[herbertgreen]

The progress of censorship in every single Western country is an admission that "democracy" is a fallacy born from an exceptional small period of time of civil peace, economic growth and wealth. Countries can only follow a stable political path - good or bad, this is not the point - if they have an authoritarian regime.

Communism did not work because it was not communist enough, now democracy is not working because it's not democratic enough. Democracy is the golden calf of westerners. I truly believe that voting rights are hurting more a society than drugs and alcohol.

[simonask]

A crucial component of democracy is free and accurate media. Every single functioning democracy in the world has institutions that can apply some amount of sanctions against newspapers and other media that do no live up to the expectation of accuracy.

They are struggling to figure out how to do this in the Information Age, but that doesn’t mean it’s not reasonable or important. Blocking propaganda posing as “news” is a stopgap measure, but we can’t do nothing if we want democracy to work.

[ur-whale]

> A crucial component of democracy is free and accurate media.

What does "accurate media" mean?

The fact is, there strictly isn't and strictly never was any such thing.

In fact, it is absolutely impossible to attain something like this.

The moment something gets transcribed, it ceases to be objective and therefore, there never isnt any such thing as "accurate" news.

Any student of history learns this in their first semester.

> They are struggling to figure out how to do this in the Information Age

LOL, it was far, far worse before the information age.

True, there was far fewer "official" versions of what actually goes on in the world, but it doesn't mean they were in any way accurate or any less manipulative.

All it takes to check that is to hop from one so-called "free country" to another an compare two mainstream newspapers describing the same event.

The only way you can get a bit close to the actual truth of what's happening is by reading all the opinions, especially the diametrically opposed ones and try to form your own.

[Amezarak]

When exactly was there “free and accurate” media? Did you mistake the restrictions on some 20th century broadcast media that originated as a consequence of government licensing as some sort of centuries-old universal truth prior to social media? If anything newspapers in particular used to be much more irresponsible and scandalous, certainly as bad as anything on Twitter. And yes, there was plenty of foreign influence operations as well.

[herbertgreen]

Democracy immediately stops existing when elites start to prevent people of "wrongthink". Democracy is just another authoritarian system with a big downside: nobody is accountable of failures. There is no king, no chief to dethrone. Another friend of the temporary suzerain will be placed in power for a couple of years.