Roskomnadzor builds a cage and tapes the blueprints to the walls. The Trump administration tears down the walls, calls it liberation, and paints the rubble in red, white, and blue.

Roskomnadzor’s grotesquely titled “list of useful materials for personal data operators” is not a guide—it is a state-issued instruction manual for digital subservience. Behind the facade of technical assistance lies the rotting infrastructure of information totalitarianism. The Russian state isn’t offering help to data handlers; it’s corralling them into a Kafkaesque labyrinth of forms, templates, FAQs, and pseudolegal gibberish—all designed to convert every operator into a bureaucratic informant. The obsessive categorization, the infantilizing crosswords for children, the endless links to government servers—each a sterilized mechanism to disguise what amounts to ideological coercion through policy anesthesia.

Roskomnadzor is not preserving privacy; it’s weaponizing it. The real objective lies in manufacturing a docile society that instinctively complies with censorship and reports its own behavior. Operators across Russia—from schools and clinics to e-commerce storefronts and local municipalities—are force-fed a compliance doctrine that quietly converts them into surveillance nodes, broadcasting their obedience through bureaucratic paperwork. Under this system, consent is a performance, and participation is submission. The target isn’t just data—it’s trust, autonomy, and truth itself.

Meanwhile, in a striking parallel unfolding across the United States as of April 20, 2025, the Trump administration is scripting its own digital crackdown, wrapped in a different brand of deception. Through a cynical rebranding of “free speech,” the administration has launched what amounts to a partisan purge of independent journalism and critical thought. Executive Order 14149, signed on the day Trump resumed office, bans federal agencies from participating in content moderation—effectively opening the floodgates to misinformation while simultaneously investigating the very systems once tasked with shielding the public from it. This is not reform. It is demolition.

Access to the White House now favors MAGA-aligned influencers while press institutions like Reuters and the Associated Press find themselves iced out. In tandem, the administration is working to defund NPR and PBS, publicly funded institutions whose only crime has been their refusal to act as propaganda arms. These efforts are no accident. They are stages in a systematic hollowing out of public trust and informational neutrality, much like Roskomnadzor’s regionalized enforcement mechanisms that disguise centralized oppression as federated governance.

Brendan Carr’s appointment to chair the FCC signals the beginning of digital siege warfare against platforms under the guise of accountability. Stripping Section 230 protections and forcing disclosure policies is not about transparency—it is about eliminating safe harbor for dissent. This tactic matches Roskomnadzor’s theater of compliance where data handlers police themselves into paralysis. But the Trump administration, true to its cognitive warfare ethos, adds another layer: narrative inversion. It calls authoritarian suppression “freedom” and casts censorship as liberation. That rhetorical shell game outpaces even Roskomnadzor’s blunt-force paternalism.

Artificial intelligence has not escaped the reach of this agenda either. Executive Order 14179 revokes existing AI ethics protections and removes any federal barriers to ideologically biased deployment. Where Russia suffocates innovation under state scrutiny, the U.S. under Trump deregulates it into a weapon of partisan influence—chaotic, unaccountable, and unleashed upon a public that no longer knows what’s real.

Roskomnadzor builds a cage and tapes the blueprints to the walls. The Trump administration tears down the walls, calls it liberation, and paints the rubble in red, white, and blue. Both target perception, suppress autonomy, and manipulate truth. One through bureaucratic strangulation, the other through ideological gaslighting. What unites them is their shared contempt for informed citizenship and their reliance on deception disguised as doctrine. The result is the same: coerced conformity packaged as public service, while those who see through it are left to shout into an increasingly rigged void.