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Close your eyes and imagine a world where any social media post or account could be removed without explanation at the behest of a Trump administration. Thats censorship.

Twitter banning an account? Thats debatable.

When the company confirmed on Jan. 20 that it had locked the account of Chinas embassy in the US due to a tweet defending Beijings policies in Xinjiang, many on Chinas Twitter-like Weibo were quick to mock the US company. What is freedom of speech? It is that the Weibo account of the US embassy in China can still voice its opinions, whereas the account of the Chinese embassy is locked by Twitter, posted one user.

A spokesperson for Chinas foreign ministry echoed that confusion,saying today (link in Chinese) that the embassy was merely trying to explain the truth, and that China was bewildered by Twitters decision.

The now-unavailable tweet cited a report from China Daily, a state-owned English-language newspaper, arguing that government policies in Xinjiang had eradicated extremism and emancipated the minds of Uyghur women, such that they are no longer baby-making machines. Thats contrary to how the US government and other critics understand the situation, which is that as many as 2 million Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities may have been held in internment camps in the far western region, and that Beijing has forced stark reproductive choices on Uyghur women.

A spokesperson from Twitter said the tweet violated a policy which prohibits the dehumanization of a group of people based on their religion, caste, age, disability, serious disease, national origin, race, or ethnicity. Twitter has not confirmed when it banned the account, but it has not issued a tweet since Jan. 9.

Its the second time this month Twitter is defending its decision to silence a high-profile account: On Jan. 8, the company permanently banned the account of now former US president Donald Trump, citing the risk of further incitement of violence following a Trump-encouraged insurrection at the US Capitol. The radical left and their big tech allies cannot marginalize, censor, or silence the American people, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trumps former press secretary, tweeted at the time. This is not China, this is the United States of America, and we are a free country.

Its important to debate how governments should deal with the ever-expanding influence of social platforms, and how those platforms should deal with the ever-expanding need for consistent moderation policies. But its something else entirely for both American and Chinese commentators to compare Twitters moves to censorship, especially given what constitutes censorship in China.

For starters, private US companies like Twitter usually give clear reasons when they suspend accounts or remove certain content, as Twitter did in the Chinese embassy case. For hundreds of millions of Chinese internet users, its common for content to be removed by platforms without explanation, leaving the user to wonder which word or image triggered the censorship. Chinese users even have a catchphrase to describe the sudden removal of their social media accounts: account bombing. Even Hu Xijin, the chief editor of the Chinese state tabloid Global Times, once begged editors (link in Chinese) at Weibo not to delete his followers comments.

Second, US companies generally have the right to decide what content they carry, while all Chinese internet platforms have to follow the orders of the Chinese government, which is primarily concerned with the control of information, rather than misinformation or hate speech. And because Chinese companies are held accountable for even third-party content according to Chinese laws, they spend a great deal of energy censoring political content, while allowing racial slurs to survive. The companies have no power to refuse the authorities request for access to their users information, which has led to the arrests of dissidents. For many Chinese users, it is hard to imagine criticizing or even just joking about their leaders, given that it could result in jail time.

Lastly, being shut out of one platform in the US, or even multiple platforms, doesnt mean a user has nowhere else to voice their opinions. In China, by comparison, its not uncommon for the online presence of a user seen as too politically sensitive by the state to be erased from platforms entirely. Chen Qiushi, a citizen journalist who reported on the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, told Quartz last year that his Chinese social media accounts were deleted after he made a trip to Hong Kong to report on anti-government protests there. Chen has not been seen publicly since February 2020.

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Why Twitter's "censorship" is not the same as China's - Quartz

Jack Greiner Published 9:42 p.m. ET Jan. 19, 2021 | Updated 10:10 a.m. ET Jan. 20, 2021

Matt Schruers, the president of the Computer & Communication Industry Association says Facebook and Twitter are simply "exercising their own speech rights" in banning Trump from their platforms. (Jan. 11) AP Domestic

Two state legislators in Kentucky have recently proposed legislation in response to Twitters decision to ban President Trump from its platform.

Senate Bill 111, entitled the Stop Social Media Censorship Act, co-sponsored by Sens. Robby Mills and Phillip Wheeler, would make a social media platform liable for civil damages if that platform deletes or censors the users religious speech or political speech.

