I don't think disrupting a foreign states propaganda operation falls under censorship.
It's not different this time or when we do it or any of the usual contortions attempted to maintain a barely passable facade of intellectual honesty.
You claim there is an equivalence, so why don't you put up some examples of these purportedly equivalent things.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-56030340
British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab called the move an "unacceptable curtailing of media freedom".
That was censorship too ...
Maybe better to say there are two different forms of censorship: 1) the government doesn't like something, 2) society reduces it attack surface
The two can coincide or not.
Can't the "free" and purportedly superior western media debunk whatever BS rt.com peddles?
But then they would probably be inclined to also call-out the psy-ops and other shenaningans staged by our govenments and targeting us. Ooops!
Debunking has limited effectiveness even in factual situations, beyond factual, not even sure what that would mean.
There is, of course, also a numbers game, flipping the side of a few people is quite sufficient for a some things, so even being really good at countering adversarial propaganda will leave a lot of gaps. Reducing an attack surface might not always be a bad idea.
What you cannot be is a foreign state at war with an ally and freely distribute state propaganda aimed at furthering your war goals. This isn't a hard line to draw.
And you can do that because it has literally no impact. This vision of free speech was a moment of genius from our institutions.
However, you can’t talk about the crimes of occupants in France in, say, a newspaper, or any broadcast channel, or anything that has an audience. Governments have literally made it a speechcrime to discover the authors who are killing our children at 23x the pace of the others.
If I'm reading your racist dogwhistles correctly, "occupants of France" would be muslims or brown/black people? Don't you worry, plenty of shit-tier "news" in France make it their life goal to cover every single crime committed by someone who cannot trace their lineage to 15th century France. (cf. Valeurs Actuelles) Hell, there are multiple political parties founded around those ideas, that don't forget to chime in any time anything happens.
> Governments have literally made it a speechcrime to discover the authors who are killing our children at 23x the pace of the others.
Who are those killing our children at 23x the pace, and what is the speech crime? Sources, please.
So I dare you make the study on how much crimes the occupying forces are doing in France.
But you missed the point: the illiberalism isn't the restriction on the foreign government's actions, but the restriction placed on your own citizens—the restriction that they are not allowed to read certain things: that certain books, prints, newspapers, are illegal for their eyes. That's anathema to open society.
This isn't about "foreign governments' rights"; it's about peoples' rights.
"To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker."
Again, the ban of RT isn't because they spread certain ideas that were considered wrong by the EU censors. The ban is because they are owned by an adversary state that currently invading an ally on the EU border.
> That's anathema to open society.
You should maybe read up what the inventor of the very term of the open society had to say about the limits of openness in an open society.
Right now the US has the tools to deal with that, if they need a domain down they can do it under their sovereign power. The EU doesn't.
You're conflating multiple issues into one. The US has jurisdiction to seize domains being used in furtherance of crimes; sure. But ideas aren't crimes in the US. The US isn't able, legally or practically, to use this power to censor opinion or information on the basis of its content: the US courts do not permit it.
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Your other question ("What do you do...?") is much more interesting to me, but it's too big for me to be able to give it a respectful treatment. This is my shortest answer: we entrust democracy to decide whether to start a war or to a end a war*; whether to build nuclear weapons or abolish them. It's implicit in our method of government that we trust the civic deliberation process with our lives. The fact that our collective deliberation can make mistakes, and kill a million people with its "whoopsies!", is part and parcel of what it means to function as a republic. (To lay the responsibilities elsewhere is to have a different method of government). Most political ideas are capable of causing immense harm in a democracy (except unimportant, frivolous ones)—there aren't many important, but safe, ideas.
*(I think it's remarkable that much of the First Amendment jurisprudence involves censoring opinions about wars, in one direction or another: an acknowledgement that "ideas capable of killing millions" is at the heart of this civic question).
That's a distinction without a difference. Whether "macrosoft.com" is considered an idea or brand impersonation is in the eye of the beholder .
And of course something not being allowed doesn't mean it doesn't happen in plain sight without repercutions. On the practicality of it, getting a take down court order for brand or copyright violation seems straightforward, and civil forfeiture can apply to domains [0] as well, so vaguely sticking a potential associated crime to a domain owner is enough for an agency to take down a domain, whatever it is.
I think that's totally US's choice to have these laws and apply them their way. I also sympathize with the rest of the world planning to get out of that influence and their own tradeoffs.
> It's implicit in our method of government that we trust the civic deliberation process with our lives.
I feel you're looking at from the political lens only. A lot of "ideas" are not political and asking for civil debate everytime one of these gets a wide audience would be an issue.
A suicide inducing site could be such. And it doesn't need to be intentional nor straight illegal. If looking at it hundreds of kids took out their lives every single day, you'd shut it down and start asking questions later.
[0] https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/ice-domain-name-...
/'sɛnsər,ʃɪp/
noun
counterintelligence achieved by banning or deleting any information of value to the enemy