You know you've lost your freedom of speech when the Russians are laughing at you

It is a sad day for the Western world when the Russians have good cause to mock the free world and its lost freedom of speech. The Russian news agency RT has just announced the creation of a new portal, New Samizdat, which will aggregate news stories censored by the Western English-language MSM.
For those of you born in the free world, here is a definition of Samizdat:

Samizdat was a form of dissident activity across the Eastern bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader. This grassroots practice to evade official Soviet censorship was fraught with danger, as harsh punishments were meted out to people caught possessing or copying censored materials. Vladimir Bukovsky summarized it as follows: "Samizdat: I write it myself, edit it myself, censor it myself, publish it myself, distribute it myself, and spend jail time for it myself."

I remember, as a child, people passing along censored pamphlets, poems and banned books. Even music was circulated as samizdat.
Some of you will say - ‘we’re not there yet’ - but this is the direction we’re heading. As RT mentions it its article, hundreds of independent alternative pages have just been purged from Facebook. If you don’t check, you might not even notice a certain page has been deleted. It has happened to me to see posts with a link to Snopes pasted by FB saying that that particular story is not reliable. I’ve read today articles praising Facebook’s moves 'to keep us safe from the plague of fake news'. Again, I know, we have the blockchain, but the masses don't. Unfortunately.

I’m pretty sure the Russians are not the ones who should be mocking the Western press, as there’s a lot of censorship in the Russian media as well. But that’s not the point. The point is the West is losing its freedom of speech and the Russians are laughing their heads off. God knows, maybe the Chinese, too.
You might want to bookmark the New Samizdat, might come in handy one day.

Thanks for reading

rebeccanew.png

Sort:  

Curated for #informationwar (by @wakeupnd)

  • Our purpose is to encourage posts discussing Information War, Propaganda, Disinformation and other false narratives. We currently have over 10,000 Steem Power and 20+ people following the curation trail to support our mission.

  • Join our discord and chat with 250+ fellow Informationwar Activists.

  • Join our brand new reddit! and start sharing your Steemit posts directly to The_IW, via the share button on your Steemit post!!!

  • Connect with fellow Informationwar writers in our Roll Call! InformationWar - Leadership/Contributing Writers/Supporters: Roll Call

Ways you can help the @informationwar

  • Upvote this comment.
  • Delegate Steem Power. 25 SP 50 SP 100 SP
  • Join the curation trail here.
  • Tutorials on all ways to support us and useful resources here

The blockchain becomes ever more important. It is sad that the majority of people, those in my own circle included, fail to even realize that they are losing their freedoms, much less care enough to do anything about it. I talk about it as much as they'll tolerate, but it falls mostly on deaf ears.
New Samizdat may very well come in handy, as you say.

Those in my circle are the same - reposting FB memes and embracing the latest liberal crappy ideas, just because it's trendy.

Wish we can have that mass rejection of MSM by the masses already. Time to speed up the adoption of blockchain social platforms

You got a 45.07% upvote from @ocdb courtesy of @ladyrebecca!

Coin Marketplace

STEEM 0.35
TRX 0.12
JST 0.040
BTC 70638.80
ETH 3565.34
USDT 1.00
SBD 4.73