Posted on 11/22/2020 8:57:42 PM PST by John Semmens
The Communist government of Vietnam has threatened to ban Facebook if it doesn't step up its censorship of content critical of the government. At stake is an estimated billion dollars a year in revenue to Facebook.
It's not like Facebook hasn't been assiduously editing out or blocking anti-government statements. "We made an agreement in April," said a Facebook spokesman. "We upheld our end of the agreement, and we expected the government of Vietnam to do the same, but now they want to exert even more control over us. It's like they never heard of freedom of the press."
Minister of Information and Communications Nguyễn Mạnh Hùng insisted that "it is the People's Republic's right to control communications in our country to ensure unity of thought and action. Bourgeois notions of free speech open up society to destructive anti-social misinformation. Facebook has already accepted this premise. We are only asking that they follow through as we require them to."
The Vietnamese government's position received a sympathetic expression of support from Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn) who agreed that "the goal of national unity is of supreme importance in every country. We have been having similar problems with Facebook and Twitter in America. They think their suppression of nonconforming opinions has been sufficient, but it's not. They need to do more. In fact, they need to do whatever the government wants them to do. If our Party can win the two Georgia senate runoff elections in January, Democrats will have control of both houses of congress and, once Biden is inaugurated, the presidency. We will have the power to compel their obedience."
In related news, Biden has named Richard Stengel to take the "team lead" position on the US Agency for Global Media. Last year Stengel wrote a Washington Post op ed in which he warned that "free speech is a threat to social and political harmony" and called for "government to more actively drive out lies" because "the average person isn't capable of judging for himself what is or isn't true. We don't yet have the technology to detect and suppress incorrect thoughts, but until we do we must eradicate incorrect speech."
If you missed any of the other Semi-News/Semi-Satire posts you can find them at...
http://www.gopbriefingroom.com/index.php?topic=420544.0
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