After a bill to potentially ban popular video-sharing platform TikTok passed in the U.S. House by an overwhelming margin, Chinese officials have penned a lengthy article excoriating Washington over its “double standards” on First Amendment rights.
“This report, by presenting numerous facts, aims to expose what ‘free speech’ is according to the United States, what the U.S. actually does, and what its real purpose is,” reads the 3,600-word piece released Thursday by the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
China’s most successful tech export, TikTok boasts nearly 2 billion users worldwide, including some 150 million active users in the U.S.
Critics say the TikTok legislation threatens freedom of expression and the livelihoods of thousands of employees and influencers. Proponents say the bill, which would require Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell its controlling stake in TikTok or see it banned, is necessary for national security given that Chinese companies are bound by law to hand over data to their government upon request.
Anna Barclay/Getty Images
The post cited a 2022 poll by The New York Times and Siena College that found only 34 percent of Americans believed the whole country enjoyed free speech against the backdrop of rising political polarization and cancel culture.
The ministry also pointed to violations of press freedom, such as the many incidents of police attacking and detaining journalists during the George Floyd protests of 2020.
The campaign to divest TikTok “has set a worrying precedent by damaging freedom of more than 150 million TikTok American users on the platform. The U.S. government has turned a deaf ear to these calls,” the ministry said, echoing concerns raised by the American Civil Liberties Union and other rights groups in a recent open letter.
More and more people are seeing how the U.S. government “relies on lies to weave ’the emperor’s new clothes,’ and how it smears others to maintain its hegemony,” the article concluded.
In China, speech is tightly controlled by the government, with strict regulations on media, the internet, and individual expression. Criticism of the Communist Party or discussions that challenge official narratives are heavily censored, and peaceful expressions of dissent can lead to arrest, secret detentions and torture.
In its 2023 “Freedom of the World” report, Washington, D.C.-based non-profit Freedom House gave China a score of -2/40 for political rights and 11/60 for civil liberties. The U.S. received scores of 33/40 for political rights and 50/60 for civil liberties.
While it hasn’t technically been banned in China, TikTok is not accessible without a virtual private network (VPN).
China has also blocked access to YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, and Google services—which U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Burns has called “supremely ironic.”
“We welcome foreign platforms and services of various kinds to the Chinese market on the premise that they observe China’s laws and regulations,” Liu Pengyu spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in the U.S., told Newsweek Thursday. “This is completely different from the U.S. way of handling TikTok, which is clearly a bullying act and robbers’ logic.”
The House passed the TikTok bill by a vote of 352 to 65. If the Senate approves its version, President Joe Biden has said he’d sign the bill into law.
The U.S. federal government and 39 states have already restricted TikTok on government-issued devices to some degree.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.