For nearly quarter of a century.

Longer than that. I feel like people have completely forgotten things like Iran-Contra, or the Gulf of Tonkin.

Or, for that matter, that Orwell based 1984 off his experience writing propaganda for the British Ministry of Information during WW2.

or that the CIA literally killed a sitting president

Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ensuring Effective Discipline Over Monitoring Act.

It's just an acronym bro, don't get all worked up about it, now let's go down, the Two Minutes' Hate is about to start.

We're incredibly lucky the 'just an acronym' ended that way then. Had they named it the 'Joining and Reinforcing the Nation by Satisfying Liberties and Guaranteeing Efficient Control Over Surveillance' we would have ended with the JRN SLGECOS Act.

You can forget about liberties until you come up with a better acronym

Would you settle for a catchy motto, mayhap?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Free_or_Die

> "Live Free or Die" is the official motto of the U.S. state of New Hampshire, adopted by the state in 1945. It is possibly the best-known of all state mottos, partly because it conveys an assertive independence historically found in American political philosophy and partly because of its contrast to the milder sentiments found in other state mottos.

I suppose one must die, since living free is not an option.

Note to self: stay out of New Hampshire.

Note from New Hampshire: We don't want you anyway.

there's dozens of us!

Come on, that is literally what "Live Free or Die" means!

Apparently I forgot to close my sarcasm tag.

Stuff is so Orwellian that it really looks like a joke for those who do not know what USA Freedom Act means.

I chuckled, at least.

Seeing the rise in the amount of bots on YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, basically all the major and a lot of minor social networks over the last ~decade has really been something, too. Tons and tons of people with account names that all follow similar regex's saying the same things around the same time.

I suppose it feels closer to Brave New World than 1984 but it's eerie, and those are just the accounts that stand out. I imagine the "premium propaganda" option from the companies and agencies providing the bot services are even harder to discern.

Really, it’s right out of Ender’s Game IMO.

It's a deception, something that should have no place in law coding.

"I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and all sorts of petty fuhrers of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means. Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible."