Good news: The repressive machine relaunched in Russia by President Vladimir Putin has a reverse gear. Bad news: It takes far more effort to engage it than the ones that push the machine forward.
In Russia, home of the meme-heavy propaganda and trolling operations that drew the attention of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his investigators looking for links between Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the campaign of President Donald Trump, one can go to jail for reposting a meme on a social network. The number of convictions in such cases has increased steadily in recent years.
Last year, according to Sova, a nongovernmental organization that tracks radicalism and human rights violations in Russia, 658 people were convicted for various forms of "extremist" speech — "insulting the feelings of religious believers," "incitement of hatred," calls to terrorism and separatism — and another 3,511 were fined for similar administrative violations. That's up from 133 and 182 respectively in 2011, the year before Putin began his third presidential term, which was marked by stepped-up reprisals against any kind of political opposition.
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