Thankfully, as seen in Russia and India, those thousands of cultures have no wish to be moderated by the self-anointed SV elite.
There is a wide spectrum of news you can trivially read, from Fox to BBC to tons of small blogs.
If you want to be anywhere near Soviet levels, you want to eliminate all viewpoints except one. Until you do this, you are not even close.
But from talking to people who were living in the USSR as adults through the 70s and 80s (and my own memories of the USSR in the 80s, though I was not an adult, and reading I have done, but I put more weight on the in-person conversations with people I know and who can give me direct first-hand comparisons), the US is certainly same-universe close at this point, and rapidly getting closer, in terms of things like public confessions, limiting acceptable points of view (in _parts_ of the US, segregated by culture) etc. In some aspect, "further along", heading for Cultural Revolution era China. The practical implications are unfortunately not as different as one might like.
Maybe a clearer way to describe it is that the "lived experience" (again, limited to certain professions or locations in the US) is unfortunately far too similar, even while the legal and social structures that produce it are quite different in their details.
And just make sure we're on the same page: the US now is nothing like _1930s_ USSR. We should make sure we mean the same thing when we say "life in the USSR", because it varied quite a bit over 70 years.
If you are arguing for unbridled free speech then fair enough (Personally I wouldn't but we can have that conversaion).
If however you have your own feelings about sane limits on free speech - then you can't take this position without someone else using your argument against you.
It's fine to make these kind of grand statements but I'd like you to clearly state that you're going all the way with it and not just being slightly less inconsistent than the person you're calling out.
I presumed you were arguing that it is a hypocricy to criticise "repressive government moderation" on one hand while supporting "policing hate speech" on the other.
I would argue that it's possible to consistently support the latter whilst condemning the former. It's simply a debate about when a neccesary evil slips over the line into something worse.
It's just words. Sticks and stones... What I see on social media platforms is a UX made to require moderation. Once upon a time, the user had the power to ignore people with the click of a button. "Don't feed the troll" was common wisdom. If Alex Jones or anyone else said something you didn't like, you just ignored them and never hear them again.
All the "gamification" of social media made everyone participating in social media into "gamers" who throw tantrums and their little joysticks when they "lose" points. Just like when you got your ass beat playing Mortal Kombat. Then moderators, like parents, come in to scold you and give you a timeout/suspension/whatever.