We're all subject to propaganda from vested interests --sometimes that propaganda aligns with our values, other times not. But all these services provide propaganda --not in the advertising sense, but in the psychological manipulative sense.

Honestly don't care about "it's all propaganda" rhethoric. Yandex abused its dominant market position and silenced our protests and filtered sources alternative to Kremlin. Yandex News is the largest Russian media by a mile. They've done all the could (including firing editors who were out of line) to make it align with Kremlin.

This same applies to all major tech companies. If you stray form the narrative, they abuse their dominant position to silence opposition.

Now, of course, being a democracy and not being run aby a single party, we don't send people off to "work camps", but people losing their jobs for off-handed comments is not unusual. Oh, you made a joke that was acceptable 10 years ago and now it's not seen as okay? Go repent, sinner!

Also, because there is an active war, in your case, the repercussions are amplified, but we'd likely see similar things if we were in an active war instead and only received opinions would be allowed. Even as it is, if someone inexplicably swallows Russian propaganda and critiques the other side, these people get sent to their online purgatory.

Man, you're comparing American "cancel culture" to actual torture and murder of opposition and journalists, kidnapping, beatings by unmarked men, spray paintings "Z" and "traitor" on the walls, prosecution of relatives?

You are just rich Westerners who love to downplay our struggle just to make yourselves victims.

How did it all start?

I'm not equivocating them --what is happening there is monstrous, as is what's happening to a lesser degree in China and other places, and we are no way there. But the setting of narrative is the same. They are using narrative to achieve different goals. However, the tool is propaganda exerted by undemocratic institutions.

I think we agree it's a dangerous tool that can be leveraged to do bad things. They are being used for bad things in Russia, we're not leveraging this tool for this purpose --but that does not prevent it from being used in the future for a bad purpose.

One of the catalysts were probably 1999 bombings of apartment buildings[1] that were very suspicious (including one where FSB were actually caught planting hexogen by a local militia) and led to dramatic rise of Putin.

Along with crackdown on media it created a narrative where you have a strata that must have their rights removed and be hated by society. First it were "terrorists" and then to a different degree "opposition", "journalists", "LGBT", foreigners and Ukrainians.

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

by this standard pretty much all americans are war criminals. get off your high horse

Germany paid reparations for many years, so no, it's an actual pathway that can be implemented by a framework similar to Nuremberg.