One of the deepest ironies of our current situation is that the modes of communication that enable today’s authoritarians were first dreamed up to defeat them

If you want to find corruption, then "Follow the money." If you want to find authoritarians, you can follow the flow of fundamental things in much the same way:

    - Who is doing the silencing?
    - Who is engaging in coercion?
    - Who wishes for the power to coerce?
    - Who is using violence?
    - Who is distorts the truth to push agendas?
    - Who eschews the universal for the momentarily convenient?

The answer nowadays is the same answer as in other times and places: angry, toxic parties who tend towards the far ends of the political spectrum, both left and right. It's the fringes that want discourse to end and take normal people for an excursion into chaos. It's the fringes that want to roll the dice for their chance at power.

The best thing to do is to let people have their voice. There's no authoritarian nonsense, no matter how virulent, which lasts forever and is immune to general good sense. It might take awhile, but people eventually come around.

A note of caution: there are a lot of villains who thought they were on the side of good, who turned out to be the opposite. When you've given up on convincing, and you're starting to shout, to hate, and to want to coerce people, you're probably on the wrong side of history.