Why on Earth should Americans care that the Chinese government is jailing its citizens for tweets of which it doesn’t approve?
China’s Communist Party has sentenced more than 50 people to prison in the past three years for using Twitter and other platforms banned in China to criticize Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his government. The Wall Street Journal reports the growing use of prison sentences marks an escalation of China’s efforts to “control narratives and strangle criticism outside China’s cloistered internet.”
The majority of users that China has imprisoned have little influence and reach. Among the detained citizens, their online followings range from the hundreds to the low thousands, with one having fewer than 30 followers…. This entire story is sickening and is in dire need of help. And it will take more than Big Tech platforms to make a change. All companies in the US that are profiting largely from China must stand up, this includes the NBA which has refused to condemn slave labor, and Apple and Nike, two companies that actually lobbied against cracking down on forced labor in China. Until the NBA, Nike, Apple, and Pepsi make strong stances against China’s behavior toward its citizens and its handling of social media use, all their social justice campaigns should be viewed as what they are: opportunistic and phony.
Is Clay Travis really unaware that Douglass Mackey was recently arrested for tweets he posted four years ago? He wasn’t arrested in Shanghai or Beijing, he was arrested in West Palm Beach. By the FBI, who is also looking to arrest four more people on similar charges.
Americans desperately need to stop fretting about what is happening on the other side of the world and start paying a lot more attention to what is happening to them in their own backyard.