese government.
US media have demonstrated an inveterate double standard for the concept of “censorship,” applying far more stringent criteria to countries that are the targets of US aggression than to the US and its allies. Corporate outlets’ insistence that the US’s configuration of the internet is “free” is a justification for homegrown platforms’ bolstering of Washington’s empire. Moreover, these outlets’ trepidation that China’s technological development poses a global threat is a condescending, thinly veiled avowal of Western supremacy. US media aren’t making useful prescriptions for a free internet; they’re merely stoking the flames of the new Cold War.
Julianne Tveten’s work has appeared in In These Times, The Nation, The New Republic, Pacifica Radio and elsewhere.
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