Who liberated the concentration camps?

There is no such thing as a “free and neutral net”. It would be nice if there were but sadly that’s just a fairly tale for children. Someone is always in control.

Poland was never part of the Soviet Union. Unless they lived in the USSR and later moved to Poland, they did not “grow up under Soviet rule”.

It’s probably healthy for them to take a step away from social media and go touch grass for a while.

It only seemed that way because we were not as aware of the extent of western information warfare operations. In reality the firewall has always been justified.

The Nazi regime in Kiev which came to power in a US orchestrated coup attacked Russian speaking regions of Ukraine and has pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing since 2014. Sources here: https://lemmy.ml/post/26654686

Your German example is legit, but you are completely dismissing their cultural guilt related to WWII; there are signs of them shifting.

They have no guilt, else they would not be supporting another genocide or giving money and weapons to help Nazis kill Russians again. Their pretense of feeling guilt is purely performative and self-aggrandizing. The only signs are of them getting worse, more self-righteous, more racist, more authoritarian toward any dissenters, more detached from reality.

but you are completely dismissing the existential threat of Russia.

Is their deranged paranoia supposed to justify their revisionist history portraying SS butchers as the good guys and the liberators of the death camps as the bad guys?

You are also trying to be subtle in shifting to mainstream media

Where have i mentioned mainstream media? And why are you shifting the goalposts? The topic was freedom of speech, regardless on which media. And social media has replaced mainstream media for most people nowadays anyway.

when the thread was about internet control and social media

Yes, social media is being censored and controlled across Europe and the broader West. Let’s not even mention how often Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter have banned anti-imperialist channels, deleted pro-Palestinian or pro-Russian content. The governments themselves are legally persecuting social media based news outlets, forcing them to shut down

Both in Britain and in Germany you can get arrested and prosecuted for social media posts. There have been plenty such cases.

In Germany you get sued and even arrested for simply insulting politicians on social media. It is enough to simply call a politician stupid (what else can you call someone who doesn’t know what doing a 360° turn means?) and you can get charged and taken to court. One particularly ghoulish politician has levied over 2000 defamation charges at people for insulting her.

The US government already does that. It controls US based social media. If you don’t live in the US you should want your government to control the social media you use because at least that way you can have a say in that control via the (nominally) democratic control you exert over your own government. Either way someone controls it. By not having digital sovereignty your country is just handing the control over your information space to a foreign government which can then use it to shape your opinions and views to their advantage instead of yours.

but you won’t get censored for criticising the Government… I guess unless you are an American criticizing Israel

Or if you are a British journalist speaking out against genocide, in which case you get arrested on terrorism charges

Or if you are in Germany and hold a conference discussing said genocide, in which case the police raids you and shuts you down

Or if you are a European journalist documenting an inconvenient truth from the “wrong side”, in which case you get your bank account seized and face criminal charges and are banned from entering the EU

Or if you are in the Baltics celebrating Europe’s victory over the Nazis and singing songs the government doesn’t like, in which case you get arrested, fined and possibly jailed

Freedom of speech in the West amounts to you being free to shout into the void, and only so long as it doesn’t change anything or threaten the ruling establishment and its political agenda. As long as your speech is entirely ineffectual and can be ignored by those in power then you can scream as loud as you want. As soon as your speech is a real threat to the agenda of the ruling class you are quickly shut down and made an example of with extreme prejudice.

You are functionally not allowed to challenge the official government position in the West either. In European countries the government outright bans candidates from standing in elections if they are anti-EU or anti-NATO, and you are threatened with fines or even jail time for disagreeing with the official narrative on Ukraine conflict. On certain issues, namely those that actually matter, there is only one accepted position, and deviation results in you being branded a terrorist, traitor, Hamas sympathizer, Russian agent, etc.

The West is just as if not more authoritarian than China. China is just more honest about their censorship.