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At the end, this political system is about supporting current power who settled by force (and to whom you have to pay a tax to not be sent into physical jail, and all your belongings taken).
Remember that at the beginning, these nice people are actually people who killed to be in place, and collected a lot of power and money, and that are now defending their position.
Kingdoms, then Dictatorship were too unstable, and this gave birth to Democracy, still with the same elites.
In some way, it is a softer continuation of conquest-coercion dressed as consent.
The newest generations use propaganda to settle; the approach changes, but the goal is ultimately the same.
There are people who see that as positive, because are used to be extremely careful and conscious of their words. But is a very thin line, where one word can obliterate your life as you know it.
The RT ban is not about what RT publishes, you are free to publish their arguments more or less verbatim on your own site without getting sanctioned in Europe (which indeed some people do). The RT ban is about RT being a state owned propaganda network owned by the government thats waging an active war against Europe.
In your country if say some public TV would publish hard core porn mid day for children to see, would there be consequences? like fines and license removal? I am sure in civilized countries that TV station will be punished.
Now imagine you have a Ruzzian TV station publishing hard core porn for children to see, how to you punsish them without paid trolls claiming censorship ? Because this si what happens, in Romania Romanian TV station need to respect the Romanian laws , liek for example pay fines and retract any falsehoods and mistakes, but Ruzzians can publish fake documents and videos and if we want them to respect the laws of our countries we it is censorship... blocking faked documents is bad, blocking boobs is good in the land of the free
There is a saying: if voting would change things, it is long time that it would have been forbidden
The good solution would be the educate the population about critical thinking, and to use their brain when they see information.
If you just censor things, you hide the real problems, and end up with dumb people without critical judgment (or no access to information).
rt hasn't done this and there are concrete laws against doing this, if rt violated them, they would/should fined/suspended, it's really that simple, do you have any real examples of illegal things they've carried out?
and if you're implying that extrajudicial measures are the only effective method to deal w/ situations like these, then there's an issue w/ the laws
just because censorship is carried out against a cause you don't like, doesn't make it justified, since it's very likely to be used in less benevolent ways in the future
So let me flip the question: if a certain thing is illegal in a jurisdiction, but hosted outside, is it justified to block access to the hosting provider (notably, including Cloudflare and other giants)?
The decision to classify something as propaganda should never be the role of a government, much less blocking it.
But that's something that's close to impossible for continental European cultures to ever understand, at a gut level.
Setting limits on what content can be shown at what times isn’t censorship because you’re not actually censoring content. What you’re doing is setting rules about scheduling content.
Except, in the case of RT, it was not justified in an abstract way at all. Consistently "reporting" on stories counter-indicated by all available evidence.
To put it another way, if a judge can imprison a murderer for life as justified by the motive of reducing murders, what's stopping them from imprisoning everyone with no justification at all? Well, in practice the evidence required is quite a hurdle to this.
If you're not arguing that RT is innocent of what it has been accused, then you're arguing against the concept of punitive action outright.
If you are a parent, it is your responsibility to watch your kids and install a porn filter on their computer / tv / phones. It is pointless to have websites to verify that you are old enough, as there always be websites from abroad who will not respect the law, and it forces you to leak your identity (who becomes tied to your IP address).
If you are not happy with propaganda, it is your role and the role of schools to educate people around about how to consume information and look with a critical view.
I think the current shift in acceptance of blocking social media for children is a start and allows us to consider it’s positive and negative effects.
It’s very easy to convince anyone to support your cause. Just tell them they are the real victims, that they have been deprived of their rightful privilege, and that it is someone else’s fault. Give them undue credit, take away their inconvenient responsibilities. I promise you, they will have zero motivation to uncover your lies.
We have a collective responsibility to protect the truth - the actual, messy, complicated, real-life truth.
I believe in democracy. If people want to listen to ridiculous and false Russian propaganda or support Russia against Ukraine they should be able to without hindrance, even if their politicians or the better informed don’t like it. It’s their job to persuade their fellows. They shouldn’t get to declare their beliefs are right and beyond democratic contestation.
Sometimes democracies make really bad decisions. Alciabiades conned the Athenians into the disastrous Sicilian Expedition. That’s the tradeoff you get for having a democracy. Declaring some subjects out of bounds is taking away democracy and installing something else instead, with those tradeoffs, that we as a society decided we weren’t going to make, without consensus.
But if you applied it consistently, you'd have to admit that Germany, the US, and many other Western countries also engage in full-blown hybrid warfare, against their own populations.
