alt Hacker NewsI mean, you're cutting off the qualifier with your selected quote. They are clearly talking about online freedom:
> this takes a sledgehammer to the core of internet privacy. In all cases in the world where this has been done before like China or Russia, freedom is also lost shortly after.
Russia's first online censorship was for truly abhorrent things. It moved on to become a ban on things the government didn't like. The book "The Red Web" does an excellent job detailing how this downward slide took place. It wasn't overnight, but it was a constant effort by those in power to erode privacy and freedom, and the first step was putting in place a basic censorship apparatus.
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/andrei-soldatov/the...
>It wasn't overnight, but it was a constant effort by those in power to erode privacy and freedom
yes because Russia is a dictatorship. These recent age limits on social media have had broad public support and are widely supported by parents. Not having your kid grow up on a combination of porn, gambling and body dysphoria and their data exfiltrated by a US mega-corporation isn't the dawn of internet censorship. What about the privacy of children and the ability to grow up outside of the morass of commercial surveillance platforms?
Having your kids grow up free from that crap doesn't make you China, it makes you ca 1990s Denmark. Japan and China both have strict gun control laws, but Japan's a democracy. People are free to live by different values than Americans, just screaming red scares isn't going to convince anyone.