I remember seeing an article in the WSJ about the ways in which Chinese dissidents were managing to get news through the overwhelming censorship there. This was from maybe about 10 or so years ago.

The article listed some crazy ideas the dissidents were using, such as

I thought to myself, back then, "Wow. At least we don't need to do that here".

And then I saw during the covid era, how people got censored for writing the word vaccine, ivermectin, all kinds of things like that. They had to start using other words, which constantly changed as they were added to the "censorship list". Like vaxx, jab, magic juice, etc.

That really struck me. No, we're not the worst, we're not as bad as China. But there is extreme censorship on very important topics.