The question was if people (I assumed a regular folk, not journalists and opposition) are allowed to make jokes about the government, and I answered to that. Of course I know that Russia has no traces of democracy left and I am aware how Russia targets high-profile people, including journalists. You should be more reserved before telling people they don't know anything.

Allowed? People would do it anyway. Most Eastern European communist era jokes involved the beloved leader. Russian jokes about politicians and policies are even better.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_political_jokes

No, the question was:

> Do you see it headed towards China, where no internal criticism is allowed?

But if you’re a russian opposed to Putin you cant’t really answer that on a western-run online platform.. (unless you’re considered insignificant enough by the Russian government, so you can safely be ignored of course)

I answered to this question:

> are people allowed to make jokes about their own government in Russia?

> participating in anti-government protests often results in people losing their jobs or being expelled from the universities

This is quickly becoming the situation in the US if you criticize popular political movements.

Not exactly... In the US, organizations use this form of self-censorship to prevent a potential backlash from the public, whereas in Russia, the bans are direct orders from the government and the employers simply don't have any choice.

Often, there is less practical difference than I’d hope for. Look at the credit card networks’ sanctions of things like allofmp3.com, for example.

If you enjoy audio fiction, or short stories you might enjoy “The Revolution, brought to you by Nike”. It was written by an ad industry insider, and touches on a lot of issues regarding corporate self-censorship. (It’s a few years old, and predates Nike’s recent political activism):

https://escapepod.org/2018/09/06/escape-pod-644-the-revoluti...

For example, there have been many documented cases in the past few years of people getting fired over supporting the BDS movement - or in a few cases, not actively supporting anti-BDS movements.

... oh, that's not what you meant?