Start to teach logical fallacies in primary schools. Encourage critical thinking. This comes at the cost that the government's own bs does not work so well anymore, because people now know how to spot a logical fallacy.

To be clear, I'm not saying that the enemy agitprop is all true. However, the most effective kind of agitprop is the one that uses facts as the foundation for the rest of the structure. So how about we start there?

First, I will point out that almost no government, ever and everywhere, isn't full to the core with corruption and lying, like a decaying and rotten fruit left for weeks in a garbage dump.

Some Westerners are deluded with the strange thought that it somehow makes a difference that those who are bamboozling them do it through convoluted interlocking systems of protocols and processes, commonly called Democracy, and not through brute force or other such barbarous means.

From a dispassionate analysis of raw results, however, considering just the outside blackbox behaviour of a country without reference to its internal algorithms and data structures, almost every single thing China or Russia can do to a citizen, USA and Canada and UK And Germany can (and does), just maybe not as frequently and not as publicly (yet).

This rather large caveat\objection aside, I will take the question at face value : what can a (supposedly benevolent) government do in the face of outside propaganda? A lot.

First, propaganda is easy, especially when you're a government. If a foreign country is paying X to propagandize your citizens, you can afford to pay 10X, discounted by all the natural advantages you have when you're propagandizing your own citizens (same language and culture, official capacity to make and enforce laws, privileged position when dealing with media outlets, etc..., you literally rule). Indeed, for the same reason that religions always need a devil and revolutions always need enemies, the foreign propaganda might be a boon to you, a thing to rally against in your own propaganda, food for your propaganda artists.

Second, talk is cheap, and the vast majority of people would rather rage than do anything in real life. So, let propaganda fester, like a harmless fever. This an unfortunate effect of large human populations, known at the smaller scales as the bystander effect. In essence, everybody just says "not my problem" and just keeps shouting (if they do even that), hoping for someone else to actually do something, but everybody is thinking like that so nothing really gets done. This is bad for the people, but it's good for governments, it means most Free Speech is harmless. (which is bad news for any serious Free Speech advocate, because the goal isn't Free Speech in and of itself, but Free Expression, which starts with Free Speech but must end with Free Action. But again, this is all normative land, in actual material fact, most Free Speech is pure thunder without lightning or rain, and nobody loses anything by allowing it unless what they're hiding is truly egregious.)

Finally, returning to the first caveat again, maybe just fuck you, the government? Maybe the foreign government is actually correct and the citizens should revolt and create unrest and become ungovernable till their demands are met?

In summary, don't worry about the poor little governments, they can manage very well, with all the monopoly on violence and money printing and whatnot.

heres an example where the White House admits it: https://nypost.com/2021/07/15/white-house-flagging-posts-for...

That is censorship, because social media then bans (censors) those users and the discussion. Which was my exact point.

What do they do in China: “hey this snippet here looks like misinformation” then the company removes that snippet. They extend it to insults about the Chinese race, but don’t we do the same with gender pronouns?

How is it different materially?

My point was censorship is done universally, just in different ways and for different topics. It’s always the same reason though, to avoid some idea the people in power don’t want propagated. Could be a joke, could be “misinformation”, could be that there’s only one good race (no one dare make fun of), or you can have any gender. It’s all just power / politics.

The censored rarely take the time to learn what is being censored because they don’t think to know. You have to keep the idea from entering the mind of the opposition. That’s why you censor in the first place. You have to defame those who question the authority and call them “fascists” so no one listens to them. Self-censoring who you listen to and not telling others “hey this person has an interesting take!” It’s all the same game, a game to control the population.

> Besides, censorship is not inherently bad, and most stable democracies with a functioning legal system will have some form of censorship, to protect minors, for example.

I would argue we don’t see stable “democracies”, we see oligarchies. Why is it ruling families in the UK still effectively rule? Politicians are always from a certain class. Similar in France, when’s the last commoner who speaks like the rural folk who’s held the prime minister seat? We all see how Trump was treated for speaking plainly… then again, he was a “threat to democracy”

The oligarchs control what you can think, through managing what information you can read / see. “Democracy” in the US is a code word, for the status quo.

Then why do you get mad when China or the Middle East bans material they find objectionable? They simply have a different definition of what counts as objectionable, that's all, and it's well within their rights to enforce their different cultural values within their borders, just like you argue that a "democracy" has this right.

Also, when I go to Netflix and search for "LGBT", I see tons of material. So that must obviously mean censoring of LGBT is a pathetic lie, it's right there in one (very big, much bigger than Fox) media outlet so it's obviously not censored.

Disagreement among private parties, or getting less private promotion than you wanted to get, is not “censorship”. It’s free speech in action.