Yes, Chinese-style speech suppression could happen here (The revolution will not be televised).
Posted by Ed Folsom, November 30, 2025
The Cyberspace Administration of China recently enacted a set of rules barring social media influencers from posting content on “‘serious’ topics- such as finance, health, medicine, law or education- [unless they] provide proof of relevant professional credentials.” The platforms themselves are responsible for enforcing the requirements, and for “ensur[ing] that the content being shared [by the credentialed] mentions proper citations and disclaimers.”
The Chinese Communist Party already blocks the Chinese public from accessing all social platforms that the Party does not control. It claims that the new policy is necessary to eliminate rampant misinformation on important topics being spread by the un-credentialed.
Of course, it is possible for people to be misled in harmful ways by others posting false information on social media while holding themselves out to be authoritative. So the Chinese Communists Party has targeted a legitimate area of concern. But what if the Chinese Communists were totalitarians? Couldn’t they use their new system to ensure that nobody gets to say anything important on Chinese social media unless what they say advances the Chinese Communist Party line?
In effect, the new policy creates a gate that categorically de-legitimizes and silences everyone who can’t pass through it. Whatever the opinions of the excluded might be, they lack the credentials for an official determination of legitimacy, so they are not to be heard.
The Chinese Communist Party, through its Cybersecurity Administration of China, also decides whether the comments of approved commenters require a disclaimer, and if so what form of disclaimer the comments require. If the Party decides that a given comment requires citations to authority, the Party also determines which authorities may appropriately be cited and which may not. If an approved commenter tries to post content that deviates unacceptable from the Party line, the Party can easily and quickly cancel that person’s credentials, categorically silencing any further commentary from that person as un-credentialed and therefore illegitimate.
The new accreditation requirement makes the Chinese Communist Party’s totalitarian reach into social media neater and cleaner, under the guise of protecting the public from the scourge of misinformation.
It’s a good thing we have the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in this country. The First Amendment ensures that what the Chicoms are doing could never be done here, right? Maybe not. According to Pew Research, 51% of recently polled Americans are in favor of the U.S. government restricting false information online even if the restrictions limit freedom of information.
Think back to the U.S. social media environment during the Biden Administration, at the height of its COVID-19 heavy-handedness. The official party line on social media platforms was that lock-down and isolation policies could not only slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2, initially to allow time for the health care system to prepare for and cope with the virus, but that these policies could actually stop the virus from spreading. Later, the official narrative shifted to insistence that mass vaccination could stop the virus’s spread.
Always, throughout, the official line was that following restrictive public health orders — on 6-foot distancing, restrictions and bans on various types of gatherings, travel bans, business-closure orders, school closures, even one-way aisles in grocery stores — would suppress or outright stop the spread of the SARS-Cov-2 virus. Failing to follow these purportedly scientific orders was said to cause case spikes and uncontrolled viral spread.
Anyone who dared to point to real-world data, showing that viral spread and cycles of case spikes and declines were occurring worldwide regardless of the public’s adherence or non-adherence to such orders, risked being met by a flock of trolls, shrieking, “Where did you get your medical degree?!!!!?” In other words, where are your credentials to claim such a thing, illegitimate pretender? It was not acceptable to point them to the government’s own data – only the government’s experts were allowed to conclude out loud what the facts on the ground actually showed.
In Maine, we had all the bans and restrictions. We had interstate travel restrictions; mask requirements; 6-foot distancing; business closures; school closures; court closures; restrictions and bans on various types of gatherings, including funerals, weddings, and religious services; and even one-way aisles in stores.
At one point in 2020, a group of people held an indoor wedding and reception in the Millinocket area that led to a handful of non-attendees later contracting COVID-19. The illness of one person who later died with COVID-19 was traced back to this wedding. I saw people posting on Facebook that, up until the Millinocket wedding, Maine had the virus under control, but then along came those irresponsible people at the Millinocket wedding who blew everything up, causing cases to spike all over Maine. Nobody with a clue could possibly have believed it, but it’s what our “expert” class insisted on telling the public to believe. Essentially, it was: “Follow our orders and everything will be fine. Violate our orders and everyone dies, and we will blame you.”
If people had felt comfortable thinking for themselves, they might have hesitated to follow all of the government’s orders. The bureaucrats were suddenly at the peak of their power, and they wanted their orders followed!
Nationally, the Biden Administration threatened and otherwise pressured social media platforms to suppress speech that it didn’t want the public to see or hear, as outlined a memorandum order in Missouri versus Biden (which I previously blogged about here). The Administration, and Biden himself, accused people who posted disfavored speech, and the tech platforms who failed to adequately censor them, of “killing people.”
As heavy-handed as the U.S. Government was at that time, how could it ever engage in the kind of censorship that the Chinese Communist Party engages in, given the speech protections of our First Amendment?
