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Comment by epups | Hacker News Reader

Russia is pausing gas supply to scare everyone and guarantee better negotiating conditions for the end of the war. I find it surprising how little discussion there is of what those terms might be, or what would the West accept as a reasonable outcome. In Germany especially, there is censorship around this topic like never before.

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There is no censorship in Germany. Please provide evidence if you make such claims.

Gladly. Since the beginning of the war, Germany and the EU as a whole have pushed to ban Russia Today and other state press it deems dangerous [0]. More worryingly, Germany has one of the most repressive social media censorship laws ("NetzDG") in place [1]. Through this act, they have attempted to prosecute Telegram from giving Germans access to pro-Russian content [2]. It has also issued a draconian rule, where any German posting pro-Russian content - in this case, the "Z" symbol - would be prosecuted [3]. You might think that this is alright but legitimate political discussion is also being banned under the same premises - here is an example of that [4].

[0] https://www.politico.eu/article/russias-rt-sputnik-ban-raise...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Enforcement_Act

[2] https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-rt-media-telegram-ukr...

[3] https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-to-prosecute-use-of-...

[4] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/03/30/pers-m30.html

Some call it censorship, others call it blocking enemy war propaganda. One can argue it's the same, yet I cannot understand or accept the freedom in advocating killing me and my family.

It's still censorship, whether or not you agree with it.

Sometimes one simply cannot make the difference anymore between propaganda trolls and ivory tower nerds...

With the amount of online and offline inquisitors ready to pounce at the slightest divergence from the official EU and US party line, those trolls and nerds stand no chance.

Just like truth, neutrality, free speech, etc don’t either.

Really, actually, there is a global crisis about information and management discussion, since decades and climbing. The cost of information and the expectations from the web model - consequently, reduced quality and/or independence in the lower budgeted informational products; the raise of noise and propaganda through the deviated discussion model in social networks - with the emergence of unleashed delirium as an issue in societies that have lost the controlling/mitigating and educating pyramidal network social models, and with generated bastions for the practice of manipulation; the difficulty in managing these phenomena and cleanly so, with the emergence of perverse micro-regulation (from mentally inept terminal managers) and maximalistic macro-regulation (from governments banning "misinformation" - cpr the UK - as if it were trivial to assess truth)... I could go on.

The west can accept whatever terms it wants. Unless Ukraine accepts those terms too, the west's acceptance is largely irrelevant.

The NS1 pause is a technical one and has happened other years

You can see in the article that this year is much different.

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