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.<\/p>\n
\u201cLegally he\u2019s still the president. This is a coup,\u201d said one comment, which included an expletive, that was liked 21,000 times on Weibo, the Chinese social media platform.<\/p>\n
\u201cA country as big as the United States can\u2019t tolerate Trump\u2019s mouth,\u201d another popular comment said. \u201cU.S. democracy has died.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Mr. Trump \u201clost his right as an ordinary American citizen,\u201d it wrote in an editorial. \u201cThis, of course, goes against the freedom of speech the U.S. political elites have been advocating.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Trump\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Much of the condemnation is being driven by China\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome people may believe Twitter\u2019s decision to suspend the account of the U.S. president is a sign of democracy,\u201d Hu Xijin, editor of the Global Times, wrote in an opinion piece with the headline \u201cTwitter\u2019s suspension of Trump\u2019s account shows freedom of speech has boundaries in every society.\u201d<\/p>\n
It would be tough for the United States to come back and play the role of \u201cthe beacon of democracy,\u201d Mr. Hu added in a Weibo post.<\/p>\n
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 shouldn\u2019t have shut down Mr. Trump\u2019s account. The poll\u2019s sponsor was a newspaper owned by the Xinhua News Agency, the Chinese government\u2019s official mouthpiece.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just learned in the past few days that the U.S. social media platforms frequently delete posts and suspend accounts too,\u201d wrote a verified Weibo account called \u201cSu Jiande.\u201d \u201cI lost the last hint of respect for the country.\u201d<\/p>\n
The user thanked Weibo for allowing users to say whatever they want in pursuit of truth. (I read through the user\u2019s Weibo timeline and found no hint of sarcasm.) Many Weibo users urged Mr. Trump to open a Weibo account.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is not the U.S. as we know it,\u201d commented a Weibo user named Xiangbanzhang. \u201cThis is Saddam\u2019s Iraq and Gaddafi\u2019s Libya.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump defenders compare the president\u2019s ouster from social media to China-style censorship. \u201cThis is not China, this is United States of America, and we are a free country,\u201d Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Mr. Trump\u2019s former press secretary, wrote on Twitter.<\/p>\n
Chinese censorship doesn\u2019t 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 can\u2019t go on their platforms.<\/p>\n
The Chinese government requires news websites to dedicate their top two daily items to Xi Jinping, China\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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 don\u2019t even have the right to post photos of Mr. Xi, much less criticize him.<\/p>\n
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. Xi\u2019s 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. Xi\u2019s response to the coronavirus outbreak.<\/p>\n
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 can\u2019t produce original news content.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The riot inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6,\u00a0followed a rally at which President Trump made an inflammatory speech\u00a0to his supporters, questioning the results of the election. Here\u2019s a look at what happened and the ongoing fallout:<\/p>\n