China (Yes, China) Complains About Attack On Its 'Free Speech Rights' After Twitter/Facebook Boot Propaganda Accounts

from the nice-try-guys dept

Oh come on. Earlier this week we wrote about both Twitter and Facebook shutting down a bunch of Chinese accounts that both companies claimed were state-backed accounts pushing propaganda/misinformation/attacks against Hong Kong protesters. Separately, Twitter also changed its policies to no longer accept advertising from state-backed media operations. The Chinese government -- the very same government famous for aggressively censoring the entire internet -- apparently is not happy about it, arguing that it's a violation of free speech rights. Really.

A Foreign Ministry spokesman dismissed the allegations, made by the companies a day earlier, that the government had done something wrong in using online resources to portray the protests roiling Hong Kong as the work of “cockroaches” spurred to action by shadowy Western forces. Rather, ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said, the accounts were not the work of alleged government disinformation teams but Chinese students and others living overseas who “of course have the right to express their point of view.”

First of all, even assuming that they are Chinese students living abroad (already a dubious claim), they may have a right to express their point of view, but they don't have a right to force Twitter and Facebook to host it. And, China knows this, considering that it currently bans both Twitter and Facebook in their country. So if it really believes that Chinese citizens deserve a right to express themselves on that platform, it might want to fix something back home first.

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Filed Under: china, free speech, hong kong, protests, social media, trolls

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