06/04/2019 / By JD Heyes
Remember when the social media tech giants were social media tech startups out to change the world by bringing the very American concept of free speech and expression to the oppressed masses?
Yes, we don’t either because it’s been so long ago and so much suppression of speech and expression has occurred since — much of it willingly by the very same companies that once duped investors with stories of a wide open Internet.
Twitter has become one of the most censored social media platforms in existence. It bends over backwards to ban and silence Americans with whom its Left-wing speech Nazis disagree in the very same way the platform cooperates with the murderous Chinese regime to silence their citizens.
As the 30th anniversary of China’s Tiananmen Square massacre approached, suddenly hundreds or, according to some reports thousands, of Chinese ‘dissidents’ (i.e. critics of the regime) were inexplicably banned from Twitter just three days out, Zero Hedge reported.
What’s more, not all of the dissident Chinese account holders were actually inside China, according to one Twitter user:
#Developing A large number of Chinese @Twitter accounts are being suspended today. They “happen” to be accounts critical of China, both inside and outside China. @TwitterSupport @TwitterForGood pic.twitter.com/GHYRkofK9v
— #六四不吃饭 (@YaxueCao) May 31, 2019
According to The New York Times:
It hit human rights lawyers, activists, college students and nationalists, who use workarounds to get access to Twitter, which is banned in China. Just about every part of the raucous, if small, Chinese language Twitter world was affected.
The accounts began rapidly disappearing just days before the 30th anniversary of the crackdown on a student-led pro-democracy demonstration in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Many online assumed the worst: a coordinated attack by Beijing to project its suffocating internet censorship outside its own digital borders.
In other words, Twitter — which is an American-registered company based in San Francisco, supposedly very liberal and all about giving voice to the voiceless, willingly took away voices from a small group of mostly powerless Chinese so they can’t question or criticize their own government, which routinely violates human rights, murders citizens, and tramples liberties in various ways. (Related: New film ‘You Can’t Watch This’ chronicles the big tech censorship of conservatives.)
And all on the anniversary of an incident in which the same Communist government murdered perhaps thousands of its own citizens simply because they disagreed.
Or maybe the ccp hacked Twitter. That would make more sense to me.
— Kyle Bass (@Jkylebass) June 1, 2019
Was it intentional? Well, gosh, Twitter issued a statement and said that the company ‘inadvertently’ targeted several legitimate Chinese-language accounts as part of a larger effort to go after spam and other behavior deemed inauthentic.
“These accounts were not mass reported by the Chinese authorities — this was routine action on our part,” said Twitter in a statement, adding “Sometimes our routine actions catch false positives or we make errors. We apologize.”
Sure. How coincidental.
It should be noted that Twitter also blocked supposed Chinese dissidents from the platform way back in 2009, when the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square was approaching. Coincidentally, of course.
But given Twitter’s now well-documented incidents of blocking and banning people based on their (cough-ahem conservative cough-ahem) beliefs and opinions, there are many nonbelievers when it comes to the excuse given regarding the blocking of Chinese accounts.
The Times noted further:
The routine action set off real fears. In China, the June 4 anniversary of Tiananmen brings an extra dose of censorship to one of the world’s most controlled corners of the internet. Tools that help users jump the Great Firewall to get access to the broader online world often sputter inexplicably. Within China, Twitter users have faced escalating pressures.
Here’s the thing: At 1 a.m., Chinese troops armed with assault weapons and tanks began firing on their own citizens, most of them students. Perhaps thousands were killed; 10,000 or more were arrested, and many executed.
Twitter doesn’t have to be in China at all because Jack Dorsey could grow a spine, revisit his American values and roots, and tell Beijing where it can stick its authoritarianism.
But instead, he’d rather cater to China’s Communists while banning American conservatives. What a guy.
Read more about tech giant censorship at TechGiants.news and Censorship.news.
Sources include:
Tagged Under: American conservatives, ban, Big Tech, Censorship, China, Chinese communists, communism, conservatives, coward, dissidents, evil, human rights, Jack Dorsey, massacre, shadow ban, suppression, tech giants, Tiananmen Square, Tiananmen Square Massacre, Twitter
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