Twitter Blocks Tweets On China Human Rights Abuses Story As AG Barr Decries Silicon Valley ‘Collaboration’ With CCP

After repudiating China’s claim to the South China Sea, ending an Obama-era policy of indifference that critics slammed as tantamount to appeasement, and moving to strip Hong Kong of its special status (while punishing CCP officials responsible for enforcing the new HK national security law), the Trump Administration unleashed its latest rhetorical assault on the Communist Party and its monstrous human rights abuses.

As the Trump Administration weighs a travel ban on CCP officials, AG Bill Barr delivered a speech warning about the complicity of Silicon Valley and Hollywood in helping to perpetuate the CCP’s growing influence over American culture.

Criticizing China for resisting political liberalization that Americans once believed would eventually follow along with the economic liberalization agenda, Beijing is now embarking on a mission to elevate itself as a locus of geopolitical power to rival the US.

Barr complained that Hollywood has become too willing to kowtow to Beijing, censoring not just versions of movies that are shown in China, but also those that are released in the US.

Many Hollywood films have been “altered one way or another to please the CCP” and many other scripts never see the light of day due to self-censorship. Barr added that it’s tantamount to a “massive propaganda coup”.

He also invoked the memory of Walt Disney, saying the found would be “ashamed” of what happened to his company.

I suspect Walt Disney would be disheartened to see how the company he founded deals with the foreign dictatorships of our day,” Barr said in a speech at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum.

As an example, Barr cited “World War Z”, which reportedly contained a scene where the protagonists speculated that the virus originated in China. Examples of this type of censorship have grown increasingly common Barr said.

He also accused the American tech behemoths from Google to Facebook and Twitter of doing the CCP’s bidding.

“Appeasing the PRC may bring short term relief…but in the end, PRC’s goal is to replace you,” Barr warned.
 

The fundamental character of the regime has never changed…as its ruthless crackdown of Hong Kong shows once again, China is no closer to democracy today than it was in 1989.”

Over the years, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple “have shown themselves all too willing to collaborate” with the Communist Party of China, Barr added.

As if to underscore his point, just as Barr was speaking, one of the NYT reporters who was recently booted out of Beijing by the CCP complained that Twitter had censored one of his tweets about a horrifying forced sterilization campaign in Uygur women.

Here is the twitter notice I got. pic.twitter.com/UbqDDsTVxm

— Mike Forsythe 傅才德 (@PekingMike) July 16, 2020

Another Twitter user purported to find a mistake in the code to which this ‘arbitrary’ censorship might be attributable.

Twitter is using a regular expression (aka regex) that is catching everything lowercase alphanumeric as a bech32 address.@Twitter, here’s the regex you need to use:

\bbc(0([ac-hj-np-z02-9]{39}|[ac-hj-np-z02-9]{59})|1[ac-hj-np-z02-9]{8,87})\bhttps://t.co/kGa1BwBUBX https://t.co/qiFEI9qcPl

— Jimmy Song (송재준) (@jimmysong) July 16, 2020

But the company hasn’t commented on what’s going on.

Watch the speech below: