Meddling For We, But Not For Thee

Chris Menahan
InformationLiberation
Aug. 21, 2019

Twitter announced Monday that they had suspended over 200,000 accounts allegedly linked to a Chinese government influence operation in Hong Kong and claimed that "covert, manipulative behaviors have no place on our service."

From the AP, "Twitter shuts Chinese accounts targeting Hong Kong protests":
Twitter said it has suspended more than 200,000 accounts that it believes were part of a Chinese government influence campaign targeting the protest movement in Hong Kong.

The company also said Monday it will ban ads from state-backed media companies, expanding a prohibition it first applied in 2017 to two Russian entities.

Both measures are part of what a senior company official portrayed in an interview as a broader effort to curb malicious political activity on a popular platform that has been criticized for enabling election interference around the world and for accepting money for ads that amount to propaganda by state-run media organizations.

[...] The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of security concerns, said the Chinese activity was reported to the FBI, which investigated Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election through social media.

After being notified by Twitter and conducting its own investigation, Facebook said Monday that it has also removed seven pages, three groups and five accounts, including some portraying protesters as cockroaches and terrorists.
"Covert, manipulative behaviors have no place on our service — they violate the fundamental principles on which our company is built," Twitter said in a statement.

Despite such claims, Twitter was put on the map after they worked together with former State Department official, Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and Bilderberg attendee, Jared Cohen, to help foment the Arab Spring in Iran around 2011.

As The New Yorker reported in 2011:
During the peak of the protests in Iran, Jared Cohen, a young staffer at the State Department who worked for Slaughter, contacted officials at Twitter and asked the company not to perform a planned upgrade that would have shut down the service temporarily in Iran, where protesters were using it to get information to the international media. The move violated Obama’s rule of non-interference.
White House officials “were so mad that somebody had actually ‘interfered’ in Iranian politics, because they were doing their damnedest to not interfere,” the former Administration official said. “Now, to be fair to them, it was also the understanding that if we interfered it could look like the Green movement was Western-backed, but that really wasn’t the core of it. The core of it was we were still trying to engage the Iranian government and we did not want to do anything that made us side with the protesters. To the Secretary’s credit, she realized, I think, before other people, that this is ridiculous, that we had to change our line.” The official said that Cohen “almost lost his job over it. If it had been up to the White House, they would have fired him.”
[Hillary] Clinton did not betray any disagreement with the President over Iran policy, but in an interview with me she cited Cohen’s action with pride. “When it came to the elections, we had a lot of messages from people inside Iran and their supporters outside of Iran saying, ‘For heaven’s sakes, don’t claim this as part of the democracy agenda. This is indigenous to us. We are struggling against this tyrannical regime. If you are too outspoken in our support, we will lose legitimacy!’ Now, that’s a tough balancing act. It’s easy to stand up if you don’t worry about the consequences. Now, we were very clear in saying, ‘We are supporting those who are protesting peacefully,’ and we put our social-media gurus at work in trying to keep connections going, so that we helped to provide that base for communicating that was necessary for the demonstrations.”
The U.S. government is working to foment a similar revolution right now in Hong Kong.

Protesters have been seen waving American flags, singing our national anthem and sharing Pepe memes to appeal to right-wingers in the West.



"Individual rights" and "democracy" are not popular concepts in China. They're much more focused on what's good for the collective.

Here's one of the protest leaders, Joshua Wong, meeting with Marco Rubio:


And Nancy Pelosi:


And here he is meeting with US diplomat Julie Eadeh in Hong Kong earlier this month:


Some protesters were even carrying signs asking Trump to "liberate" Hong Kong:


These have been violent protests which are costing billions in lost revenue.

Here's a video from Voice of America framing protesters attacking police as police attacking protesters:



Here's the same incident from another angle showing more context:



Here's another video from the BBC showing a cop aiming his gun at protesters:



If you just zoom in before he aims his gun at them you can see he was clocked in the face with a weapon before pulling his gun:



As best I can tell, this appears to be part of Trump's ongoing trade war.



There's a very real possibility this situation could spiral out of control if China sells off their $1.1 trillion in US treasuries.

I'm not against the US projecting power in the world, but it's rather ridiculous for our ruling oligarchs to spend three years whining about "Russian meddling" over some Facebook and Twitter memes while they're working to overthrow the governments of Iran and Venezuela and pushing for Hong Kong to stage a violent revolution against China.

The fact our media is shilling for these protests strikes me as a strong indicator they're not in our best interests.

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