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if the tech companies "de-platform" Russia on their own does that count as a sanction? I wouldn't think so since it wouldn't have been ordered by a government. I wonder how Russia would react to that, cyber warfare against the company denying them service?

edit: after thinking about it, the above seems like punishing the Russian people more than the Russian government which shouldn't be done IMO

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Banning ordinary Russians from using American services would remove the last place where Russians can express their opinions freely, playing into Putin's hands.

Well sanctions generally affect the average citizen the hardest already.

It's not like government or military leaders are the ones that can't get basic medical supplies or food in a sanctioned country.

Why can’t they spin up a blog? Also, as an American, I don’t think those FAANG places are a safe space for “expressing opinions freely”. The boys (bots) will come.

An independent blog is easily banned. In fact, most of them are already. Platforms like Facebook host millions of pages and use https so it's not possible to ban individual pages, only the whole thing. And they've been hesitant to ban whole social networks because of possible discontent

It's a lot easier to DDOS a blog than it is to DDOS facebook.

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