Reviewer: Keka；Translator: John Cena；Proofreading: Zenobia Q；Editor:BlueSky；Page：Daoiii

[News]

On January 8th, Twitter announced that they will permanently shut down President Donald Trump’s twitter account, which had 88 million followers and was the 6th most followed account on the platform. This move follows the banning of President Trump from Facebook. Twitter also has banned the accounts of many of his strongest supporters, including General Michael Flynn, a former National Security Advisor and attorney Sydney Powell.

After his twitter account was shut down, President Trump tweeted from the @POTUS account to communicate with his supporters. Twitter deleted these messages as well within minutes.

On Sunday, following Apple’s removal of Parler, another social media platform that President Trump used, from its App Store, Amazon shut down Parler’s servers permanently.

https://www.voachinese.com/a/twitter-facebook-instagram-capitol-attack-incite-violence/5731019.html

[Comments]

After President Trump’s twitter account was shut down, mainstream media has accused him of being a dictator. But how can a leader lacking control the media be a dictator? A hallmark of tyrants is the seizing of control of public media. How could one act as a dictator when he has been completely silenced, as twitter and other social media companies have just done to the President, and thereby cut off from communicating with the public at large? The mainstream media’s attacks on the President undermine their own critiques.

On the other hand, how has Twitter treated universally acknowledged dictators and authoritarian regimes? Mahathir Mohamad, the former Malaysian Prime Minister, tweeted that Muslims have the right to “kill millions of French people.” Former President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in an attack on the 8.8 million citizens of Israel, advocated for “wiping them off the face of the earth.” Hua Chunying, a chief diplomat of the Chinese Communist Party, issued the slanderous lie that the U.S Army created the Covid-19 pandemic. The accounts of these advocates of gross falsehood and mass murder remain in good standing on Twitter, making the social media company the handmaiden of dictatorship and genocide. In the case of President Trump, however, Twitter’s actions prove his innocence.

Why would a government seek to ban freedom of speech? George Washington argued that there are three likely motives: either that government is covering up for past crimes, or it is suppressing talk of its current malicious actions, or it has sinister plans which it knows cannot be brought to light.

Today’s suppression of speech was not brought about by an overreaching Executive Branch; it was a collaboration between Congress and the media in an effort to ban a sitting president’s free expression. These colluding forces want to control not only the wealth, communication channels, and popular norms of the country, but now, additionally, they seek to dominate the means by which individual voices are expressed and heard.

There is engraved at the entrance of Dachau, one of the most infamous death camps of the Holocaust, a cautionary quote from exiled poet Heinrich Heine: “when a regime has started burning books, if not stopped, they will burn people next! When a regime has started to silence people, if not stopped, they will murder next!”

The first step the government stolen by Biden, Pelosi, and McConnel have taken to destroy America is the destruction of freedom of speech, in order to prohibit dissident thinking. Next, inevitably, will come confiscation of guns, followed by prohibition of public demonstrations, leading finally to indiscriminate arrest and murder.

A year ago, in the Chinese Twitter community, it was often said that we are all Chan Yin-Lam, a teenager murdered by the Chinese government for protesting in favor of freedom for Hong Kong. Today, it is said that we are all Trump. No American would have believed that within a year, from Chan Yin-Lam in Hong Kong to Trump in Washington, the suffering from across the Pacific Ocean would arrive on their shores, and that the evil claws of the Chinese Communist Party could have reached to the United States of America.

Edited by：【Himalaya London Club UK】