- "Some critics likened this to measures seen in authoritarian states like China and Iran."
To distinguish the actions you would need a magnifying glass and a thesaurus.
(Which any number of pundits are about to dust off from their bookshelves. Because: moral valence flows from the actor to the action. Obviously the authoritarian regimes oppress their people; obviously the free democracies protect their peoples' freedom and security. It takes conscious effort to reverse the causal order—to judge the actor by their actions, not re-interpret the actions on the fly to the fit the actor).
That's kind of the point I was going for in my (post-edit) comment. EU countries are broadly very free countries, totally and qualitatively unlike the authoritarian exemplars. The threat of shutting down social media to quench anti-government protests, specifically, is very, very like parallel examples from repressive dictatorships. It's a thought-terminating cliche to erase this second observation by overwriting it with the first.
To distinguish the actions you would need a magnifying glass and a thesaurus.
(Which any number of pundits are about to dust off from their bookshelves. Because: moral valence flows from the actor to the action. Obviously the authoritarian regimes oppress their people; obviously the free democracies protect their peoples' freedom and security. It takes conscious effort to reverse the causal order—to judge the actor by their actions, not re-interpret the actions on the fly to the fit the actor).