They're hitting that Uno Reverse card. Tbf, the US does a LOT of the stuff that we openly criticize Russia and China for. Which, I would hope that people have enough insight to recognize that this is a bad thing across the board. The only people who get hurt and face consequences from this kind of a thing are the citizens.
This is a key perspective people fail to take into account. We've been conditioned by movies, books etc to think everyone fits into these black and white "good and bad" categories.
Most western countries do horrific things we do not find acceptable, but when we do find out we hand wave it away because they're the "good guys".
They don't tend to care until large enough quantities of people start listening despite whatever filters (i.e. de-ranking social media posts) and countermeasures (i.e. cable news assets) are put in place before it gets to that point. Then they very likely have the ability to label it as misinformation and find a legal reason to prosecute under a number of broad categories: https://www.thefederalcriminalattorneys.com/false-informatio...
It came very close to this during Covid, and maybe once or twice since then.
You're free to say what you want, and everyone is free to ignore you if what you say doesn't jive with "common sense".
