Censorship

When a regime has finished with the newspapers and the television studios, there is always one frontier left, and for the Russian state that frontier is now the internet itself. The old press was strangled long ago; the last registered liberal outlets were blocked in the first week of the full-scale war, and the editors were given the standard choice between prison and silence. But none of that reached the place where most people had quietly gone to find out what was actually happening — the open net, with the handful of platforms that still carried information and opinion diverging from Kremlin propaganda. Two of them mattered above the rest: Wikipedia, and, towering over everything, YouTube. The campaign against these is not a continuation of the old censorship by other means. It is a qualitatively new project: not to bend the platforms but to wall the country off from them, to sever an entire population from the global information space and seal it inside a managed enclosure. This is the digital iron curtain, and it is being lowered in plain sight. ...

There is a peculiar instruction that observers of foreign affairs hear constantly, and it always arrives in the same imperative tone. Do not interfere in American affairs. Do not interfere in European affairs. And if you no longer live in the country you came from, do not interfere in its affairs either. The logic, such as it is, runs like this: a person who watches a country from a distance has forfeited the right to an opinion about it, and any judgment he offers is an impertinence at best and a hostile intrusion at worst. The demand deserves to be taken seriously, because beneath its surface lies a genuine question — about who is entitled to speak, and about what honesty requires of anyone who does. The answer comes in two parts that may at first seem to pull against each other. The first is that the demand for silence is not modesty but censorship. The second is that the freedom to speak does not license one to say anything at all; it comes attached to duties that are easy to evade and important to honor. ...