The Last Domain of Free Expression Is under Siege - American Thinker
Looney left wingers taking a page from communist China, just using another door.
f all of this fearmongering sounds oddly familiar and totalitarian, that's because the Communist Party of China (CCP) has been a pioneer in the conquest of cyberspace for decades — under the guise of combatting "misinformation" harmful to national security:
The CCP exercises pernicious, ruthless dominance in its own cyberspace behind the Great Firewall. No bit of subversive minutia is too small to ban; it successfully scrubbed images of Winne the Pooh into oblivion after internet activists likened the character to CCP boss Xi Jinping in 2017.
We Western heirs to the Renaissance and Enlightenment cannot allow the internet to become the plaything of the state in the mold of the Great Firewall, for information to be censored on a whim and distorted and rebranded.
If a population in a free society grows distrustful of its government, as has occurred in the U.S., the onus should be on the state to rebuild trust — not on the population to be herded into Orwellian goodthink via censorship.
Instead of demonizing a large (and growing) portion of the citizenry that no longer has faith in the government to serve its needs, the entity that needs fixing in this scenario is the government, not the people. Free speech is that corrective mechanism.
The Jan. 6, 2021 "insurrection" in D.C. — which was largely organized on the web via hard-to-track apps like Telegram — gave further ammunition to the corporate state to justify repression of dissident voices:
Looney left wingers taking a page from communist China, just using another door.
f all of this fearmongering sounds oddly familiar and totalitarian, that's because the Communist Party of China (CCP) has been a pioneer in the conquest of cyberspace for decades — under the guise of combatting "misinformation" harmful to national security:
Chinese state censorship — along with the other tools of social control it deploys on its own population — is the model that Western governments hope to emulate:
The Chinese government operates what has been called the "Great Firewall" — restricting access to information deemed unacceptable by nameless state censorship agents and sending it down the Memory Hole.
The CCP exercises pernicious, ruthless dominance in its own cyberspace behind the Great Firewall. No bit of subversive minutia is too small to ban; it successfully scrubbed images of Winne the Pooh into oblivion after internet activists likened the character to CCP boss Xi Jinping in 2017.
* * *
We Western heirs to the Renaissance and Enlightenment cannot allow the internet to become the plaything of the state in the mold of the Great Firewall, for information to be censored on a whim and distorted and rebranded.
If a population in a free society grows distrustful of its government, as has occurred in the U.S., the onus should be on the state to rebuild trust — not on the population to be herded into Orwellian goodthink via censorship.
Instead of demonizing a large (and growing) portion of the citizenry that no longer has faith in the government to serve its needs, the entity that needs fixing in this scenario is the government, not the people. Free speech is that corrective mechanism.
* * *
The Jan. 6, 2021 "insurrection" in D.C. — which was largely organized on the web via hard-to-track apps like Telegram — gave further ammunition to the corporate state to justify repression of dissident voices:
