You are much more likely to be repressed/harrassed/arrested by your local government than a foreign government. So a local government knowing your behavior is more likely to lead to bad consequences than a foreign government knowing.
Of course, that might change in the future. Hypothetical example, the US government bans you from using any US cloud services because of what you did in private.
Though that's not exactly exclusive to governments either, Google banning you from GMail and Google Docs because of your YouTube uploads is already a thing.
There is certainly plenty of retaliation happening against non-compliant speech and people. The federal government has been used as a weapon against pro Palestinian activists, people are being imprisoned by Ice on the day of their citizenship ceremony, "enemy" officials like Leticia James face politically motivated investigations, universities are being bullied into ideological compliance and on and on.
That's really not the point they were making.
You are much more likely to be repressed/harrassed/arrested by your local government than a foreign government. So a local government knowing your behavior is more likely to lead to bad consequences than a foreign government knowing.
Of course, that might change in the future. Hypothetical example, the US government bans you from using any US cloud services because of what you did in private.
Though that's not exactly exclusive to governments either, Google banning you from GMail and Google Docs because of your YouTube uploads is already a thing.
There is certainly plenty of retaliation happening against non-compliant speech and people. The federal government has been used as a weapon against pro Palestinian activists, people are being imprisoned by Ice on the day of their citizenship ceremony, "enemy" officials like Leticia James face politically motivated investigations, universities are being bullied into ideological compliance and on and on.