I find it an equally problematic off-sourcing of state functions to corporations, to have as an excuse "but it's not state censorship".
-- and this is something that has been commented on, and spread increasingly more, for half a century...
"Trump conspiracy theories": Bad.
"WMDs, video with prostitutes in Russia, and the Steele Dossieur": Good.
(plus, we'll self-critique ourselves, several years down the line, when it doesn't matter anymore, e.g. after the war was declared, the elections over, etc., so that makes us legit).
Nobody was saying anything like that.
But go ahead. Have fun with your strawman arguments.
That people don't care about being lied to is their problem. Russia is a political adversary, but don't try to convince people you think critically. That would be absolutely ridiculous for anyone part of that discussion. If people dislike impolite statements more than war too, well, just don't argue about morality please or the same ridiculousness continues.
I don't think Trump is a good candidate to be president. But his opposition was a laughing stock.
Twitter decided they want to join the conspiracies about Russian interference. They are free to do that. But don't complain about other conspiracies either.
In times where there's more fear about dissidents, you get McCarthyism, blacklists, and people fired from their jobs, Hoover's FBI blackmailing politicians and journalists, and so on. And even in more benign times, from MLK to SDS members, and from human rights activists to Kent State students, had taps on them, police records in the tens of thousands of pages, intimidation, and attempts to frame them with drugs, snitches and other BS. Heck, even John Lennon, a harmless famous pop culture figure if I ever saw one, had FBI records the size of a small library.
And this goes all the way to modern OWS members, environmental and political activists, black rights activists, character-assasinated journalists (from Garry Webb to Greenwald), and so on.
And if we extend it to the "but they deserve it, no?", war on terror, I don't see much of a difference between a state with black sites, extra-judicial drone killings, and off-shore off-due-process camps, with people exposing state crimes like Manning in prison and Snowden in exile...
Western phones are no different, the only difference is in which government actually manages the data...
> Western phones are no different, the only difference is in which government actually manages the data...
In some ways first world oppression is comparable to third world oppression, but they are different in scale and magnitude.