For that matter, in most cases where RT has been linked to me, I couldn't see any clear way that the story advanced Russian interests, except perhaps by trying to paint the USA as full of internal social and cultural conflicts. But, frankly, American media does a pretty good job of that, too. (And many of those media outlets have also grossly misrepresented many events relevant to those conflicts — including ones where I know very well that they were misrepresented because I witnessed them first-hand. For example, I watched the Rittenhouse trial live-streamed, and then read media coverage describing something barely recognizable as what I just saw.)
(Besides, it's not like they're trying to hide that "rt" stands for Russia Today.)
> The RT ban is not about what RT publishes, you are free to publish their arguments more or less verbatim on your own site without getting sanctioned in Europe (which indeed some people do).
Can you give a concrete example? (Somehow I cannot recall ever seeing one proactively volunteered, in years of people denigrating RT on the Internet.)
The Internet used to be cool in the '90 when it wasn't regulated and Meta, Google and Tiktok didn't exist. Now it's all ads, propaganda and hate speech.
Propaganda usually isn't banned, except in specific cases (defamation, hate speech, etc...). But AFAIK, RT is not special in that regard, it is just the kind of content one would expect from a website openly affiliated with Russian authorities.
Plenty of people have never seen moon hoax theorists' propaganda. They imagine if they see it, they'll quickly see through it for its absurdity. But they're often wrong. Moon hoax theorist's propaganda is actually much better than you think. They can point out lots of "inconsistencies", which do have an explanation, but aren't immediately obvious at all. You see they have experience meeting people like you, but you don't have experience meeting people like them.
I used moon hoaxers as an example because their sophisticated propaganda actually have been exposed and explained a few times, although it still isn't common knowledge why e.g. it seems the exact same rock is right behind an astronaut in two different photos. But that isn't nearly as true for suppressed ideologies. You haven't heard their arguments.
This sparked a discussion about how to handle hate spech, as for regular people being called a dick does not result in a 06:00 am. police raid with six officers.
In the aftermath, a mural in a left wing culture center has been painted over multiple times with the tweet and a call for his resignation [1].
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/09/09/pimmelgate-g...
[2] https://images.welt.de/67dd7b08559c903aae8287ac/12efd9779a84...
My GAF meter is pretty low for anti-secular groups that shot first. And their own neighbours who were "supposed" to be their allied seem to think the same
Many of the real problems in society, unfortunately, have no easy solutions and require very substantive evaluation, weighing expert opinions, etc. In the current environment it has become very hard to get a lot of people to even consider these or, if they want, elect someone to do it in their stead.
TLDR: populism + propaganda causes significant dysfunction in democracies, especially ones that aren’t winner-takes-all.
The whole idea of supressing stupidity in a democracy leads to some sort of elitist society.
These are all the exact same arguments made by regimes like the CCP as to why their authoritarian methods are necessary. It’s all for the public order and the public good as unfortunately, many people are stirred up even against their own interest by meddlers, demagogues, and foreign interests. Fortunately, the CCP knows better, as the Party makes sure that the experts are making decisions based on all the data.
I would prefer to live in a democracy, and it astounds me to see people in the West repeating word for word what Russians and Chinese regime apologists say about their governments, all while explaining it’s all necessary to protect democracy.
Sorry, I'm more confortable with RT being blocked than having another Adolf Hitler screaming their own propaganda.
Screw Russia and China. The Internet blocking committee should probably also block Tiktok while they're at it, as it makes people's brains rot.
This is the same argument as for encryption. You can't have encryption only for the good guys and not for the criminals. You either have encryption that protects everyone including criminals or you have no encryption.
In this case, you can't have free speech while advocating for censorship against what you consider to be propaganda.
Either everyone has the right to express themselves, including pro war lunatics or you right to free speech will eventually go extinct because then it's only a matter of time before someone else will use the same argument to start censoring a topic or an idea that you care about and they will do it the with the same zeal as you when you agreed to censor RT.
Yet despite this fact that has been proven time and time again, here we are in 2025 with people like you who applaud censorship.
There were and are plenty of reasonable groups one could work with, but the genocide is about grabbing land, asserting dominance and exacting revenge, while feeding a victimhood complex that is never able to acknowledge its own mistakes.
> Somehow I cannot recall ever seeing one proactively volunteered
I err on the side of brevity, not seeing a claim that RT's removal was unjust in the comment I was responding to, I felt no need to justify it myself.
I used to be a hardline freedom of information defender, but we must face the fact that humanity has become way too good at manufactoring opinions and even facts. We're exposed to this threat at all levels, from your local company invading your feed with hidden ads in legitimate tiktok content to nation states influencing your political worldview.
Considering yourself immune to this manipulation is as naive as thinking you don't need vaccines - depressingly, we've far beyond the point where individual protection is enough.
As opposed to your positions. The masses, well, they think wrong, but you, you thought long and hard about everything and you came to the right conclusions.
