Grammy Award-winning German Dj/Producer Anton Zaslavski aka Zedd wrote on Twitter “I just got permanently banned from China because I liked a @SouthPark tweet.”
The incident came after South Park was banned by the Communist Chinese Party (CCP) for criticizing and making fun of the country.
I just got permanently banned from China because I liked a @SouthPark tweet.
— Zedd (@Zedd) October 10, 2019
Zedd also posted the same message on Instagram.
View this post on InstagramI just got permanently banned from China because I liked a @southpark tweet.
Zedd had liked a post by South Park on Twitter. The post was an ad for the show’s 300th episode.
In the 300th episode, which was aired in Oct. 9, a character shouts, “[Expletive] the Chinese government!”
In the episode—which also happens to be the show’s 300th—Randy’s business partner, a towel named Towelie, tries to stop Randy from selling marijuana to China due to its human rights abuses, just as the latter achieves a milestone $300,000 sales record, largely thanks to business in China.
“I’m never working for a company that’s regulated by a communist government,” Towelie says, pressing Randy to promise “no more kissing China’s [expletive]” while threatening to leave if Randy doesn’t condemn the Chinese regime. Towelie asks him to shout the anti-Chinese-government message. Randy decides to appease Towelie in order to keep him as a partner.
In their previous episode, “Band in China,” South Park criticized China’s censorship, which triggered a virtually complete deletion of the comedy cartoon series from the Chinese internet on Oct. 7. The episode touched on human rights issues that the Chinese regime considers unacceptable to talk about, famously having a “5 cent” army on internet to track and censor anything related to some of these topics, including forced organ harvesting, slave labor camps and brainwashing.
South Park creators then issued a faux apology, further mocking the Chinese regime for trying to censor freedom and democracy.
“Like the NBA, we welcome the Chinese censors into our homes and into our hearts. We too love money more than freedom and democracy,” they said, making fun of the National Basketball Association (NBA) for kowtowing to Beijing in the recent pro-Hong Kong tweet fallout.
A Houston Rockets executive tweet supporting pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong has caught the NBA in a firestorm in China. Despite the tweet later being replaced with a vague apology, several of the NBA’s key business partners have since severed ties with the company.
Epoch Times reporter Eva Fu contributed to this report.
