Low information, under-educated, soundbite-oriented mass media consumers are these easiest to manufacture consent of, shout nationalist opinions at, and convince them of the moral superiority of the tribe they supposedly belong to. What's changed over the past 30 years is that media consumption has exploded and diverged with the internet and smart phone, making it easier to bypass centralized broadcast-only mainstream media and any meaningful attempt at regulation of the firehose either by the platforms or by regulators. Cambridge Analytica and Russian interference with phony microprotests were just a few known examples, but it's clear that nefarious actors can and will exploit social media to cause chaos and manipulate people into actions in the real world. That's partially a technological problem but it's mostly a people problem of applying pause, reasonableness, and reasonable skepticism to avoid causing direct harm in the real world. Identifying mass and targeted manipulation of sentiment that doesn't directly affect elections or calls to action is a problem for journalists, tech companies, and regulators to identify and minimize through data analysis.

Also, ownership of TikTok is largely a symbolic, selective, ideological/political fight rather than meaningfully addressing industry regulation of content moderation, data privacy, algorithmic oversight, mental health/app addiction, or data (re)patriation.

I was in China part of 2020 (I entered before their border was closed). It was definitely a low point watching the heavy handed way in which police handled protests. And today seeing police with sniper rifles aiming at students, it is pretty far from the respect for free expression I’d like to see. Point is, China and Russia might be dismissing the right to protest, but the police are doing a pretty good job of that as well.

The other factor is the media, which seems to only be interested in the spectacle of the protest rather than the substance of it. Very rarely do they actually ask about the specific reasons people are protesting. They care more about whether people are protesting in the “right way”. It’s the kind of sanitized distant coverage you get when all media is consolidated into multinational corporations. Of course they will talk about how destructive protests are as a means of affecting change but never about how the most common method, lobbying, is just legalized bribery.

https://archive.ph/n4rCp

This reads like propaganda in itself, I would have enjoyed something more balanced.

"secret authoritarian “plot” to preserve the ability to spread antidemocratic conspiracy theories" - Applebaum is an American citizen so she should already know this but it's not an "ability", it's a right we all share. Say what you like, read what you want.