Marco Rubio: Twitter’s tolerance of China’s graphic attack on Australia shows bias

Rubio, a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, remonstrated with Dorsey as an intervention into the intensifying dispute between Australia and China. His letter marks the convergence of parallel disputes, as conservative American frustration with how U.S. social media companies manage their platforms now mingles with China’s use of social media as an avenue of diplomatic clashes.

“The American people increasingly see mainstream social media, especially Twitter, as little more than a liberal echo chamber inclined to censor conservatives,” Rubio wrote. “I share their concern, especially when enemies of America are allowed to post falsified and dangerously misleading images with no consequence.”

The acrimony between one of the closest U.S. allies in the world and Washington’s chief global rival, which originated in Australia’s call for an investigation into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, gave rise this week to China’s production of a meme that portrays the Australian military as war criminals.

“It is a false image and a terrible slur on our great defense forces and the men and women who have served in that uniform for over 100 years,” Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said this week after Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian tweeted a graphic of an Australian soldier cutting the throat of an Afghan child.

Chinese officials produced the image after Australia unveiled the results of an investigation into war crimes committed by a group of Australian special forces operators. “It’s our advice that the Australian side face up to the crimes committed by the Australian soldiers in Afghanistan, hold those perpetrators accountable, and bring justice to the victims,” a spokeswoman at China’s embassy in Canberra said.

Australian officials disbanded the unit implicated in the war crimes and initiated criminal cases against the alleged perpetrators.

“There are undoubtedly tensions that exist between China and Australia,” Morrison added. “But this is not how you deal with them. Australia has patiently sought to seek to address the tensions that exist in our relationship in a mature way, in a responsible way, by seeking engagement at both leader and ministerial level, to ensure that we can openly discuss what are clear sources of tension in this relationship.”

Morrison noted that he had asked Twitter to remove the image, a request that has not been acted upon by Dorsey’s team, to Rubio’s irritation.

“We know your company has the ability to move rapidly, as it frequently issued warning labels on tweets of prominent Americans during the election — sometimes within minutes of a tweet being sent,” he wrote,

Rubio tied the controversy to a broader debate over whether Twitter and other social media companies should be held liable for the content posted by users on their platforms.

“Social media platforms, including Twitter, have taken it upon themselves to regulate, moderate, and censor speech on their platforms,” he added. “That is your right as a private company. However, the logic of such actions is increasingly difficult to understand in light of their inconsistency and raises questions of whether Twitter specifically should be eligible for Section 230 protections.”

Rubio, who has rebuked other U.S. technology companies such as Google for cooperating with China’s authoritarianism in recent years, asked Dorsey to explain his company’s handling of the tweet in question.

He paired that request with a question targeting Twitter’s motives in tolerating the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s behavior: “Does Twitter want to operate in China in the future? And if so, has it had any conversations with relevant officials or entities in China?”