The Double Standard of the U.S. on Internet Uses

The United States is a country of contradictions and double standards that have no dignity. When it meets the interests of America’s corporations, the United States hails to freedom, free trade and investment freedom. When America encounters trade deficits, the country immediately gives up on free trade and investment freedom. Instead, it pushes protectionism, levies high, punishing taxes on Chinese imports and forbids Chinese corporations from purchasing American companies — the case in which the U.S. government blocked Huawei’s proposed investment is a good example.

America keeps talking about human rights. However, the U.S. military has not only invaded Iraq, but it has also carried out massacres of Iraqi citizens and has tortured prisoners in camps. The United States is against the manipulation of currency, and yet it prints out trillions of U.S. bills each year to devalue the U.S. dollar in order to lower its debt — it bilks and brings losses to its creditors.

When riots broke out in the Middle East, the United States showed two different sets of attitudes toward the countries involved — it was mild and patient toward its allies, but for countries that were unfriendly toward the United States, such as Iran and Libya, the U.S. had a totally opposite attitude and called on the people to gather in the streets and overturn the government. The United States stands for using the Internet to interfere with other countries’ policies. In her public speech, Hillary Clinton commented that she supported the use of the Internet for free expression in order to overturn the government, because protecting human rights is equivalent to protecting the freedom of expression on the Internet, and the U.S. stands firm from this point of view.

As Clinton was talking about the “benefits” of the uses of the Internet in Washington, a few miles away in Virginia a federal court was debating whether to grant the government access to Twitter’s information database and permission to investigate users who are related to the WikiLeaks case. The CIA stands for expanding rights to monitor online communication tools such as social websites and Skype.

The Senate is considering establishing laws that give more power to law enforcement to fight “pirate sites.” Meanwhile, during a raid against 10 child pornography websites, the agents of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security purposely expanded their list of targets and shut down 84,000 unrelated websites.

The United States increases its “freedom on the Internet” in other countries, allowing American websites to roam freely on other countries’ domains and to invade their privacy. However, the freedom on the Internet on its own turf keeps on diminishing as the United States keeps tightening the regulations and forces certain websites to shut down. These contradictory actions shows America’s imperialism; it also explains how “freedom” is just a tool the United States uses to cover up its dirty work.