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... and the West slipping into borderline crypto-authoritarianism itself with mass-surveillance and so on - encroaching on citizens' rights while excusing themselves with being the good guys, and only protecting the population against the usual suspects of bad actors.

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Bollocks. "The West" is not one place, and the "crpyto-authoritarianism" is a lame attempt to generalize. There is no comparison between Russia / China and Western Europe or the US.

Make no mistake, I think that facebook and social media have chilling effects on discourse and are, on the whole, very negative, but I can still get on any forum and call my national leader a clown (aka Xi = Winnie the Poo) and not risk going to jail.

Whataboutism. Mass-surveillance (including bulk collection of metadata) is an authoritarian move, which more and more western countries are guilty of.

I'm not making a comparison – I'm simply arguing against something.

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