Now that Elon Musk has bought Twitter - now the Pit edition

All of these things—whether Israeli surveillance promotes self-censorship of Arab media, whether the BBC documentary about Modi is accurate, whether the BBC has some kind of “neocolonialist” mindset regarding Indian audiences—are beside the fundamental point that the Indian government’s demand to remove the documentary from Twitter is direct government censorship.

There are lots of other phenomena in the world that also result in the suppression of free speech, but direct government censorship tends to be pretty high on the scale of authoritarian repression. Whatabouting other forms of free-speech suppression is not a valid rebuttal to concerns about government censorship.