BEIJING: The United States has long claimed freedom of speech and promoted a double standard, cloaking domestic political manipulation and social injustice with empty political slogans and the hypocritical moral mask of so-called “freedom of expression”, according to a report released by the ministry. of Chinese Foreign Affairs.
According to the report, the United States on the international stage dreams of continuing to speak for everyone, hinders the democratization of international relations with hegemonic practices, destroys the environment of international public opinion with smear campaigns, and deceives the international community with self-glorifying images and high-sounding rhetoric.
By presenting numerous facts, the report seeks to reveal what the United States thinks “freedom of speech” is, what the US actually does, and what its real purpose is.
The report says the United States considers freedom of speech a cornerstone of the country, but tramples it under the feet of political realities. Although the First Amendment of the US Constitution expressly provides for “freedom of speech,” political controversies and vested interests constantly use the form of “freedom of speech” to undermine its substance. The public does not feel free to speak the truth and will gradually see through and tire of the hypocritical slogans and promises of politicians.
The Knight Foundation of the United States released the Free Speech in America After 2020 survey report in 2022, which the US Center for Free Speech rated as “the most comprehensive study of public opinion on free speech to date”. The report states that political polarization and partisan strife have severely eroded free speech in the United States, especially on political issues.
Freedom of speech in the United States has been declining in recent years. In a 2022 national poll conducted by The New York Times and Siena College, 66% of participants said they do not believe Americans have free speech. 8% also say Americans do not have free speech. Political polarization and political violence in recent years have made people more cautious or even reticent to talk about political topics for fear of attacks and reprisals. 46% said American society has much less freedom to talk about politics than it did a decade ago. Many people talk as little as possible or even avoid political topics. Women are more cautious than men, and younger people are more cautious than older people. Some young people were harshly criticized and even retaliated against for certain political remarks.
Restrictions on free speech are quite common in the United States. According to the Free Speech Institute’s 2022 US State Free Speech Index, most states have a poor record of respecting free speech and the right to assemble. Only three states—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Iowa—scored above 70%, and 35 states scored below 50%.
The United States is inundated with false information that further erodes its credibility in terms of free speech. During the 2016 presidential election, political groups used the media to spread disinformation to interfere with the election, with fake news sites receiving as many as 159 million visits, or 0.64 visits per American adult, according to a research study conducted by Stanford University. A Brookings Institution report, Disinformation Erodes Public Trust in the Democratic Party, published in 2022, found that minorities are more susceptible to misinformation, with 51.5 percent of respondents believing that America’s black community is being targeted. In recent years, discussions of voter fraud and the spread of misinformation have further eroded Americans’ trust in free speech.
It’s no secret that the US government monitors domestic public opinion. Carl Bernstein, the famous journalist who exposed the Watergate scandal of 1972, revealed in detail the collusion between the CIA and the press. The New York Times, Time Weekly, CBS and other media outlets have close ties and work with the CIA to monitor public opinion.9156
False information is used to manipulate public opinion and interfere with speech. A Cato Institute report noted that “if the American people expect the media to provide accurate and neutral information about government policy, it will be a big mistake.” The US government colludes with the media and often spreads various information under the auspices of the media to achieve political goals. In March 2022, The New York Times published an editorial entitled There’s a free speech problem in America, which points out that American society is caught in a cycle of left-right attacking each other and that free speech in the US is commonplace. past. In April 2022, the Biden administration announced the creation of a committee – aimed at combating disinformation about population and infrastructure – in the US, which was met with fierce opposition from Republican members of the US Congress and right-wing media. Republican lawmakers have argued that the administration is using taxpayer money to suppress free speech in the conservative news media under the guise of cracking down on disinformation. The committee was shut down after only three weeks of existence over the objections of the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Freedom of speech in the United States today is more like a ball to be kicked by the parties than a right in the hands of the people.
The US government is manipulating information about the epidemic and suppressing voices that tell the truth. Helen Zhu, the Chinese-born doctor who warned about the epidemic in the United States and reported the test results, received a gag order from the administration. Captain Crozier, who told the truth about the epidemic on the aircraft carrier USS Roosevelt, was fired. Some officials from the State Department and the Department of Defense who dared to speak the truth were all fired. Fauci, an infectious disease expert known as America’s “epidemic captain,” has “disappeared” many times.
Freedom of speech in the United States has a problem with racial discrimination. Perceptions of free speech among white groups are significantly stronger than among black groups, where free speech is more restricted. As we trace US history, freedom of speech has never been fully and evenly applied to the black community, and state governments have long used their discretion to suppress the rights of the black community. The black community is often treated differently when it comes to free speech. In June 2023, Justice Earls—the only African-American justice on the North Carolina Supreme Court—was investigated by the North Carolina Commission on Judicial Standards after she revealed in an interview that there was a lack of racial and gender diversity in the local court. System. Her colleagues treated her differently because of her race and gender. In February 2024, Margaret Satterthwaite, the UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, noted that the commission’s disciplinary investigation into the state’s only African-American female judge raised suspicions of racial and gender discrimination.