What's next? Give the right to vote only to the "right" people?
After all, if you can't trust the judgment of the masses because their views are based mainly on emotional reasons then surely you don't think they should have a say in how their country should be run?
Is that really a good example? Weimar Germany regularly suppressed and censored Nazi newspapers and publications, shut down hundreds of Nazi newspapers, and even at one point suppressed party gatherings.[1] Obviously, it did not work, and the Nazis used the same laws and precedent to suppress their enemies when they took power, and were able to campaign with statements like "in all of Germany, why are WE silenced?"
You can take two things away from this:
1. Weimar should have suppressed the Nazis EVEN HARDER. Weimar needed an even more stringent censorship regime, shutting down any publication and arresting the editors at the slightest whiff of wrongthink. They should have deployed informers to identify and arrest dissidents before they broke out into the public arena.
OR
2. Weimar Germany was a deeply unpopular and dysfunctional regime that had already failed. Governments should do better to represent the interests of their people so that things never get to that point. The Nazis would never have obtained any power if Germany had been doing well and people felt represented by their government, no matter what kind of crazy propaganda they put out; people don't choose extremism because of propaganda, they become propagandized when they are deeply disaffected. Censorship only further delegitimized the regime and increased the popularity of the Nazis, as it showed they were a threat to the people in power that were perceived to be mismanaging the country.
[1] https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/wo...
It's pure hypocrisy coupled with conformity - or rather virtue signalling. Send junk weapons to Ukraine to showcase that you do support the cause, meanwhile keep buying gas the same time go after their propaganda because that looks nice.
There are literally thousands of cases constantly of different severity, but freedom looks different to me. https://www.zdfheute.de/politik/deutschland/habeck-beleidigu...
When that happens, you won't be happy anymore and you will go on Twitter complaining that your government is turning fascist in a hurry and ask how nobody did anything to stop this.
But you probably think that it's never going to happen because you are one of the good people, not the scum of the earth that dares watching Tiktok.
Consider the cost of the sites I listed. Literally, how do you pay these companies? With the monetization of your attention, first and foremost. Good journalism costs money to produce, leaving good journalists unable to be the highest bidder.
Just think about this (which is not 100% correct, but for the sake of discussion): it's probably not meta, google and tiktok. It's the internet peoples who are the source of all that. It's peoples who say hate, who push for ideas they believe in, and they also (surprise!) publish ads! (While google et cetera are just a medium, with lots of moderation, yep.).
What do you prefer instead, to make domain registrars enforce sanctions instead of blocking on DNS level? That would quickly make so that no one with Russian passport is able to register a domain no matter how much we are against russia or putin
If it had been more effective, more people would become very impressed the first time they came across a new to them, consistent (more or less!) narrative universe in which the bad guys are the good guys. Not only that, but their narrative incorporates a bunch of entirely true, verifiable damning truths about "our" side.
there's nothing wrong with this. Stable democracies tend to be republican and elitist. One of the reasons why the US has been, until recently, an exceptionally stable country was because decision making was largely insulated from the whims of the public. Democracy properly understood is best used as a tool for legitimacy and as a check against the worst abuses of power, not actually as a tool for decision making.
Having the inmates run the asylum is generally a bad idea, we've known this since Plato.
The thing I referred to in my previous comment is more of a historical thing before smart TVs and similar tech. Current RF technology is still just an evolution of the same signals sent 70+ years ago. So they’d moderate content via scheduling. “Terrestrial TV” still works that way today.
You are presenting an argument and I am pointing out the flaws in it.
I am also presenting the logical conclusion of your argument that maybe you were not comfortable making in your original comment, that is that a certain part of the population is not capable of thinking rationally and therefore, someone else must decide what they should be able to see, hear and read because otherwise they may make the "wrong" choices.
That, in turn implies that their votes could be also swayed by emotional reasons, so if you think that these people are not capable of making up their own mind about the issues that we face today, then surely, you are not fine with having them express their opinion in the voting booth.
> But clearly populism combined with propaganda isn’t working out either in a number of countries.
So your solution to populism is to refrain the population from accessing views that you find problematic?
> I realize very well the problems of following this line of thought
I don't think you do because if you did then you would know that having the state decide what citizens should have the right to see or hear is exactly the same kind of rhetoric that authoritarian regimes use today.
> Should we just stop thinking about causes and what could be done about it, because it’s uncomfortable to think about it?
I don't think anyone is feeling uncomfortable looking at the many issues that the western democracies are facing today.
I am uncomfortable however when someone thinks that the solution to these problems is to go down the path of censorship because sooner or later someone will use the same excuse to start censoring political opponents/ so-called undesirable views in the name of saving democracies or protecting the children or fighting terrorism as it has been seen time and time again.
