My job as a reporter in China included trying to ask questions in government press conferences where the authorities constantly sold lies and half truths. If someone had told me that two decades later, White House press meetings would also be like this, I would have accused them of selling dystopian science fiction. But here we are. My PTSD report in China is sometimes triggered if I watch those briefings on TV.
President Donald Trump has pulled a page out of the CCP playbook, even when he moves to punish China for “swindling the United States”. On Friday, it announced that it will remove Hong Kong’s special trade status in response to Beijing’s crackdown on civil liberties there. Yet even when he takes this position, his own efforts to break the law, demonize the press, lie to the American public, and stay in office by suppressing the vote, threaten to make the United States more like China.
The United States is, for now, if we can keep it, a democratic and open society in which people can hold their government accountable, even imperfectly. Whether Americans can avoid a descent into authoritarianism depends on the survival of a robust and independent civic space for activism and public discourse. Such spaces can only survive and prosper if they are protected by the rule of law. Instead, our civic space is under attack by the President and his allies in Congress. Authoritarian leaders like China’s Xi Jinping bend the law to fulfill its purposes and strengthen its power. Trump is trying to do the same.
China has one of the world’s strongest liability regimes for Internet companies: Social media platforms face severe legal penalties if the content displayed on their platforms threatens the Communist Party version of reality. Last week, my feelings of déjà vu grew even stronger when Trump issued an executive order targeting social media companies after Twitter was attached. fact check warnings to two of his tweets in which he stated that the use of mail ballots would inevitably lead to electoral fraud. Under the pretext of defending freedom of expression, his threatens the executive order to revoke the immunity of social media platforms from legal liability under current US law. USA to set and enforce rules for user content and determine how it is displayed, including adding fixes to user posts.
Trump and his supporters Style “Alice in Wonderland”, they claim that they are the ones who defend freedom of expression against alleged corporate censorship. But it effectively seeks to impose legal and regulatory sanctions on any social media platform that dares to challenge or contradict its statements, including disinformation about the voting process. As states shift to widespread use of absentee ballots in an effort to protect voters from Covid-19 hiring, experts have warned that misinformation about the voting process could suppress voter turnout and weaken legitimacy of the result The President is not only the source of such disinformation. He is trying to make it more difficult for social media platforms to warn the public, in the same way that they have steps taken warn people about falsehoods related to Covid-19.
Legal Experts Both left and right do not believe that Trump’s order is upheld in court. But it has already dealt a blow against the electoral processes and institutions of our nation. He has granted political permission to attack social media companies if they enforce their rules against misinformation known to cause harm, whether it’s a medical problem disinformation on Covid-19 or disinformation about the voting process, which is an attack on the right of the American people to responsible self-government.
In 2018, after the Chinese Communist Party effectively anointed President Xi for life, Trump was registered as telling supporters: “I think it’s great. Maybe we have to try it one day.”
Americans, and citizens everywhere, have the right to receive and share correct information on how to vote and other facts related to the voting process. Otherwise, the elections are not fair or free. We must not allow the nation’s dominant political party to use a distorted argument about freedom of expression to twist the law to the point that the President’s word cannot be questioned. Unless we really want to give the president a chance for life, just like his counterpart in Beijing.
