“China’s Ministry of Public Security used operatives to target people of Chinese descent who had the courage to speak out against the Chinese Communist Party – in one case by covertly spreading propaganda to undermine confidence in our democratic processes and, in another, by suppressing U.S. video conferencing users’ free speech,” said Acting Assistant Director Kurt Ronnow of the FBI Counterintelligence Division. “We aren’t going to tolerate CCP repression – its efforts to threaten, harass, and intimidate people – here in the United States. The FBI will continue to confront the Chinese government’s efforts to violate our laws and repress the rights and freedoms of people in our country.” https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/40-officers-china-s-national-police-charged-transnational-repression-schemes-targeting-us 18 U.S. Code § 2261A - Stalking | U.S. Code | US Law | LII / Legal Information Institute
The Twitter files provide plenty of evidence that the FBI and its allies have worked to “threaten, harass, and intimidate” and “repress the rights and freedoms” of people who dissented from official narratives.
As noted in the OP, the US government has funded NGOs to act as state-sponsored censors.
In the 17th release of the “Twitter Files,” journalist Matt Taibbi disclosed that the U.S. government is funding a group that has supported the censorship of dissenting viewpoints on social media, including those of U.S. citizens.
That may sound familiar. Just a few weeks ago, I wrote here that the congressionally created, federally funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) had supported the British-based Global Disinformation Index (GDI). The index was widely ridiculed for targeting ten conservative and libertarian sites as the most dangerous sources of disinformation; it sought to persuade advertisers to withdraw support for those sites, while listing their most liberal counterparts as among the most trustworthy.
Where are similar charges against the Global Disinformation Index for its government-supported campaign of censorship and harassment?
Since the indictment of Chinese officials for harassing people who disagree with the party line from Beijing, they indicted members of the African People’s Socialist Party for disagreeing with the party line from Washington.
The Biden administration’s Department of Justice has just charged four members of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) for conspiring to act as agents of Russia by using speech and political action in ways the DOJ says “weaponized” the First Amendment rights of Americans. . . The superseding indictment containing these charges consists of a lot of verbal gymnastics to obfuscate the fact that the DOJ is prosecuting US citizens for speech and political activities in the United States which happen not to align with the wishes of the US government. The grand jury alleges that the aforementioned Ionov “directed” these Americans to “publish pro-Russian propaganda” and “information designed to cause dissention in the United States,” which is about as vague and amorphous an allegation as you could possibly come up with. Biden DOJ Indicts Four Americans For “Weaponized” Free Speech – Caitlin Johnstone https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1580251/download
Back in Stalin’s days, meeting a foreigner was likely to result a one-way trip to a gulag as a foreign agent. It looks like the FBI is working to establish as similar standard here, at least if they disagree with your politics.
Of course, the US itself funds extensive massive programs to influence politics overseas, yet it complains bitterly about violations of human rights if foreign nations apply US DOJ standards for foreign agents.
At this point, the biggest difference between the Moscow and Washington is that Moscow does not claim to be world’s shining light of freedom and democracy.
