'Free speech' that Trump wants is backlash against biased media

Before he debates with Kamala Harris, Donald Trump issued a cautionary statement on his social media platform, indicating his intention to pursue legal action against people “involved in unscrupulous behaviour” during the election, should he emerge victorious. He asserted, “When I win, those people that cheated will be prosecuted... with long-term prison sentences.”

Trump now contends that the coming election will be subject to rigorous examination. He broadened his warning to encompass attorneys, political strategists, contributors and those he identifies as unlawful voters and dishonest election officials.

Between 2016 and 2020, the Trump administration would frequently attack the media, branding outlets like CNN and The New York Times as “fake news” peddlers. This adversarial relationship extended to attempts to delegitimise any critical coverage of the former administration, creating an environment where journalists faced threats and intimidation for reporting the truth.

However, before the merits of Trump’s grouse are judged, his background must be studied.

How they hounded Trump

Trump’s frustration is plausible. In the free-er American society of the 1970s, US citizens heard stories of a growing-up Trump, the brash son of a construction baron. His journey from there to an occasion when he, as a part of the audience, had told the then-POTUS Barack Obama that he would one day run for president, did not the Americans know who they were dealing with? Why did all hell break loose the day Trump won the presidential race in 2016?

Then, the 2020 election in the United States saw Twitter (now X) as a de facto Democrat campaigner, as it shamelessly marked tweets of Republicans as unreliable, denting the credibility of the incumbent's campaign.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was the decision of Twitter and Facebook to permanently suspend former US President Donald Trump in 2021 after the Capitol riots. It was the most glaring example of the platforms' political bias.

A despondent Trump went on to found the Truth Social platform while a group of other Republicans created the networking site Parler (French for “speak”).

If that was hardly an indictment of Twitter or Facebook, a series of files were released on X that revealed how the now-sacked staff of the top management under Jack Dorsey manipulated the medium's users. Straw had by then already admitted his company was overstaffed by leftists.

Worse, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had to take heat from the US Senate in 2018 in a two-day congressional hearing on privacy, election interference and a range of other issues, stemming from the scandal of hiring a manipulative agency, Cambridge Analytica (also hired by the Indian National Congress seven seas away). Zuckerberg, the founder of one of the internet's most dominant companies, had to apologise and try to convey that his company was changing for the better. We know it turned worse, actually insane.

Europe burning, but neither any government nor media thinks so

In another part of the West, the situation is no better. Police in the UK arrested three individuals in connection with violent and allegedly hateful Facebook posts in the wake of violence by forces of resistance across the country in early August. In one of the cases, a Scottish comedian was arrested for a satirical video that some interpreted as hate speech. The arrested were mostly critics of Islam.

With all this suppression of freedom going on, the left wonders what gives rise to politicians like Geert Wilders of the Netherlands and Marine Le Pen of France. They were as surprised when Trump rose to power, seeing nothing amiss in Obama, the poster boy of the left who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize when he had hardly done anything, right or wrong, as the US president.

But the absence of a free speech regime anywhere in the world was perhaps never felt as intensely as the time following the lynching of journalists of the French weekly Charlie Hebdo. Media in France, the nearly utopian land of liberté, égalité and fraternité, did not dare reproduce the cartoons of Mohammed, the prophet of Islam, which had got on the nerves of a bunch of Muslim fanatics.

Left-leaning suppression: Silent walls around Islam and liberal intolerance

Criticism or scrutiny of Islam in Western societies is often met with harsh backlash or accusations of Islamophobia, much as there is nothing phobic about knowing the Qur’an, Ahadith and Shariah and seeing it in the light of modernity. In the United States and Europe, discussions around Islamic extremism or fundamentalist interpretations are often stifled under the banner of cultural sensitivity. In the United Kingdom, criticism of grooming gangs or extremism is avoided or watered down.

Then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel had accused critics of her action of opening the floodgates of Syrian refugee influx into her country as racists — even though Islam is not a race but a religion. The streets of Paris in France and Birmingham in England have been taken over by Muslims offering salah in the middle of thoroughfares, but you can’t say a thing about these countries’ suicidal immigration policies.

Globally biased commentary

It’s been nearly 1,000 days of the Russia-Ukraine war and one wouldn’t find a single report published or broadcast in more than two years that says Ukrainian firing killed an innocent Russian villager, let alone a report that says Russia is winning this war. Because Russia must be portrayed as evil; at the same time, Russia must be the loser!

Curiously, the media does not see search engines blacking out Russian sources of information as racism although a part of the anti-India position of Nato comes from the fact that Russians are looked down upon as an Eastern Slavic tribe that follows Orthodox Christianity while the Caucasians of America and Europe are what Adolf Hitler believed was the Aryan race, who are today Protestants and Catholics.

Indian situation almost as bad

Throughout this period, the Western-dominated media also misreported petty crimes by sundry criminals in India as instances of Hindu intolerance. In 2015, a case of burglary at the convent school, of which Smriti Irani is an alumnus, was reported as a Hindu attack on Christianity. That very year, Harpreet Singh alias Kaka (28), Narender Singh alias Raja (30) and Ravinder Singh (25) had a bet on who was the greatest Sikh in the trio and, to prove that, vandalised a church in Delhi. The media found the act by Sikh youths as another case of Hindu tolerance. While NCRB showed no palpable change in the rate of crimes of bigotry, the leftist media in India, Europe and the United States alike created an impression Hindus were cleansing India of all Muslims.