The solution to the views that you find problematic such as the ones expressed on RT is not found in the reduction of free speech, it is done through education and demonstration of the facts.
I don't have a side in terms of a political entity or official, I'm defending evidence-based action. I genuinely think my life is better because I don't have to defend anyone uncritically, but you're welcome to try and change my mind I guess lol
Where did you heard it?
It is not only factually incorrect, every point is just completely wrong: no favorable candidate to Moscow was elected in 2014, US did not worked to undermine democracy and there is absolutely zero evidence of both of these things happened.
This is what RT and other propaganda networks is dangerous, it creates a fake reality which people believe in. Then you act on this knowledge as if it is real.
Just because two things superficially share some traits doesn't mean they are equivalent, at all. "Full-blown warfare against their own populations" is a bit dramatic, don't you think? As a German, I can tell you, while the government doesn't much act to my benefit, I am not exactly at war with them either. Intelligence, military and police don't have the competence or power, either. Most importantly, like in many proper democracies, there is a plurality of opinions and oversight in parliament, which prevents this sort of thing at scale. "Full-blown warfare" would imply a grand conspiracy, that's simply not factual.
Apart from the UK, Hungary and Poland, I think that's true for most western countries. The US is a bit exceptional, of course, since... well, I don't know what the fuck they are smoking there.
Israel definitely should be sanctioned till it stops its war crimes because doing nothing will directly affect us.
Ukraine is most definitely a part of Europe.
Moldova and Georgia and Ukraine, as relates to its aggression in Europe.
This is as pointless as saying that is my role as a consumer to test the food that I buy to ensure it is not contaminated with shit, so instead of punishing the companies that have contaminated food we should allow them to sell if even if we know it contains literal shit and instead teach our children in school how to use equipment to test the food.
Sorry for the Ruzzian puppets but soem countries are not retarded and they decided to block the toxic food today and not ignore the victims, as I said in the original comments we have laws and the fact that you are from Ruzzia should not put you above our laws, RT shoudl stay banned until they open a local branch where we can apply the fine to them equaly as we apply to our own media.
Also there are a lot of Ruzzian money wasted on social media to spread actual fake shit, priovable fake shit that I think we need to really go further in identifying the source of behind those fake crap and arrest, fine and sanction the individuals behind that shit, no level of education can just make a person intelligent or make them do investigative work to confirm that some information that he really, really loves is in fact false.
And I know some fascist here will claim that trush is not objective, and my response is that a photoshoped document is 100% fake in all natural logic systems. The strategy used in Romanian presidential campaign by the Ruzzian aligned side was to put faked documents or information on social media then have media people share in on social media and then bringt the faked document in discussion on TV.
So don't cry for the regular idiot they still get their conspiracies and faked information from Ruzzia on social media and sometimes even in the mail, as an example they sent people faked official looking letters that they are getting called to military service to go and fight in Ukraine.
So please freedom of media but there must be consequences for external media not only for local one.
Israel should be sanctioned because of the war crimes and the genocide perpetrated by their government, I agree, but that's a different thing.
The only safer places are heavily moderated hobby related forums with actual people. Anti vaxxing is not a hobby btw.
Right, so my local TV gets fined if they published something fake, like for example they had a news about some bullshit happening in Romania but they were showing a video from a different country, the TV claimed it was stupidity and not manipulation, they got fined.
So I want RT and other media to respect the exact same laws, if they do not want to respect our laws and continue to publish fake shit we block them until they pay their fines and start respecting the laws.
And trust me there is no communism censorship here in Romania, the TV is terrible still , you get tons of commercial to shitty suppliments and gambling, you get politicians presenting their bullshit conspiracies, you get the hosts claiming that Soros is doing everything that is wrong in the country and this days also Macron and France are big villains (because they upset Putin and the Zeds are super, duper butt hurt )), you can see ladies presenting themselves as "doctors in energy-shit-karma-bullshit" and claiming the vaccines caused a giant number of allergies and other crap that she and her company with ehr supplements will sell.
We still let people to be idiots but we need to not be idiots like a society and let paid and organized attacks on our population to continue, and we need to do more against this state organized attacks. (as I mentioned previously but maybe in other comment faked documents were sent by mail to people, this is clearly a state sponsored action, they had names and addresses, they falsified documents and then paid for physical mail delivery to make it look more authentic )
And yes, I think you have a side, and I think these groups' foreign policies are 1. Very far from being simply "evidence based" and 2. Not in any meaningful sense under democratic control.
Have you ever wondered why so many people actually turn up to vote for Putin in Russia, even though they don't really influence anything by doing so?
I think they have simply decided that it's easier to want what they can have. Learn to like the taste of the only course that's on the menu.
And I also think that attitude is very common in the western world.