Twitter’s Censorship Resembles Communist China’s

Illustration picture of Twitter. Kacper Pempel/Illustration/Reuters

Commentary

On March 21, 2006, someone decided to send something called a tweet. A rather banal message, it included the following five words: “just setting up my twttr.” The person responsible for the tweet was Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter.

In the almost 16 years since the Tweet was sent, the microblogging site has gone from a once hospitable place—where people were free to share ideas—to a rather inhospitable one.

In November, Dorsey handed in his resignation letter, and for good reason. Twitter has become a censorship machine—a place where dissenting views and heterodox opinions are shot down. In many ways, Twitter’s censorship now resembles communist China’s.

As someone who lived in China up until very recently, I have firsthand experience of censorship. Now, before I am accused of being hyperbolic, let me state the following: what I am discussing here is an approach toward censorship, and the ways in which those who stray from the prescribed narrative find themselves punished—swiftly and severely.

On Twitter, it’s not uncommon for people to have their account temporarily suspended. Similarly, in China, it’s not uncommon for people to be “temporarily suspended.” In October 2020, shortly after criticizing members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the billionaire Jack Ma mysteriously disappeared. Three months later, the co-founder and former executive chairman of Alibaba Group reappeared. His “account” was reactivated. The CCP allowed Ma to reenter society.

However, in China, plenty of people aren’t as lucky as Ma. They disappear from sight—never to be seen again. In Twitter-speak, as crude as it might sound, their accounts are “permanently suspended.”

Which brings us to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. To some, the Republican is a hero, a brave individual who believes in defending the First Amendment (and the second). To others, however, she’s a hazard to society and someone who’s responsible for spreading dangerous “misinformation”—a word that has become a weapon used by those in power.

On Jan. 2, Twitter chose to permanently suspend the U.S. Congresswoman’s account for spreading COVID-19 misinformation. Greene responded by calling Twitter “an enemy to America,” a company that simply “can’t handle the truth. “That’s fine,” she warned, “I’ll show America we don’t need them and it’s time to defeat our enemies.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) speaks during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Feb. 5, 2021. AP Photo/Susan Walsh

Is Greene right? Is Twitter “an enemy” of the people? Well, not all of the people.

In August of last year, in an effort to thwart “misinformation” campaigns, Twitter partnered with Reuters and the Associated Press, two outlets that have a shady history of working closely with governments around the world, according to credible reports.

Both Twitter and Reuters, as I’ve discussed previously, are part of the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), a program that was established back in 2019 to ostensibly stop “fake news.” Other members of the TNI include Facebook, a known conduit for misinformation, and The Washington Post, an outlet that has published a number of rather unconvincing articles in recent times.

Members of the TNI, Twitter included, have worked tirelessly to shut down vaccine “misinformation.” The term “misinformation” is an interesting one, because it appears to be used by those in power to refer to anything that they deem dangerous—even if the “misinformation” is, in fact, accurate information. Today, the term is often used to discredit those who question the efficacy of lockdowns, masks, vaccines, etc. The term “misinformation” is thrown about with reckless abandon.

Although I am not qualified to speak on the actual efficacy of the various vaccines, one needn’t possess more than a few functioning neurons to see that the people and companies responsible for tackling “misinformation” are highly compromised.

This, perhaps, explains why Dr. Robert Malone recently had his Twitter account suspended. His sin? Criticizing the Pfizer vaccine. For the uninitiated, Malone is a virologist and immunologist. He’s uniquely qualified to comment on the efficacy of vaccines—unlike Bill Gates, a man who is forever discussing the need to get people vaccinated, although he possesses no qualifications of merit whatsoever (unless having a sizeable bank account is considered a qualification).

Malone has dedicated his entire professional existence to the development of vaccine technology. But once he had the audacity to criticize Pfizer—a company with a history of manipulating data in scientific studies—he found himself banished from Twitter, a ridiculously popular platform with more than 37 million users in the United States alone.

To Conclude

Did Marjorie Taylor Greene deserve to have her account deactivated? I’ll let you decide. How about Dr. Robert Malone? Again, you are free to come to your own conclusions.

Before going, let me finish by asking one more question: are the people calling the shots at Twitter to be trusted? Remember that the platform is part of the highly compromised TNI. The crackdown on very specific people with very specific concerns deserves to be examined in greater detail. Malone’s blocking may very well prove to be a tipping point of sorts—with millions of people around the world waking up to the reality now facing us.

Big Tech and Big Government are not friends of everyday people. They are friends of those in power—people with specific agendas and specific ideologies. They have become tools for preserving the status quo—not bettering humanity.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.