The US government has cracked down on TikTok. Before the House Energy and Commerce Committee held a TikTok hearing in March 2023, several American free speech organizations, including the Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and the Coalition Against Censorship, jointly signed an open letter. He pointed out that banning TikTok would have a serious impact on free speech in the digital domain, which violated the First Amendment rights of the American people. The crackdown set a disturbing precedent by damaging the freedom of more than 150 million American TikTok users on the platform. The US government has not responded to these calls and is determined to take action against TikTok.
Press interference threatens freedom of speech. In recent years, press freedom in the United States has been significantly affected and the working environment for journalists has deteriorated. CNN correspondent Jim Acosta has been stripped of his White House press credentials for asking about “migrant caravans” and “access to Russia” during a White House press conference. Some senior government officials have also threatened and assaulted members of the news media. The Washington Post, New York Times and other media outlets have pointed out that these words and actions increase the security risks of journalists and seriously affect the freedom of the press. The United States government also restricts media coverage of the events. In 2021, a number of journalists were harassed or harmed by police while reporting on popular protests against the police killings of George Floyd and Dawn Wright. According to the US Freedom of the Press Tracker, there were 128 violations of press freedom in the US in 2022, including 40 attacks on journalists and 15 arrests or prosecutions. In 2023, at least 12 journalists were arrested or charged in the United States, and several were criminally convicted for normal reporting. Campus Control suppresses free speech. In recent years, various bans on words and books in the United States have severely affected free speech on campus. Censorship of banned books in public schools has expanded rapidly since 2021, with lawmakers in some states enacting “educational gags.” Between January 2021 and February 2022, Republican lawmakers introduced more than 150 bills at the state level that restrict teachers from discussing issues such as race and social justice in the classroom, as well as censor and monitor teacher speech. In 2022, the Individual Rights and Expression Foundation surveyed nearly 45,000 undergraduates from 208 universities and found that 22% of students felt they were often unable to express themselves on certain issues. Race, gun control, the coronavirus pandemic, anti-discrimination and abortion have become minefields for discussion and expression. Alliance Defending Freedom claims that public schools in the United States currently suppress free speech by creating “free speech zones,” using vague and misleading policies, forcing teachers and students to express certain information, and punishing those who fail to “faculty members” . behave well’ in terms of freedom of expression.
Social media violates freedom of speech. Interest groups have lobbied governments and media companies to regulate social media and suppress objectionable expression. Internal documents released by Twitter show that the US Biotech Innovation Group sent letters to the US government and Twitter on behalf of pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, Modena, AstraZeneca and others, demanding a review of users who called on Twitter to offer cheap vaccines and share intellectual property and patents . to maintain a monopoly on COVID-19 vaccines. American media reported that between 2016 and 2020, financial tycoon George Soros used hundreds of millions of dollars to bribe hundreds of networks related to American media to build his own media network and achieve manipulation of public opinion.
Social media and the interest groups they represented block free speech. The New York Post reported on March 30, 2023 that Twitter had removed nearly 5,000 tweets about “transgender protests” before the US Supreme Court, citing “incitement to violence”. As more users expressed doubts about the deletion of the tweets, Twitter changed its excuse, saying that the deletion was due to the system’s automated identification and deletion process, regardless of the specific content of the tweet. More shockingly, Twitter instead suspended The Washington Post’s Twitter account after it announced a massive deletion of tweets on its Twitter feed. The New York Post noted that Twitter’s move to ban The Washington Post was “severely inconsistent with the declared freedom of expression.”
To maintain its hegemony, the United States often manipulates international public opinion and injects “rationality” and “moral sense” into its foreign policy. The United States also uses social media to launch psychological warfare along with military operations in other countries and suppresses all kinds of anti-war rhetoric. He uses freedom of speech to practice double standards, creating a smoke screen and claiming that other countries are spreading “false information”, publishing various distorted and discrediting reports based on false information to divert the attention of the international community from the wrongdoing of the United States. of states. On May 4, 2022, U.S. Senator Rand Paul spoke openly at a Senate hearing: “Do you know who is the greatest spreader of disinformation in the history of the world? American government.”
During the Cold War, the United States government established three media organizations, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty, to wage a war of public opinion and establish peaceful development. Since the 1980s, with the rapid development of the Internet, the United States has taken advantage of its technological advantages and focused mainly on young people to spread American ideology, values, and cultural products through the Internet. The US manipulated international public opinion, influencing or even directly inciting the people of the respective countries to oppose the government. On February 25, 2022, former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in an interview incited US hackers to launch cyber attacks against Russia. She said: “We could also attack many government institutions and oligarchs and their way of life through cyber attacks. We did some of this during the Arab Spring when I was Foreign Secretary.