Jack Greiner, attorney for Graydon(Photo: Provided, Provided)

The proposed bill will no doubt appeal to Kentuckians offended by Twitters decision, but it wont sustain an inevitable legal challenge, assuming it is actually enacted.

I try to keep my column to a word limit, so I wont be able to detail every legal defect with this bill.Ill just try to hit the highlights.

Before we even get to the glaring constitutional defects, lets discuss the bills title. Censorship is when the government steps in and prohibits a citizen from uttering an unpopular thought. Its not censorship when a private entity sets rules for engagement and enforces them, even against a sitting President. So, the title itself is a misnomer.

The bill also ignores the concept of preemption.Very simply, under the supremacy clause of the United States Constitution, when a state law conflicts with federal law, the federal law prevails.In this case, Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act provides plainly that:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account ofany action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected;

So the proposed legislation blatantly contradicts federal law. Its preempted and that is not even a close case.

And while the bill ostensibly seeks to advance the First Amendment interests of would-be Twitter users, it actually violates the First Amendment in a fundamental way.

When we think of the First Amendment, we typically focus on how it prevents the government from prohibiting what citizens can say. And it surely does that.

But the other side of the First Amendment coin is that it also prohibits the government from telling us what we are required to say.The Kentucky legislation does exactly that.

It literally tells Twitter that it is required to publish certain speech, and that it will be subject to government sanction if it fails to do so.

That is compelled speech and courts have routinely and correctly struck down statutes that impose such a duty.

The bill also declares Whereas protecting the constitutional rights of the citizens of Kentucky is of utmost importance, an emergency is declared to exist and this Act takes effect upon its passage and approval by the Governor or upon its otherwise becoming a law.

This seems like a bit of an overreach. Were in the middle of responding to a pandemic.That seems like an actual emergency.And one that impacts thousands of Kentuckians. Id be curious if Mills and Wheeler could cite any Kentuckians whove had their accounts deleted by Twitter. And if they can identify any, Id also like to see the circumstances that led to the decision. Maybe theres an emergency in there somewhere, but I have a tough time imagining where it could be. By comparison, the notion that a private entity is kicking a few people off its platform hardly rises to the level of an emergency.

The Stop Social Media Censorship Act is a solution in search of a problem.And the hurt feelings of a former Twitter user in chief is hardly a reason to introduce a law that violates the Constitution.

Jack Greiner is managing partner of Graydon law firm in Cincinnati. He represents Enquirer Media in First Amendment and media issues.

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Strictly Legal: Trump's hurt feelings not a reason to introduce a law that violates the Constitution - The Cincinnati Enquirer

Whether you agree with President Donald Trumps rhetoric or not, the outsize role that Big Tech Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter has played in censoring the sitting president of the United States and erasing Twitters conservative alternative, Parler, should worry you. The actions taken by these media giants last week show exactly why Congress needs to rein in the massive power held by these monopolies thatcan instantly turn off an alternative viewpoint with no opportunity for recourse.

When my family and I legally immigrated to the United States after the 1979 Iranian revolution, we fled a government that controls the media and what its people hear, whilealsocensoring and persecuting its people based on theirreligion, as well opposing ideologyand views. Today, platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter remain banned to people in Iran, mainland China, North Korea and Syria. As weve seen with the removal of Parler from the Amazon cloud, Apple and Google, these tech titans are creating a shockingly parallel line ofbanning speech in the United States, very much like these oppressive nations.

For dictators and thugs,likethe Islamic Republic of Irans supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, or the supreme leader of North Korea Kim Jong Un, who have banned their people from social media, Big Techshould similarly block them from using theiraccounts, especially when they spread lies and propaganda.In 2014,Khamenei sent out a tweet denying that 6 million Jews perished in the Holocaust. Just last week, the Chinese embassy tweeted on Uyghur Muslim women and sterilizing them. Though these accounts were never banned, millions of conservatives accounts were, even if they were nowhere near the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

In what is sure to be a showdownwithBig Tech,expect to seeRepublicansin Congress offer legislation to break the monopolies of Big Tech,as well as repealing their liability protections better known as Section 230. In states, a divesting of state contracts with Big Tech companies, as has been offered by Florida House Republican Rep. Randy Fine, are sure to spring up as well.Wecan also expect toseemoreprivateinternet service providers(ISPs) block their users fromsiteslike Twitter and Facebook, as one provider has already done in Idaho.

