June 7, 2021 by Maggie McNeill
Last Friday was the 32 nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, in which roughly 3000 people were brutally murdered by the totalitarian government of Communist China. Of course, the exact number will never be known, because the tyrants memory-holed the truth and have over the past generation methodically buried any and all references to the massacre accessible to their subjects, to the point that few young Chinese today can even recognize the iconic "tank man" photo. But if it were only their own subject population the Chinese were trying to bury in suffocating ignorance of their rulers' atrocities, there would be no point in writing about it because that has been the playbook used by every oppressive government since the invention of mass media. However, while past regimes were mostly limited to spewing propaganda via press releases and useful idiots (just as all governments do), the Chinese have taken their misinformation campaign into the 21 st century by sending out swarms of social media "bots" to interject themselves into conversations featuring certain keywords, no matter which language those conversations occur in or what the nationality of the participants; after I retweeted a tweet about the "tank man" on May 28 th, a short thread formed which has been repeatedly interrupted by tankies and bots, mostly during business hours in Beijing, and despite the thread having little engagement from real people. I've also seen similar harassment of threads about the genocide against the Uighurs, the suppression of Hong Kong, and the mere mention of Taiwan; furthermore, the Chinese are using their economic power to force Hollywood to make its spineless denizens dance like marionettes to whatever tune Beijing calls, no matter how transparently stupid, even to the point of publicly humiliating themselves by "apologizing" for merely stating plain facts. We're not yet to the point of watching the same crowd of celebrity halfwits who have proven so useful to "sex trafficking" fetishists singing "re-educational" songs about how much they love Xi Jinping, but what we are seeing, especially in light of Western governments' concurrent crusade to destroy the open internet, is more than horrifying enough, and does not bode at all well for the future.