The US government uses social media to invent war lies to justify foreign interference. In 2019, the Washington Post released a federal government document that included interviews with more than 400 key figures involved in the war in Afghanistan, including US military sources, diplomats, military contractors, Afghan officials and others. The documents show that the US government tried to cover up respondents’ comments and hide evidence that the war was unwinnable and that senior officials never told the public the truth during the 18-year war in Afghanistan, making things difficult for people. get true information. A 2008 document released by the National Security Archive revealed that the Bush administration bolstered allegations against Iraq by pressuring the intelligence community and selectively releasing evidence favorable to the government’s position to legitimize the war. The document also mentions several instances of such “politicization of news”. For example, insiders say that if CIA employees provided information other than what the Bush administration wanted, his career would be in jeopardy. The facts after the Iraq War indicate that Iraq was not found to possess weapons of mass destruction or to be linked to Al Qaeda. Suspicion and criticism of the government’s manipulation of public opinion and deception of the people has become widespread in the United States.
The US military uses social media to manipulate issues and false propaganda to influence the perception of other countries. US Central Command has signed a deal to develop software with a California software company to manipulate social media through fake online personas and influence people in Middle Eastern countries. In 2022, Twitter released internal documents to the website “The Intercept”, revealing the US military’s use of social media to conduct disinformation campaigns justifying its indiscriminate killing of citizens of other countries. The Department of Defense created a “white list” that would require Twitter to prioritize services for agencies on the list. Central Command official Nathaniel Kahle asked Twitter in July 2017 to prioritize six US government accounts in Arabic that promoted “the precision of US drone strikes in Yemen killing terrorists, not civilians”.
The United States prides itself on “freedom of speech” while applying a double standard to other countries. In August 2022, the Stanford Internet Observatory released a study titled – Unheard Voices: Evaluating Five Years of Pro-Western Covert Influence Operations. It revealed a network of interconnected accounts on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram that use fraud to promote pro-Western rhetoric in regions such as the Middle East and Central Asia, praise the US government and attack and denigrate countries such as China. , Russia and Iran. Some accounts also use artificial intelligence technology to create fake personal profiles and spread misinformation. The United States also uses various means to “silence” foreign media. Russian mainstream media such as RT TV and Sputnik News Agency have been banned in the United States and Europe. Russian official accounts were restricted by platforms such as Twitter, Russian channels and mobile apps were removed from the Apple and Google App Stores. Content related to Russia is subject to extreme censorship.
Under the guise of “freedom of speech”, the United States maliciously attacks and smears China. Some American politicians not only arbitrarily made up false statements such as promoting the “Chinese virus” and “Wuhan virus” and other false statements, but also attacked media reports that objectively reflected China’s fight against the pandemic. According to US media reports, the White House published an article on its official website criticizing the media for taking US taxpayers’ money to “promote China”. NBC and CNN were also accused by the White House of being “puppets of China” and “public enemies” for confirming China’s anti-epidemic activities in their reports.
The US media has a one-sided interpretation of news events and malicious coverage of China-related news. The American media interpreted the withdrawal of American universities from the World University and Professional Rankings as a righteous act against the tyranny of American higher education, but interpreted the withdrawal of some Chinese universities from the world rankings as China’s “closed door policy” in science. Some American politicians and the media have condemned the siege of the Capitol by the American people over the presidential election as a riot. However, the street violence in Hong Kong, China was hailed as a “quest for democracy and freedom” and a “beautiful sight”.
The US enforces a double standard on internet free speech, stigmatizing China as a “digital authoritarian” and calling India the “digital shutdown capital”. At the same time, it supported the creation of the “Internet Future Alliance”, which it claimed would build an “open, free, global, interoperable, reliable and secure future”, excluding China, Russia and other countries. By doing this, the US is trying to create a closed and exclusive small circle and create a digital divide and a confrontation of blocks in the area of the Internet.
The United States uses “freedom of speech and press” to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries and subvert their regimes. In 1970, under the guise of “freedom of the press,” the CIA launched a massive smear campaign against Allende’s government in Chile, seeking out newspapers and magazines outside of Chile to publish articles attacking and defaming Allende. It also encouraged the opposition to seize media platforms, instigate anti-government actions, and work with political forces such as the Chilean military and the Organization of American States and other Latin American countries to eventually overthrow Allende’s government.
The US is fueling color revolutions with “freedom of speech”. It took advantage of the instability of some newly independent countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union, supported and used the media to defend Western democracy, to produce and disseminate negative news about local governments and leaders, and to help the opposition promote political rhetoric. For example, the establishment of “democracy information centers” in Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan has been publicly announced to help develop local “independent media” and influence and support the “democratization process” in these countries. During parliamentary elections in Kyrgyzstan, the US-backed Aztec radio station trumpeted opposition and pro-Western views to shape public opinion for regime change.
