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Comment by egorfine | Hacker News Reader

Can we conclude that this means the Great Firewall of russia is working and ~60% of population does not care?

Update: no. Russian people who care use VPN and thus are not counted as russian traffic.

Well, they are concerned, however citizens of authoritarian states have no agency in decision-making. It works to the extent where mobile internet is mostly not working in places like Moscow (traffic to a few white-listed sites is allowed). A lot of services based on mobile connectivity are nearly impossible there for this reason (and geolocation has 4-digits before decimal point precision in km).

The blocking of cloudflare in Spain shows that citizens of “democratic” states have no agency either.

It is different. It’s just not a sensitive issue - you cannot win elections having fixing this as central part of your platform. In authoritarian states you cannot win elections, period.

It is always "different". Are you older than 18 years ? Are you "allowed" to use a computer ? Or is this "different" ?

What leads you to think they don’t care?

If you talk or write with Russians, its quite clear that they don't care. A majority of them are not following any kind of news, and the ones that are follow pro government stuff. Even though telegram was banned, the majority of all Russian channels are pro-government.[0]

[0] https://cedarus.io/research/what-do-russians-read

I always doubt statistics based on self-reporting, when there are such strong incentives not to be caught supporting the opposition. If you say the wrong thing, you may get prison, or very accidentally trip and tragically fall out of a window.

It's hard to get accurate numbers when there can be very real consequences for saying you do care about these things. I'm not saying I know one way or the other, just that it's hard to know what people really think in a situation like this.

It doesn't matter what people think it only matters how people act. The Russian ability to suffer in silence is legendary.

A guy in russia makes interviews of people on the street.

https://youtube.com/@1420channel?si=_IlEAa4V1rilJOMb

Some people just say nothing (due to consequenses), some are very imperialist (rural areas have extremely high occurance). Rarer case, openly against government.

I do both in real life, and it's quite clear that what you say is false. Remember that media and online spaces are not a reflection of the reality on the ground. Your own link even discusses one of the reasons for that: dissident media tries to fill the gap avoided by loyal media, of course all that seems similar and manipulative as a result, because they don't write about anything else. Some do understand that, but they operate from abroad - try covering anything mundane about Russia in Latvia, where e.g. Meduza resides, and see how it goes. Naturally people grow tired of the media that feels the same. (Meduza in particular making a lot of stuff up doesn't help). Online spaces are simply suppressed, you can't even give a thumb up without facing 20 years and likely being sent to the meat grinder head-first.

Russia has very effective media in using the firehose of falsehood (Trump and his media groups follow the same pattern). You fill the field with so many lies that Bullshit Asymmetry makes it near impossible to figure out the truth.

The entire point is making everyone so tired all the time and feel like they can't make any progress. Then the government as less work of finding the few places where people congregate and stop them from meeting there.

Yes, my point is "censorship and bots do work" does not equal "people don't care". People online often imagine themselves to be pretty informed about some other country, especially if they communicate with people from that country. This is delusional, I can't claim I know much about "average reality of living in Brazil" even though I communicate with people from there, follow some media, have traveled across it on a motorcycle, and was a guest to some friends there. This is even less true for current Russia.

> If you talk or write with Americans, its quite clear that they don't care. A majority of them are not following any kind of news, and the ones that are follow pro government stuff.

Case in point: totally-not-a-war with Iran.

People who do care use a VPN and don't get counted as Russian traffic

Ahhh so that completely invalidates my hypothesis. I stand corrected.

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