Old-Thinker News | Aug. 28, 2018

By Daniel Taylor

The Global Times, a mouthpiece for the Communist Party of China, defended Facebook’s blocking of Maynmar military leaders on the platform.

While saying that regulation of social media should be up to individual countries, the piece says that “hate speech” has gone unchecked because the west has valued free speech.

The article laments that there are no international standards for social media:

“Unfortunately, though social media are operated in a common virtual space, such standards vary from country to country.

From the Global Times:

“International social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been hailed as platforms of free speech, a concept the West values much. But hate speech, perhaps as old as free speech, also went relatively unchecked on these sites under the guise of free speech.“

The article goes on to say that the west and China have common ground because “they want to maintain social stability and prevent rumors and hatred from spiraling out of control“.

According to the Times, the goal of social media regulation is to “prevent social unrest”.

The article concludes by saying that one country should “not impose its standards on the other”.

This is exactly what has been happening. China has already imposed its internet standards over a large part of the globe. Apple has already followed Chinese directives to remove over 25,000 apps from its platform, while Google is reportedly working on a censored search engine for China.

The article concludes:

“Western countries have their own set of rules to govern the digital sphere. So does China. They may be at odds with the ideas and beliefs that they uphold, but one thing in common is that they want to maintain social stability and prevent rumors and hatred from spiraling out of control. The fundamental goal of social media regulation is to prevent social unrest instead of filtering out all criticism of authorities, although each country has its own approaches. One should not impose its standards on another.“

An open letter was sent to Google today authored by several organizations calling on the tech giant to stop working on its censored search for China under Project Dragonfly. The letter states in part,

“We are calling on Google to publicly commit to protect whistle-blowers in the company and to take immediate steps to address the concerns employees have raised about Project Dragonfly“.