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Comment by RandomLensman | Hacker News Reader

Did the USSR have TV channels in the West during the cold war?

To answer the spirit of the question: as an American, you could freely subscribe to Soviet newspapers, printed in the USSR, which the US Post Office would deliver right to your doorstep (via international mail). That has been the case since 1965, when the Supreme Court settled the question in Lamont v. Postmaster General.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamont_v._Postmaster_General

You could also watch some Soviet movies, but I'd say that is very different to access form large scall media outlets (radio, TV) that don't rely on subscription etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_Soviet_Union...

That was censorship too ...

Of course. Or in the US during WWII, etc. Censorship is part of conflicts and confrontations.

Maybe better to say there are two different forms of censorship: 1) the government doesn't like something, 2) society reduces it attack surface

The two can coincide or not.

That's a really low bar we're setting for our "liberal" "democracies".

Its height notwithstanding, it's a bar that worked before for liberal democracies.

Coming up next: "The police may beat us up bad because we marched at a protest, but at least we're not thrown to the dogs as Kim's uncle."

So how would you have fought the propaganda/psy-ops side of the cold war? Why do you think your approach would have worked as well or better?

How about informing/educating people by promoting instead of undermining real journalism? I aspire to be able to tell apart A from B for myself, and not being told what is what from a nanny state and controlled media.

Can't the "free" and purportedly superior western media debunk whatever BS rt.com peddles?

But then they would probably be inclined to also call-out the psy-ops and other shenaningans staged by our govenments and targeting us. Ooops!

In most cases, you have no way of telling A and B apart unless you are directly involved or an expert.

Debunking has limited effectiveness even in factual situations, beyond factual, not even sure what that would mean.

There is, of course, also a numbers game, flipping the side of a few people is quite sufficient for a some things, so even being really good at countering adversarial propaganda will leave a lot of gaps. Reducing an attack surface might not always be a bad idea.

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