Leftist US professors praise Chinese internet censorship in The Atlantic op ed; "China was largely correct"; US "wrong".

And they aren't alone on the US left in praising the totalitarian Chinese system.

"The intelligentsia’s love affair with the Chinese Communist Party shows no sign of cooling, not even for a viral pandemic enabled by China’s ruling officials.

The Atlantic published an op-ed this weekend arguing that the United States has a lot to learn from China when it comes to regulating online speech. Sadly, it is nothing new for ostensibly free academics – and members of the free press, for that matter – to praise the single-party state where dissent is brutally and violently suppressed.

“Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to Normal,” reads the op-ed's headline. Its subhead adds, “In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong...Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values."


The article continues, noting that the U.S. social media platforms that are aggressively censoring coronavirus-related misinformation are merely catching up to what the Chinese and Russians have been doing for years.

Goldsmith and Woods write:

'What is different about [online] speech regulation related to COVID-19 is the context: The problem is huge and the stakes are very high. But when the crisis is gone, there is no unregulated “normal” to return to. We live – and for several years, we have been living – in a world of serious and growing harms resulting from digital speech. Governments will not stop worrying about these harms. And private platforms will continue to expand their definition of offensive content, and will use algorithms to regulate it ever more closely. The general trend toward more speech control will not abate.

The Atlantic op-ed is not merely a clinical study in how world governments treat free speech rights in times of crises. The article is written from the perspective that China is ahead of the curve and that the U.S., with its outdated First Amendment, must change.

If you can believe it, the authors of the Atlantic piece are not alone in throwing plaudits in China's direction amid the viral pandemic the authoritarian state created. Not even close. Many in the ostensibly free press have also used the viral crises as an opportunity to cheer China's alleged leadership qualities.

“How uncomfortable is it,” MSNBC’s Chuck Todd asked in early March, “that perhaps China’s authoritarian ways did prevent this? Meaning, had China been a free and open society, this might have spread faster?”

Jacobin publisher Bhaskar Sunkara said elsewhere, “This isn’t blanket praise for an authoritarian party-state, but thank God this pandemic started in a country with a strong state that took serious public health measures. Imagine if China was run by the GOP instead of the CCP.”

That is exactly “blanket praise."

The Atlantic op-ed this weekend cheering Chinese authoritarianism is not even a first for the Atlantic.

“China has reacted to the outbreak of coronavirus in Italy by sending aid,” Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum noted on March 12. “The U.S. has reacted by suspending flights. Who is the superpower?”

If all of this sounds familiar, that is because it is. American academics, politicos, and the like have been praising the Chinese Communist Party for years. Recall that the New York Times’s taxi cab correspondent Thomas Friedman wrote in 2009, “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages.”

“That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century,” he added. “It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power.”

And this is to say nothing of the many overeager U.S. reporters and pundits who have more recently parroted outright Chinese propaganda cheering the regime's supposedly competent response to the virus and other agitprop absolving it of culpability.

So, it is not unprecedented for a mainstream publication in the U.S. to publish praise for the Chinese Communist Party. Members of America’s commentariat have been cheering this murderous, authoritarian regime for decades."

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/in-the-atlantic-us-academics-praise-chinese-censorship

Original: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/what-covid-revealed-about-internet/610549/

Reminder of the Chinese communist party's role in creating the global pandemic through incompetence, coverups, and silencing whistle blowers: https://www.businessinsider.com/china-coronavirus-whistleblowers-speak-out-vanish-2020-2