Editor’s Note: Rebecca MacKinnon was CNN’s Beijing Bureau Chief from 1998-2001. She is author of “Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom,” founding director of the Ranking Digital Rights research program at New America, and a fellow with the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement. The opinions expressed here are her own. Read more opinion at CNN.
In February 2001 near the end of my tour as CNN’s Beijing Bureau Chief, I was in an elevator heading up to an interview when two Chinese government officials stepped in. “It’s that CNN woman,” one said to the other in Mandarin, assuming I didn’t understand. “She’s so reactionary.” “Reactionary” is a term used in mainland China to describe critics of the Chinese Communist Party. I had been reporting frequently that winter on Chinese government human rights violations: They frequently occurred, and my job was to report news.
About 20 years ago the Chinese Communist Party started attacking CNN in the state-controlled media and through loyalist internet trolls as part of a hostile foreign media conspiracy. Their goal was to convince the Chinese public that our reporting was biased and couldn’t be trusted. These tactics worked pretty well, and have continued ever since. It was inconceivable to me then that the President of the United States, members of his political party, media outlets loyal to him, and his fans would also demonize CNN and other American news organizations as enemies of the people.
My job as a reporter in China included trying to ask questions at government press conferences where authorities peddled lies and half-truths constantly. If somebody had told me that two decades later, White House press briefings would be that way too, I would have accused them of peddling dystopian science fiction. But here we are. My China reporting PTSD sometimes gets triggered if I watch those briefings on TV.
President Donald Trump has taken a page right out of the CCP’s playbook, even as he moves to punish China for having “ripped off the United States.” On Friday, he announced that he will remove Hong Kong’s special trading status in response to Beijing’s crackdown on civil liberties there. Yet even as he takes this position, his own efforts to bend the law, demonize the press, lie to the American public, and keep himself in office by suppressing the vote, threaten to make America more like China.
The United States is, for now if we can keep it, a democratic, open society in which people can hold their government accountable, even if imperfectly. Whether Americans can prevent a descent into authoritarianism depends on the survival of robust independent civic space for activism and public discourse. Such spaces can only survive and thrive if they are protected by the rule of law. Instead our civic space is being attacked by the President and his allies in Congress. Authoritarian leaders like China’s Xi Jinping bend the law to serve their purposes and reinforce their power. Trump is trying to do the same.
China has one of the world’s strongest liability regimes for internet companies: social media platforms face severe legal penalties if content appearing on their platforms threatens the Communist Party’s version of reality. Last week my feelings of déjà vu grew even stronger when Trump issued an executive order targeting social media companies after Twitter attached fact-check warnings to two of his tweets in which he claimed that the use of mail-in ballots would inevitably lead to election fraud. Under the guise of defending free speech, his executive order threatens to revoke social media platforms’ immunity from legal liability under current US law for setting and enforcing rules for users’ content and determining how it is displayed, including adding corrections to users’ postings.
Trump and his supporters, “Alice in Wonderland”-style, claim they are the ones defending free speech against alleged corporate censorship. But it effectively seeks to impose legal and regulatory penalties on any social media platforms that dare to challenge or contradict his statements, including disinformation about the voting process. As states shift to the widespread use of absentee ballots in an effort to protect voters from contracting Covid-19, experts have warned that disinformation about the voting process could suppress voter turnout and weaken the legitimacy of the result. The President is not only the source of such disinformation. He is trying to make it harder for social media platforms to warn the public, in the same way that they have taken steps to warn people about falsehoods related to Covid-19.
Legal experts on both the left and right do not believe Trump’s order will hold up in court. But it has already dealt a blow against our nation’s electoral processes and institutions. It has granted political permission to attack social media companies if they enforce their rules against disinformation known to cause harm – whether it is dangerous medical misinformation about Covid-19 or disinformation about the voting process that is an attack on the American people’s right to accountable self-governance.
In 2018 after the Chinese Communist Party effectively anointed Xi president for life, Trump was recorded as saying to supporters: “I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.”
Americans – and citizens everywhere – have a right to receive and share correct information about how to vote and other facts related to the voting process. Otherwise, elections are neither fair nor free. We must not allow the nation’s dominant political party to use a distorted funhouse argument about free speech to twist the law to the point that the president’s word cannot be challenged. Unless we really do want to give him a shot at president for life, just like his counterpart in Beijing.