In the largest democracy in the world, a certain Kamlesh Tiwari made a reactionary comment on the prophet of Islam in response to rioting in Malda, West Bengal. He was slaughtered in broad daylight in 2019, only to see the opposition apathetic about it and even the ‘double engine’ government of Narendra Modi at the Centre and Yogi Adityanath in the state watching like mute spectators.

After former BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma’s comments on Mohammed, which were backed by Sahih Bukhari's hadiths, several Hindus were killed, with blood-curdling cries of “Gustakh-e-Rasool ki kya hai sazaa? Sar tan se juda, sar tan se juda” (What is the punishment for insulting the Messenger? Behead the guilty) reverberating in the air. Yet, there was a notable lack of condemnation from many left-leaning media outlets and political figures, showcasing a double standard in the treatment of religious communities.

In the worst-case scenario, the Supreme Court, which is supposed to be the ultimate upholder of the Constitution of India, rebuked Sharma while handling the man whose act of cropping her video had led to all the lynchings, Mohammed Zubair, with kid gloves.

Intolerant leftists

While the media slammed the Modi government for arresting allegedly China-funded journalists, states governed by left-leaning parties saw instances of police action against those who criticise Islam or the ruling party’s policies. In West Bengal, a professor served a jail term of 10 years merely for sharing a spoof on Satyajit Ray’s Sonar Kella, which lampooned Chief Minister Banerjee. Now her government orders X and Facebook to pull down content that supports the activism for justice for the RG Kar victim. When asked to bend, Facebook in fact crawls, threatening activists they would be banned for promoting “sexual exploitation”!

In 2020, a woman who posted messages against then-Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray was dragged to a police station and accused under section 153A of the IPC. In 2022, Marathi television actor Ketaki Chitale was arrested for sharing an allegedly derogatory post about NCP president Sharad Pawar on social media.

Real cases where Modi, RSS are intolerant

The response by the Narendra Modi regime to all accusations against Hindus was a deafening silence except in cases where he was personally condemned. From the action of the tax department on BBC for reviving the fossilised debate over the Gujarat riots of 2002 to the incarceration of Arvind Kejriwal for calling the prime minister a “chauthi pass” (semi-educated), the dispensation spared no critic.

The only occasion where the prime minister found it fit to condemn mob justice was when a band of self-styled gaurakshaks attacked alleged cattle smugglers in 2016. Why? Because this time, those at the receiving end were Dalits, the only voters among Hindus that the regime is sensitive about.

There is also one unspoken kind of censorship nobody talks about: You can criticise the BJP but not the RSS. Especially if you are sympathetic to the current regime rather than its critic. No sooner you do it on social media, somebody from the Sangh will call your employer and demand that their critic be warned and then terminated.

This reminds one of the way Sanjay Joshi was hounded out of the Sangh circles for being instrumental in the marginalisation of Modi in Gujarat BJP during the revolt by Shankersinh Vaghela — while Modi easily ignores or forgives those who constantly fire salvos at him from the opposition ranks.

There are two tacit conventions at play here:

1. You can attack Hindus, but you cannot attack Modi.
2. An adversary is entitled to attack Modi and RSS, a supporter or sympathiser isn't.

Social media's funny community standards

Social media platforms, which were once seen as bastions of free speech, have increasingly become battlegrounds for ideological control. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube have implemented content moderation policies that often reek of bias. Community guidelines on these platforms claim to promote open dialogue while preventing hate speech and misinformation. However, the selective enforcement of these guidelines has led to widespread accusations of political favouritism.

YouTube demonetises or de-platforms commentators who expose liberal hypocrisy. It also 'cancels' critics of the Communist Party of China, a regime that does not allow any American social media company to operate in its area of jurisdiction!

The funniest of them all. Now you do not have to critique Islam or Xi Jinping to be accused of violating Facebook’s community standards. All you have to do is declare that you are not a patient of gender dysphoria. Just write on Facebook that you do not believe that an individual’s gender identity can be fluid and you will be banned!

The backlash

In India, the 2021 Information Technology Rules gave the government more control over what could be posted online, leading to the takedown of numerous posts related to the farmers’ protests and the handling of Covid-19. 

The pandemic reminds one also of the complete censorship of posts critical of the vaccines that were dished out to purportedly fight the coronavirus in a medical history-defying period of six months. It was only after Elon Musk took over Twitter and turned into X that scientists and doctors who were critical of the Pfizer-Moderna vaccine, which led to blood clots among other side effects in some patients, could speak out.

On Facebook, you still cannot question the CDC or the WHO. How is the ‘democratic’ United States any better than an autocratic, communist China that arrested doctors for raising an alarm at the time of the outbreak of the disease in Wuhan in 2019?

Of course, social media companies may plead helplessness, as their businesses would not be allowed to run in countries where they refuse to conform to the local legal system. What is ridiculous is that these companies themselves assume the role of the police and the adjudicator when a post is pulled down or a user is banned without any government asking for it.

Conditional freedom is no freedom at all

The idea that freedom of speech must be absolute in some part of the world is a comforting illusion. Across the political spectrum and in democracies around the world, this freedom is constrained by ideological, political, and legal frameworks. Whether it is the left stifling criticism of Islam and enforcing political correctness or the right using nationalism and religious sentiments to suppress dissent, the reality is that free speech is always negotiated, which is ironic, as the right to express can either be absolute or a citizen's expression cannot be called free in the first place.