But regardless of what happens, banning accounts ofconservative voices on social media platforms, with 330 million actively monthly users on Twitter and 2.7 billion on Facebook alone,demands Congressimmediate action.As Florida Sen. Marco Rubio aptly said,We are now living in a country where four or five companies, unelected, unaccountable, have the monopoly power to decide, were gonna wipe people out, were going to erase them, from any digital platform.

The falloutfrom the horrific acts that took place on Capitol Hill, which resulted in the deaths of five people including a Capitol Police officer, will be etched in our memories forever.Unfortunately,the acts of some unlawful, unpatriotic criminals come at the expense of millions of conservative voicesbeing censored and banned from these platforms and the complete shutdown of the number one downloaded app, Parler.What would be even worse is if we allow these Big Tech giantstocontinue down their path of censorship, without any congressional oversight, which could quickly lead the greatest and oldest democracy on earth to crumble into a country that is no better than intolerant nations like Iran and North Korea.

Amanda Makki was a 2020 Republican candidate in Floridas 13thcongressional district. She is a lawyer who worked in Congress for a decade as a health care policy adviser and at the Pentagon just weeksafter 9/11. She is a native Farsi speaker and lives inSt. Petersburg.

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In censoring conservatives, Big Tech is acting like Iran or North Korea | Column - Tampa Bay Times

In the wake of Trump's permanent ban from Twitter and indefinite ban from Facebook, right-wing public figures cried censorship. Media personalities and politicians alike claimed the situation was Orwellian, akin to the events of "1984"; on right-wing cable news networks, show hosts wryly welcomed their viewers to "Communist China."

Author Becca Lewis. Becca Lewis

As an academic who researches social media platforms and the extremist groups that thrive on them, I agree that the Trump bans raise important questions about the role of Facebook and Twitter in shaping political discourse and information online.

But framing this as an issue of censorship distracts from the real issue.

Donald Trump's voice has not been silenced: Until the inauguration, he still has an entire press corps devoted to covering his positions via his press secretary. Even after he leaves office, he will have access to a thriving right-wing media ecosystem that can amplify his ideas and opinions.

What Facebook and Twitter have done is simply decide that he will not have a direct line through their platform to broadcast his ideas to millions of people at a time.

Read more: Trump wanted to dramatically change the way Big Tech ran their platforms. His attempt to overturn the election may have done just that.

These outlets make choices every day about what to cover, who to interview, who to publish in their op-ed sections, and who to invite as talking heads. They even decide when to air video messages from the president and how to contextualize them.

If this decision-making seems strange to us in the context of social media, it's partly because platforms have spent the last 10-plus years telling us that they aren't media companies that, in fact, they're revolutionizing public discourse, removing media gatekeepers, and democratizing the spread of information.

In 2012, Twitter executive Tony Wang famously called the platform the "free speech wing of the free speech party." Mark Zuckerberg has consistently claimed that Facebook is not an "arbiter of truth." As internet scholar Tarleton Gillespie has pointed out, even using the term "platform" was a strategic decision the word is flexible enough that it evokes both the vaguely progressive ideal of giving everyone a voice while also suggesting it is merely a "neutral" technological architecture.

As internet policy scholars Robyn Caplan and Phil Napoli write, "Being in the business of providing content to audiences, while selling those audiences to advertisers is a defining characteristic of the media sector."

Caplan and Napoli likewise point out that, while these companies claim they are neutral arbiters who make no editorial interventions, the algorithms they build make these interventions all the time. They surface, recommend, and suppress content, and in the process, they shape what information we see and engage with.

As social media companies have gotten more involved as intermediaries in news and political coverage, the difference between how they present themselves and how they actually function has been reaching a breaking point.

This's why, in the past few years, we have begun to see platforms make decisions that implicitly, if not explicitly, acknowledge their roles as media companies.

If they acknowledge it too openly, that would put them at risk of increased regulation and oversight, and it could potentially put them on the hook for more costly and robust moderation decisions. It would also force them to develop a more rigorous and consistent approach to the difficult decisions about which voices deserve to be amplified.