The First Amendment provides, “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech.” By the way, Article 35 of the Chinese Constitution provides, “Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech.” What these protections mean, however, is all in the interpretations that the official interpreters of the words give them. In the U.S., the official interpreter of the words is the U.S. Supreme Court.
Our Fourth Amendment protection against “unreasonable searches and seizures” could easily be incorporated into the constitution of the People’s Republic of China without causing any pause in the Chinese Communist Party’s totalitarian police-state practices. When constitutional language is torn free from the cultural context that gives it birth, the words can take on whatever meaning they might hold in the new culture into which they are immersed – constitutional protections, shmotections. To change the constitution, you only need to radically alter the culture in which it is interpreted. By Chinese Communist Party standards, all searches and seizures conducted by agents of the Chinese Communist Party must surely be “reasonable” searches and seizures. Who would dare to disagree?
As it stands, the U.S. Supreme Court gives the First Amendment’s “the freedom of speech” a very broad interpretation, taking seriously that speech falling within its scope shall not be abridged. While not everything that anyone might say is protected, everything is protected that does not fall into a handful of narrow and carefully defined categorical exceptions, which include incitement to immediate violence, defamation, fighting words, perjury and pornography, for instance.
The Supreme Court has defined the narrow and limited exceptions to “the freedom of speech” according to what was and was not understood to be included in “the freedom of speech” when the First Amendment was adopted. This reflects a school of constitutional interpretation called “originalism.”
You might hear “originalism” mocked and derided at times by those who resent the restraints it imposes. An alternative form of “living, breathing” constitutional interpretation is especially attractive to people who wish to fundamentally transform American society by declaring protections they cannot establish through the legislative process and proclaiming them to be the constitution. Such protections have sometimes been found hiding, unarticulated, in the constitution’s due process and equal protection clauses.
But just as anti-originalist, “living, breathing,” interpretation can expand rights and protections, it can also be used to shrink existing constitutional protections. In the case of free speech protections, being freed from the tethers of originalism would allow the Supreme Court to narrow the range of protected speech by declaring additional exceptions.
Many Americans believe that there is something called “hate speech” that should not be protected. Even more believe that “misinformation” should not have First Amendment protection. But the government is not allowed to censor “hate speech” or “misinformation” because, whatever they are, they don’t categorically fall outside First Amendment protection. This could only be changed if the Supreme Court were willing to declare that “hate speech” and “misinformation” are in fact not protected by the First Amendment. As I blogged about back in 2021, in the context of Second Amendment restrictions on firearms, President Biden repeatedly used to state some variation of: “No amendment to the constitution is absolute. You can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.” If Biden intended this to mean that the government may restrict all constitutional rights because no constitutional right is absolute, that’s crazy talk. But he did seem to mean something along those lines — something like, because not all constitutional protections are as broad as they might appear on their face, as a general proposition restrictions that Biden thinks are reasonable or common-sense may be imposed on all constitutional protections.
Under this scheme, what principle would limit the restrictions that the government is allowed to impose on constitutional rights? Who would ultimately decide what is reasonable or common-sense. Wouldn’t it be the Supreme Court?
If we turn to what the Supreme Court has told us so far, it has told us that speech that does not fall within its already-defined categories of unprotected speech is absolutely protected against government abridgment. But if the Supreme Court were to become unmoored from its history-based, careful interpretation of First Amendment protected speech, nothing would restrain it from replacing originalist interpretation with its own determination of what speech restrictions are reasonable or common-sense.
The Court would then be free to decide that “hate speech” and “misinformation” are not protected by the First Amendment because their harm outweighs their benefits (or some such thing that might look a lot like the kind of determination that our elected representatives in Congress are intended to make in matters that don’t involve constitutional interpretation). Unmoored from historical/constitutional context, why wouldn’t the test become some such balancing of interests by the Justices of the Supreme Court?
Of course, arriving at this point would require changing the Supreme Court’s composition to that of a court willing to interpret the Constitution this way. That’s where court-packing could come in, expanding the size of the Supreme Court and packing the new slots with a slate of “living, breathing” interpretationists, willing simply to declare that what they agree ought to be, in fact, is.
The Biden Administration already showed us during COVID times how to create public clamor to censor speech that the government wants to eliminate. There is already public support for censoring “hate speech” and “misinformation.” If Supreme Court approval were secured, when it comes to honing the methods of controlling and suppressing speech, the Chinese Communist Party leads the way. All that the aspiring totalitarians need to do is emulate them.
Yes, it could happen here. When it comes to agitation for anti-originalist “living, breathing” constitutional interpretation; agitation for court-packing; and agitation for censorship of “misinformation” and “hate speech,” it’s already all around us. If you don’t think so, you aren’t listening. All of this is already playing at progressivist theaters near you.
