MOSCOW, January 16. /TASS/. The fact that the accounts of US President Donald Trump and his supporters were blocked in social media is a demonstration of ‘blatant censorship’ and cyber totalitarianism, the deputy chief of Russia’s Security Council Dmitry Medvedev wrote in his op-ed published by tass.com on Saturday.
The social media unleashed the media war without rules against Trump, he said, adding that even if he leaves the politics for good and the Tech Giants wipe out his ‘digital footprint’, the minds will remain hugely polarized.
The outdated American electoral system has moved the issue of the unprecedented role in public politics of social networks and new media, and, accordingly, of private IT companies that own those platforms, extremely high up the agenda, Medvedev wrote.
"The social media, however, are beyond any special regulations and work on the basis of user agreements. And it was them that unleashed the media war without rules! And that war is waged against one single person," he noted.
"For America, just as for the rest of the world, this level of corporate censorship is a truly extraordinary phenomenon. A question arises: who are those supreme judges that decided that they, of their own volition and based on their own rules - but, in fact, guided by their political preferences, can deprive the country's president of the opportunity to communicate with an audience of many millions?" Medvedev noted. "Whether Trump is good or bad, he is his country's national, and, furthermore, an official who enjoys the trust of nearly half of the Americans," he added.
"Thus, it turns out that several technological corporations located in California got an appetite for power and thought it possible to juggle with news and facts to suit their own political preferences. This is but a blatant censorship!" Medvedev emphasized.
Dictating their own terms, "they have sought to substitute for state institutions, encroaching on their mandates, aggressively imposing their views on a great number of people, leaving them no other choice; while the 75 millions of Trump's voters and hundreds of millions of his subscribers were left out of their 'choice'. These were simply labelled as insecure. Isn't it, indeed, a spectre of cyber totalitarianism that is gradually overwhelming the society, taking away from it (and potentially the entire world) the opportunity to see the reality for what it is," he wrote.