'Why would he take such a risk?' My censor and me

This is almost out of Discworld.

The point is that descriptive writing is very rarely entirely accurate and during the reign of Olaf Quimby II as Patrician of Ankh some legislation was passed in a determined attempt to put a stop to this sort of thing and introduce some honesty into reporting. Thus, if a legend said of a notable hero that “all men spoke of his prowess” any bard who valued his life would add hastily “except for a couple of people in his home village who thought he was a liar, and quite a lot of other people who had never really heard of him.” Poetic simile was strictly limited to statements like “his mighty steed was as fleet as the wind on a fairly calm day, say about Force Three,” and any loose talk about a beloved having a face that launched a thousand ships would have to be backed by evidence that the object of desire did indeed look like a bottle of champagne.

Quimby was eventually killed by a disgruntled poet during an experiment conducted in the palace grounds to prove the disputed accuracy of the proverb “The pen is mightier than the sword,” and in his memory it was amended to include the phrase “only if the sword is very small and the pen is very sharp.”

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

We need bipartisan work to shrink the government so that neither Trump nor Biden's actions will damage us.

Oof. This sort of black self-aware humor was quite common in the Soviet Union, too.

> In spring 2014, the Chinese government begins to purge influential Weibo users, the so-called big V – as in, verified – accounts. A journalist at the People’s Liberation Army Daily is so impassioned that he publishes a post on Weibo calling all big Vs vermin who must be dealt with severely

This reminds me of the Musk purge of verified accounts, the old blueticks, mostly because they were liberal journalists, replacing them with the meaningless "I paid for my bad posts to be promoted" badge.

Is being appointed a personal censor dystopian, or is it less dystopian than posting to youtube etc. knowing that you may have your posts deleted and be banned but never have the opportunity to speak to your censor?

> prohibits university-level teachers from discussing seven topics in class: universal values, freedom of the press, civil society, civil rights, historical mistakes of the Communist party, powerful bourgeoisie and judicial independence.

side-eyes Columbia university

> None of the participants foresees that, in 10 years, half the people around the table will be in jail. Some, like me, will be living in exile. Those still in Beijing will have long been silenced and will not utter a word.

Oof.

> Some of the orders are unbelievable. One variety show compere says he almost “died laughing”. In subtitles, the word “died” must be put inside double quotation marks, otherwise it is a breach of regulations. It’s as though viewers are considered not intelligent enough to understand an extremely simple phrase

See "Unalive". Although the Chinese and Japanese languages have stronger taboos than English about death words.