Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a report on Thursday that presents the truth and facts of "freedom of speech" in the US. The report points out that the US has long purported its freedom of speech and pursued double standards, covering up domestic political manipulation and social injustice with empty political slogans and a hypocritical moral mask.

The report states that freedom of speech is not worthy of the name as the US public doesn't feel free to say what they want, and they have grown to see through and get tired of the hypocritical slogans and promises of politicians.

At home in the US, political fights trample on free speech, press interference threatens free speech, and social media violates free speech. In the international arena, the US is daydreaming about continuing to speak for all, obstructing the democratization of international relations with hegemonic practices, destroying the international public opinion environment with smear campaigns, and deluding the international community with self-glorified images and high-sounding rhetoric.

In a 2022 national poll conducted by The New York Times and Siena College, 66 percent of participants said they didn't believe that Americans enjoy free speech, the report noted, and 8 percent said there was no freedom of speech at all. Also, political groups used the media to disseminate false information to interfere with the 2016 presidential election, with fake news websites receiving as much as 159 million visits, equivalent to 0.64 visits per American adult, according to a research study conducted by Stanford University.

The ministry report also mentioned that the US violates freedom of speech at home by manipulating epidemic information and suppressing truth-telling voices. A female doctor of Chinese descent, Helen Zhu, who warned about the epidemic in the US and reported the test results, was given a gag order by the administration. Captain Crozier, who told the truth about the epidemic on the aircraft carrier USS Roosevelt, was sacked.

Some officials in the State Department and Defense Department of the US, who dared to speak the truth, were also laid off. Anthony Fauci, an infectious disease expert known as the US "anti-epidemic captain," has "disappeared" many times.

Meanwhile, the US also manipulates freedom of speech in foreign countries by controlling international public opinion, in order to maintain its hegemony. The US uses social media to launch psychological warfare along with military operations in other countries, and suppresses anti-war rhetoric.

It uses freedom of speech to practice double standards, creates a smokescreen and claims that other countries are spreading "false information," while it publishes various distorted and discrediting reports based on false information to divert the attention of the international community from the misdeeds of the US. On May 4, 2022, US Senator Rand Paul spoke bluntly at a Senate hearing: "Do you know who the greatest propagator of disinformation in the history of the world is? The US government."

According to the report, the US media has a one-sided interpretation of news events and malicious coverage of China-related news. The US media interpreted the withdrawal of American universities from the World University and Professional Rankings as a righteous act against the tyranny of American higher education, but interpreted the withdrawal of some Chinese universities from the world rankings as China's "closed-door policy" in the field of science.

The US pursues a double standard on freedom of speech in the Internet field, stigmatizing China for what it calls "digital authoritarianism," and calling India "the digital Internet shutdown capital."

At the same time, it promoted the formation of the "Internet Future Alliance," which claimed to be building "an open, free, global, interoperable, reliable and secure future" while excluding China, Russia and other countries. In doing so, the US attempts to form a closed and exclusive small circle and create a digital divide and bloc confrontation in the internet field, the report said.

Global Times