Connecticut doesn’t need lessons in child-rearing
“China,” U.S. Sen. Chris
Murphy told a forum Wednesday, “is much more thoughtful and protective of its young people” in their access to and use of social media, the news platform Semafor reported.
Murphy, a Democrat, was unleashing more pernicious nonsense at an event sponsored by Semafor and Gallup, the polling company.
Murphy’s appetite for bilge and codswallop remains insatiable. He’s called America’s role in the liberation of Europe from the Nazis the export of violence — by us. Last month he trumpeted on
CNN, “Everyone in this country is feeling alone.” Now, according to Connecticut’s junior senator, we should take lessons in free speech and childrearing from the authoritarian Chinese government.
The Uighurs would like to dissent, but they cannot. Those “thoughtful and protective” Chinese communist authorities have interned an estimated 1 million Muslim Uighurs. They have destroyed many mosques. Tens of thousands of Uighur men and women have been sterilized by the government. In, 2019, Fast Company magazine reported, “hundreds of thousands of children have been separated from one or more of their parents. Many children throughout the [Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region] region are now held in boarding schools or orphanages which are run by non-Muslim state workers.” State workers who are part of the “thoughtful and protective” government.
Uighurs are allowed smartphones. The Chinese government uses them for intense surveillance of Uighurs and others. China is the world’s most advanced surveillance state. Clicking in error on a link to a website the government views as suspicious can land an internet user in jail.
There are no civil liberties in China. Freedom House concluded in its 2023 report on China that it “is home to one of the world’s most restrictive medial environments and its more sophisticated system of censorship, particularly online.” China, Freedom House found, bans mobile apps using and teaching foreign languages, and containing Bible content. It also discovered the government “removed large numbers of social media groups, accounts, or posts that dealt with LGBT(Q)+ issues, financial advice, critical views of [Chinese Communist Party] history, and celebrities.”
The government employs 2 million censors “to aggressively monitor and censor online communications,” according to Freedom House. All done in a “thoughtful and protective” way, no doubt.
If anyone in China disagrees with the government’s policies of restricting and censoring internet use, there is no safe way to express that dissent. The Chinese Communist dictatorship’s policies include laws prohibiting children under the age of 18 “from attending church or engaging in religious activities,” Freedom House reports. How “thoughtful and protective” of them.
The Senate is suddenly engaged in a debate over whether to require the popular social media platform TikTok to divest itself from its Chinese government ownership. The Senate is considering a bill passed last week by the House by a rare bipartisan coalition.
The intelligence report that some senators point to as a reason to pass the TikTok bill remains secret. U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D.Conn., said on Wednesday, “TikTok is a gun aimed at Americans’ heads. The Chinese Communists are weaponizing information that they are constantly, surreptitiously collecting from 170 million Americans and potentially aiming that information, using it through algorithms at the core of American democracy,” National Public Radio reported.
Blumenthal does not want the public to have to rely on his and his colleagues’ interpretation of
an intelligence service briefing on TikTok’s use against Americans by its Chinese Communist Party overlords. The Connecticut Democrat thinks intelligence should be declassified and made available to all of us.
Murphy is uncommitted on the TikTok bill. He said Wednesday at the Semafor forum that “unregulated and unchecked [social media] can drive Americans mad.” It certainly seems to have had that effect on some. For him, the TikTok bill is not enough. Murphy prefers a legislation that “broadly regulates social media and have that apply to everything from TikTok to Instagram to Facebook.”
There it is. Murphy wants the government to regulate it all. No doubt in a “thoughtful and protective” way for Murphy’s nation of lonely wretches being driven out of their minds by social media.
The Chinese Communist Party becomes sniffy about social media platforms collecting data on users in China. So it has banned Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, X and WhatsApp .
If the Chinese government has used TikTok to collect data and create algorithms that undermine our liberal values, we should act to protect ourselves from its designs on damaging our democracy.
“The boisterous sea of liberty indeed is never without a wave,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to General Lafayette long after the Revolutionary War. True in 1796, true today. The way forward, and it probably involves more assertive parents, will be found through serious and open debate. It is not possible that the solution will come from a senator, Murphy, who in 2022 asked the Biden administration not to re-designate the Houthi movement in Yemen as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (slogan: God is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam) and is proudly deluded by characterizing brutal oppression for “thoughtful and protective” policies.