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Compared to:

0. People straight up disappeared in Syria, people arrested and locked up for political reasons in Russia - DOMESTIC stuff.

1. (Leaving aside that sock-puppet commenters are not the same as "massive control over global media".) The use on a massive scale of paid trolls by Russia, and the outright censorship of mass media outlets in countries from Russia and China to US allies like Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

2. Assassinations of journalists in Russia, and of some particularly high-value opposition targets abroad.



How about you set the bar even lower and start comparing with North Korea?

The US influence on global media extends far further than a mere sock-puppet program which btw predates the notorious Russian "troll factories" by a couple of years. Only very few people know what classified operations are running in addition to that sock-puppet operation, but you can be certain there are more operations like that. Like influencing foreign media trough NGO's [0] in addition to that US media are the dominant news outlets on a global scale.

And again: If you want to complain about assassinations then the US is in no position to point fingers at anybody. Just because the US does conduct these kinds of operations on a global scale mostly targeting foreigners, while being rather successful in suppressing publicity about similar actions on a domestic scale, does not make these actions any "better" or "just". Even the US has no shortage of journalists dying in rather mysterious circumstances, Gary Webb comes to mind and if they don't die under weird circumstances they are straight up put on drone kill lists [1].

I realize this is a matter of "national pride" for many US Americans, to keep the facade of "We are the exceptional good guys, number one in everything!" intact, but as somebody who's seen "both sides" of this I consider that a rather absolute and dangerous view on reality.

Note: Not a fan of using huffingtonpost as a source, but it's the only English-language source I found about this due to it being a rather German-centric issue.

[0] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/till-bruckner/think-tanks-lobb...

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/i-am-on-the-us-kill-list...


Compared to having higher rate of incarceration, not only in per-capita terms, but also in absolute terms. Even with China's extra billion people and their repressive laws. The US is way ahead and it isn't even close.




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