The previous methods of censorship had become untenable; unlike in the Soviet Union, few regimes can cut people off entirely from receiving or broadcasting information. However, the powerful had adapted. Now social media mobs and cyber militias harassed, smeared, and intimidated dissenting voices into silence or undermined trust in them. But because the connections between states and these campaigns were unclear, a regime could always claim that it had nothing to do with them, that the mobs were made up of private individuals exercising their freedom of expression.