Read more: Author of book on how Trump's Twitter presidency ushered in white rage says social media companies must be held accountable for not taking action sooner

Even Pornhub, the adult entertainment giant built on the premise that anyone can upload amateur videos, officially announced at the end of 2020 that they are now removing all videos not uploaded by official content partners.

None of this is to say that there aren't important consequences around political speech and information, or that the removal of Donal Trump is not something we should take seriously. To the contrary, it shows just what powerful media forces Facebook, Twitter, and others have become in our contemporary political world. Neither am I claiming that these companies are the same kind of media companies as TV news networks or print newspapers.

They come with a host of their own challenges and concerns that don't apply to older forms of media and that have important consequences. And on the flip side, they also lack certain civic ideals that have become entwined with traditional media companies for example, there's no public broadcasting equivalent in the world of social platforms.

But these are precisely the problems we need to work through in the coming years. We now know that a lot of what we were told about platforms early on wasn't ultimately true: They haven't revolutionized speech, spread democracy throughout the world, or given everyone a neutral platform from which to speak.

By making claims of censorship, we partially reinforce the expectation that platforms play these roles that they don't. Instead, we need to acknowledge their role as editorializers so we can hold them accountable for what they actually do.

Becca Lewis is a PhD candidate in communicationat Stanford University and a graduate affiliate at the University of North Carolina Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life. She researches online social movements and their uses of digital media technologies.

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The Trump ban wasn't censorship; it was an editorial decision - Business Insider - Business Insider

After Twitter and Facebook kicked President Trump off their platforms, and his supporters began comparing his social media muzzling to Chinese censorship, the president won support from an unexpected source: China.

Legally hes still the president. This is a coup, said one comment, which included an expletive, that was liked 21,000 times on Weibo, the Chinese social media platform.

A country as big as the United States cant tolerate Trumps mouth, another popular comment said. U.S. democracy has died.

The comments were solicited by Guancha.com, a nationalistic news site, which created the hashtag #BigUSappsunitedtosilenceTrump# on Weibo. They were echoed by Global Times, a tabloid controlled by the Communist Party.

Mr. Trump lost his right as an ordinary American citizen, it wrote in an editorial. This, of course, goes against the freedom of speech the U.S. political elites have been advocating.

Mr. Trumps expulsion from American social media for spurring the violent crowd at the Capitol last week has consumed the Chinese internet, one of the most harshly censored forums on earth. Overwhelmingly, people who face prison for what they write are condemning what they regard as censorship elsewhere.

Much of the condemnation is being driven by Chinas propaganda arms. By highlighting the decisions by Twitter and Facebook, they believe they are reinforcing their message to the Chinese people that nobody in the world truly enjoys freedom of speech. That gives the party greater moral authority to crack down on Chinese speech.

Some people may believe Twitters decision to suspend the account of the U.S. president is a sign of democracy, Hu Xijin, editor of the Global Times, wrote in an opinion piece with the headline Twitters suspension of Trumps account shows freedom of speech has boundaries in every society.

It would be tough for the United States to come back and play the role of the beacon of democracy, Mr. Hu added in a Weibo post.

Many Chinese online users bought the official line. Nearly two-thirds of the roughly 2,700 participants in one Chinese online poll voted that Twitter shouldnt have shut down Mr. Trumps account. The polls sponsor was a newspaper owned by the Xinhua News Agency, the Chinese governments official mouthpiece.

I just learned in the past few days that the U.S. social media platforms frequently delete posts and suspend accounts too, wrote a verified Weibo account called Su Jiande. I lost the last hint of respect for the country.

The user thanked Weibo for allowing users to say whatever they want in pursuit of truth. (I read through the users Weibo timeline and found no hint of sarcasm.) Many Weibo users urged Mr. Trump to open a Weibo account.

This is not the U.S. as we know it, commented a Weibo user named Xiangbanzhang. This is Saddams Iraq and Gaddafis Libya.

Trump defenders compare the presidents ouster from social media to China-style censorship. This is not China, this is United States of America, and we are a free country, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Mr. Trumps former press secretary, wrote on Twitter.

Chinese censorship doesnt work that way. In China, speech about top leaders is closely monitored and harshly censored. The people who run Facebook and Twitter have the First Amendment right to choose what can and cant go on their platforms.

