The difference is that Twitter isn't obligated to provide you a platform to spout Trump conspiracy theories, or whatever, but in most Western countries with the Rule of Law you have a right to not be extrajudicially disappeared by secret police.

A, the "it's OK when it happens to the bad people, especially on my opposite side of the potitical spectrum" argument.

"Trump conspiracy theories": Bad.

"WMDs, video with prostitutes in Russia, and the Steele Dossieur": Good.

(plus, we'll self-critique ourselves, several years down the line, when it doesn't matter anymore, e.g. after the war was declared, the elections over, etc., so that makes us legit).

> A, the "it's OK when it happens to the bad people, especially on my opposite side of the potitical spectrum" argument.

Nobody was saying anything like that.

But go ahead. Have fun with your strawman arguments.

I don't think it is a strawman at all. You don't have to like Trump, not at all actually and I don't say disliking him is unreasonable.

That people don't care about being lied to is their problem. Russia is a political adversary, but don't try to convince people you think critically. That would be absolutely ridiculous for anyone part of that discussion. If people dislike impolite statements more than war too, well, just don't argue about morality please or the same ridiculousness continues.

I don't think Trump is a good candidate to be president. But his opposition was a laughing stock.

Twitter decided they want to join the conspiracies about Russian interference. They are free to do that. But don't complain about other conspiracies either.

Is this satire? You don’t see a difference between secret police disappearing political dissidents, and Twitter telling you to sell your racism somewhere else?

Yeah, political dissidents don't dissapear - yet, I'll give you that. That's mostly because the system is rigged so that they don't have much impact anyway, they're organically lost in the noise.

In times where there's more fear about dissidents, you get McCarthyism, blacklists, and people fired from their jobs, Hoover's FBI blackmailing politicians and journalists, and so on. And even in more benign times, from MLK to SDS members, and from human rights activists to Kent State students, had taps on them, police records in the tens of thousands of pages, intimidation, and attempts to frame them with drugs, snitches and other BS. Heck, even John Lennon, a harmless famous pop culture figure if I ever saw one, had FBI records the size of a small library.

And this goes all the way to modern OWS members, environmental and political activists, black rights activists, character-assasinated journalists (from Garry Webb to Greenwald), and so on.

And if we extend it to the "but they deserve it, no?", war on terror, I don't see much of a difference between a state with black sites, extra-judicial drone killings, and off-shore off-due-process camps, with people exposing state crimes like Manning in prison and Snowden in exile...

Try posting some middle eastern terrorist stuff on your apple phone. Most likely you will have a lot of fun next time you want to get on a plane.

Western phones are no different, the only difference is in which government actually manages the data...

Actually, that probably isn’t true, and anyways it’s an easy experiment to perform.

> Western phones are no different, the only difference is in which government actually manages the data...

In some ways first world oppression is comparable to third world oppression, but they are different in scale and magnitude.