Steven Bartlett

There is nobody who's active on the Chinese internet who isn't somehow known or accounted for somehow by the authorities.

And the Internet is also connected to a whole system of surveillance cameras and other kinds of databases so that people can be tracked all through the system and all through the country.

People do have VPNs in China, and they do get out.

But the majority of people are inside.

And that's probably—China is the most extreme form of that.

And Russia is actually now heading in that direction.

So Putin has now cut off Russian access to most forms of Western social media, you know, Instagram.

And there were some amazing—

videos of really sad Russian Instagram influencers who were losing their audiences because of Putin's changes.

So he's now heading in that direction.

But even inside the United States, which is maybe the loudest and most open democracy in the world, you can see the Trump administration seeking to shape

the information space in new ways.

So we have federal regulators who are now willing to put pressure on television stations if the president asks them to.

We have the president putting his thumb on the scale of people who are acquiring new media companies in order to make sure that the new owners are somehow friendly to him.

TikTok, CBS, CNN, these are all media companies where the president is trying to get people who are sympathetic to him in charge.

And this is, by the way, you know, we all have this idea about censorship, that it's like there's a guy in a room and he's crossing sentences out of a newspaper article.

You know, that's what censorship is.

But actually, nowadays, that's not how media control works.

So in Orban's Hungary, in Erdogan's Turkey, what happens is that the leadership –

It encourages or helps business people or groups close to them to acquire media properties.