The Chinese government requires news websites to dedicate their top two daily items to Xi Jinping, Chinas paramount leader. On Tuesday, for example, online outlets extolled a speech Mr. Xi gave at a party seminar, while another piece explained the classical literary allusions used in an article under his byline in a Communist Party magazine.

The government has strict rules regarding which social media accounts and websites can post articles and photos of leaders like Mr. Xi. Young censors spend much of their workdays blocking and deleting links that contain photos of the leaders, even if the content supports the government. In other words, ordinary Chinese dont even have the right to post photos of Mr. Xi, much less criticize him.

Those who dare to criticize him face severe punishment. Ren Zhiqiang, a retired businessman and an influential social media personality, was silenced on Chinese online platforms in early 2016 after he criticized Mr. Xis directives that the Chinese news media should serve the party. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison last year after writing an essay that was critical of Mr. Xis response to the coronavirus outbreak.

Chinese internet companies conduct their own censorship, but they do so out of fear of what Beijing officials might do to them. Last February, ifeng.com, a news portal, was punished for running original content about the coronavirus outbreak. Under the Chinese regulations, these websites cant produce original news content.

According to the national internet regulator, websites and regulators in December processed more than 13 million items deemed to be illegal and unhealthy, an 8 percent increase from a year earlier. Among them, six million were processed by Weibo.

For those reasons, many Chinese are dumbfounded by the idea that private companies such as Twitter and Facebook have the power to reject a sitting American president.

When Twitter banned Trump, it was a private platform refusing to serve the president, a Weibo user called Xichuangsuiji wrote in trying to explain the distinction. When Weibo bans you, its simply executing government guidelines to censor an individuals speech.

Some Chinese dissidents and liberal intellectuals oppose the bans because they suffered harsh censorship in China or because they support Mr. Trump, whom they see as tough on the Communist Party.

Twitter and Facebook permit propaganda from the Global Times and the Peoples Daily, and yet today, they went to war with their own president by censoring his expression, Ai Weiwei, a dissident artist, posted on Twitter in Chinese. He was famously censored online in China, harassed by the police and confined to his home by the authorities before he was allowed to flee.

Freedom of speech, Mr. Ai added, is a pretense and nothing more.

Kuang Biao, a political cartoonist in the southern city of Guangzhou, has had multiple Weibo accounts shut down and has created many cartoons that were censored, including one last year about Li Wenliang, the Wuhan doctor who was silenced by the police for sharing information about the coronavirus. In the cartoon, Dr. Li was wearing a mask of barbed wires.

But when Mr. Kuang created two cartoons to express his displeasure at Mr. Trumps bans, Chinas censors did nothing. In one of them, President Trumps mouth was brutally sewn up. In another, the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is portrayed as Qin Shi Huang, Chinas first emperor, a brutal tyrant who burned books and executed scholars more than 2,000 years ago.

By Tuesday evening, the first had garnered more than 170,000 views on the short video site Douyin, a sister site of TikTok.

Everyone is entitled to freedom of speech, Mr. Kuang said. Its a sacred human right. He said hes a strong supporter of President Trump, who, he believes, is a man who serves the people wholeheartedly.

Some people in China have noted the disconnect, saying people who are defending Mr. Trumps freedom of speech are the victims of a far worse type of censorship.

Sheep that can be eaten up by the tiger at any time are angry that the tiger has been put in a cage, wrote Chen Min, a former journalist who usually goes by the pen name Xiao Shu.

On his account on WeChat, the popular Chinese social media platform, Mr. Chen wrote that a powerful leader like President Trump has a lot of responsibilities, including the consequences of his speech. Mr. Chen is frequently censored and harassed by the state security officers for what he writes online.

The journalist Zhao Jing, who goes by the name Michael Anti, is puzzled why Chinese Trump supporters so zealously defend his freedom of speech. Mr. Trump has the White House, executive orders and Fox News, he wrote: What else do you want for him to have freedom of speech?

Chinas censors dont seem to agree. He Weifang, a renowned law professor at Peking University, wrote a long post on WeChat supporting the restrictions on Mr. Trump. The article has since disappeared.

This content has violated rules, said a message with a red exclamation mark where the article was once posted, so cant be viewed.

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Twitter and Facebook Barred Trump. China Is on His Side. - The New York Times