Comment by potatototoo99
4 days ago
No it isn't. For example in my EU country I can see the list of all websites blocked, and all of them are for piracy/copyright infringement and illegal betting (legal betting is allowed, but must register and pay taxes). That and rt.com. I can also say/post whatever I want in social media except stalk and harass individual people. There is no "censorship" at all compared to virtually anywhere else in the world, US included.
Blocking RT is not censorship?
Nor is sanctioning your own journalists? Or a former intelligence agent, a Swiss national who worked for NATO, and now lives in Belgium?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46969722
You link to a comment which lists a number of russian-paid propaganda actors spreading lies and hate. They have not been censored by a government but by courts which based on evidence identified breaches of law. It's something very different from censorship.
Pensioner called Merz "pinoccio," now faces police investigation.
Even our "authoritarian" PM Modi ignores petty nonsense like this. You people need to wake up.
https://www.stimme.de/heilbronn/stadt-heilbronn/friedrich-me...
RT was not censored by any courts of law. It was censored by an unelected executive branch.
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Col Jacques Baud is the exception to your rant. He's a retired swiss intelligence officer who served with NATO.
He didn't even quote a Russian source in his books, has refused to appear on any Russian media channel.
Now explain why he's sanctioned.
So say when China censors USAian and European sites, that's authoritarian, but when Europe does it it's very different from censorship.
Got it.
Blocking someone who's sole purpose is to destabilise your region is wrong? You are an idiot if you think that one should let them spread their lies and anti EU propaganda freely.
Imagine what the Russian government tells its citizens about (blocked) European and American foreign news, and then you will see why this is a terrible argument. The mark of a free country is that nothing is blocked, because the citizens can be trusted to think.
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> all of them are for piracy/copyright infringement and illegal betting
Does that include all of the sites that share the same IP addresses as those sites?
For that matter, you're posting a reply to an article about a European country blocking the website of a generic US government VPN service, and the service isn't even operating yet. So not only have they graduated to censoring VPNs, they're now censoring a website whose only content is political criticism of their other censorship.
There are no IP bans ...
Well apparently there are, because huge swaths of CDN PoP IPs are getting banned/blocked in Europe especially during La Liga matches. How are we explaining this?
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Good lord. Your response only proved his statement. Blocking rt.com glaringly showcases the eye-rolling, ridiculous and "moving to dangerous-territory" censorship that the EU is performing - my opinion as a citizen of an Asian nation.
How much dangerous censorship does your Asian nation carry out? India, for example, blocks thousands of websites - no sex work for them - and regularly shuts down the Internet entirely.
Why is the response to all of this a giant ad hominem. “Oh but <region> does it too!” - how does this help me as an European?
Why else do you think I mentioned that the EU is on a dangerous path ? I utterly stand against govt censorship.
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Ah yes, there is a foreign government sponsored campaign to deligitimise and spread lies about your country and government. And because you are a democracy you should just accept it and let lies and propaganda flood your country? Can't even make these entities follow the law as they operate outside your legal framework. So let them lie and manipulate people while claiming to be "news.l".
This is how democracy dies - when we stop caring about truth. This is how fox ruined the US, when lies becomes fine just because they are "opinion" or "entertainment".
Hate to break it to you, but European countries have equivalent foreign news propaganda services: Deutsche Welle & France24, for example. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. If European countries weren't such nanny states, they would trust in their populations' critical thinking skills.
> That and ...
lenta.ru ? (aha, management personnel has been replaced 2014 [1])
[1] https://t.me/systemasystema/89 [RU]
> No it isn't.
Yes it is.
> For example in my EU country I can see the list of all websites blocked, and all of them are for piracy/copyright infringement and illegal betting (legal betting is allowed, but must register and pay taxes). That and rt.com.
You provided a counter-example that disproves your claim in the next sentence. I'm just flabbergasted.
Blocking a propaganda outlet by a hostile foreign government is not censorship and certainly not "general censorship that is normalised."
If you know that a foreign actor intentionally tries to undermine your government you honestly think the right course of action is to just relax and let it happen? Absurd.
Europe has seen it's share of dictators and knows that a democracy needs to also protect itself.
A regime dictating what its people may and may not read about is exactly censorship.
I'd love to see the link to your country's blocklist.
Not op, but here: https://www.gespa.ch/en/fighting-illegal-gambling/access-blo...
Let's be real, this is just protectionism. The most popular prediction market in the world is DNS-blocked, in the hopes of redirecting you to some crappy online casinos instead.
Not true. Going to assume you are from Spain. Try posting a recording of the police. Try posting something praising terrorism. Try a joke about victims of terrorism. A humour magazine called Mongolia has been fined with 40,000€ for publishing a joke about Ortega Cano. Try offending religion publicly. All of that is allowed in the US.
Every country in Europe has some restraint to freedom of expression (lots of them ban either nazi or communist symbols, for starters). US has none.
That's normalization.