Context: Russia charges journalist who protested Ukraine war live on TV
It seems that those most prolific Machiavellian manufacturers of misinformation have not learned even the rudimentary core of lessons in regards to the autonomous self-propagation of complex information artefacts, entities and systems.
Prosecution and persecution intended to silence and intimidate only ever recapitulates and amplifies the signal of, and resistance from, that which it intends to obfuscate and extinguish. This is why freedom must eventually prevail.
It is for the same reason that desalination is so costly. It tries to work against the inscrutable logic of an entropy in nature that functions so as to always and without exception maximise the dissipative (combinatorial) mixing of information and matter. Ham-fisted interdictions only displace (as offset) the entropy elsewhere and in this case that elsewhere is the manifestly brittle insecurity of autocratic narratives of political self-identity.
Therein lies the kernel recursive psychosis and enigma of (any and all) totalitarian ideology that self-validates its tenure for only as long as it actively cultivates and performatively articulates the perceived threats that it’s narrative (as much as sociopsychological) continuity depends upon.
Streisand effect, anyone?