I would like to begin that there are thousands of cases annually on the wider internet which you can find by a simple internet search where some person or the other gets arrested in some country or another for political dissent. I am sure there are other countries not discussed here that also have similar cases of arrest. There are too many content removal requests or location-based bans worldwide that I do not think there is even exact data available because I doubt if we can even keep track.
The Censorship Checklist
I have analysed a bunch of these cases and there seems to be a very clear modus operandi followed by governments in cases such as these. First they will try to find out about who is behind the real identity of the online account posting that "objectionable" content.
If that step one fails then they will move to the next step of trying to censor or geo-blocking the content in that country so the content you publish is not visible in their country or region based on the IP Address or Account Location of the viewer (if you are a serious enough threat they might put a 3-letter agency behind you)
Account Location is figured out using the IP Address used at the time of the account being made.
Age-Verification of Social Media and (potentially) even VPNs makes sure either the "problem account" stops posting due to lack of Age-Verification or the social media platform can be coerced into giving the "problem" user's data.
I have made two case studies covering 2 different countries to drive the point home.
Case Study 1: India
This year in 2026, just 7 weeks or so ago, we had elections in the Indian State of West Bengal. To those who do not know, Bengal was split into West Bengal and East Bengal by the British in the year 1905. East Bengal is now Bangladesh.
While the woman ruling West Bengal since 2011 as the state's Chief Minister lost the 2026 elections, she was not exactly the most benevolent leader. She is known to censor any memes or political dissent using the sweeping powers of the police and many claim this is the reason she stayed in power so long because people were scared. She would use intimidation during elections too.
Her name is Mamata Banerjee and she's still alive because God picks the BEST flowers first to decorate his garden and not authoritarian cacti. Her regime was pivotal in ripping apart the garb of any anonymity provided by Facebook/Meta and prove it to be an absolute joke when the West Bengal Police arrested people such as Ambikesh Mahapatra (in 2012), Priyanka Sharma (in 2019) and Tuhin Mondal (in 2022) whose only offence was that they each dared to make some political meme that Mamata did not like. When you research into the first two cases, it is found that the memers had used their personal Facebook accounts which had their full legal names, whereas in the third case Tuhin Mondal's identity was traced using Account Location data derived from the IP Address used meaning he must have used some methods of anonymity such as not naming the account after himself and other things.
West Bengal in 2022 under Mamata's regime was neither the richest state in India (quite the opposite) nor did it have the absolute best-equipped police force yet they were able to get all the details about who operated an anonymous meme page and arrested the dude behind it within mere days of the complaint filed by some Mamata supporter - it must have taken only a few hours to figure out his identity to complete all the paperwork and dispatch officers to make an arrest that fast.
Due to the state not being rich, it is obvious why people were not educated enough to not use their real name or not use VPNs. Fair. Why should I have to use VPNs and fake identities just to be able to write what I feel? That is the bigger question. Most of these cases are not about keeping you in jail since free speech is protected everywhere and political dissent is legal. Most of these cases are about ruining your reputation, running a media trial and torturing you in police custody either mentally, physically or both so that obedience can be beaten into you & millions of others (by making an example out of you)
Case Study 2: United Kingdom
This is a richer country for example and this is the place where people have also been arrested for uploading memes. Call him Islamophobic or whatever, Pete North was arrested for a post made on X in September 2025.
Posts should be replied to with counter-posts pointing to how ridiculous arguments are - instead of the government playing a helicopter mom trying to control the children who can collectively disown her in the next election if they liked. Governments have more important things to do instead of spending millions in taxpayer's money being spent on moderating the speech of their electors. Governance is not supposed to be some "I was a Discord Mod for 5 years" video on YouTube...
Around 12000 arrests were made in 2023 alone which average out to 30 per day for online views which the government deemed to be capable of inciting violence similar to the 3 major cases we studied about in the previous case study on India which were selected for being on the evening news for multiple days (if not weeks).
It is obvious that the UK's government has cast the fishing net too wide and even arresting quite a few political dissenters. We do not know if it intentional or not, neither do I think we will ever find out. As mentioned previously political dissent is a protected right under freedom of speech in most countries and civilised countries like India and the UK are no different, so these cases are more for reputational harm, media trial, torture and example-setting instead of being legal. You would fail Background Checks at your new job if you get arrested on a charge of "inciting violence" anywhere on the planet.
Questions to Ponder
It brings us back to the question: Why should I have to use VPNs and fake identities just to be able to write what I feel?
It also sparks a new question: What gives that this stops at political dissent and Islamophobia or Transphobia or Homophobia or other things that are more or less politically correct?
Age Verification is for the Kids? What about Abuse Victims having to give up Privacy?
As mentioned in the checklist at the beginning, Government and Law Enforcement uses Age-Verification to link the people via their government ID to de-anonymise them. It is not for kids, if it ever was then the people who committed all those atrocities on the Epstein Island would have been behind bars already.
Always remember that Age-Verification began on porn sites and everyone was either too embarrassed to talk about it or they thought it was okay until it has now even started to roll out for Operating Systems. It does not take a genius to understand that Age-Verification is NOT for the kids & rather it is for digital ID. It will be regular folks like you and me who will have to face the repercussions of their government ID being leaked OURSELVES when scammers using the leaded IDs to get new SIM cards to commit bigger, more complex scams without revealing their true name.
They (Government Parrots) say it's for the kids that you have to let go of encryption, anonymity and privacy so that we get a safer internet. They phrase it as if risking your Government ID in the hands of greedy corporates who use your data to earn money by selling it to third-parties is some small price that anyone can give away. Whenever you hear that just counter them with "What about Domestic Violence and Abuse Victims trying to organise privately with their lawyer? Would you rather leave real domestic violence as is than having kids seeing fictionalised violence?"
Truth is that both collecting your data and threatening to leak it for a ransom are viable businesses in this day and age. If the governments wish to support the former then you as the rightful owner of the data have the right to protect your data from the latter. This is why I always advocate circumventing age-verification or just abandoning those platforms that collect too much data AFTER you change your email and other identifiers associated with that account so that you can peacefully let the account go to hell.
Conclusion & Bottom Line
For now the answer is to use as much open-source technology as possible. The Open-Source Tech should be anonymity-friendly i.e., you should be able to use the tech without an account or disclosing your real name should be a choice that you consciously make. Mistakes like that can be amended with new accounts. Apart from this, we must also prioritise those apps that have been independently audited by third-parties regularly for critical technology like your Nostr Key Manager or your Password Manager for the regular web.
Use basic privacy knowledge like VPNs and long passphrases generated by a reputable Password Manager such as Bitwarden or 1Password alongside 2FA using an Authenticator App or Physical 2FA Key. Make sure to keep your passphrases at least 4 words long (you can also use iconic movie dialogues lol)
Meanwhile, Nostr is a good place for anonymity and privacy if you take the right steps. manage your keys or in-case you are inviting others here then tell them to make any new accounts only through a reputable key manager like Amber, nos2x etc.
To learn more about Privacy, please extend your support (whether in coin or in followers) if you reached so far and found my guide valuable & useful. Attaining a Privacy-focused life is a journey, not a checklist. Take your time but keep advocating for privacy and keep raising questions to your governments. For the safety of your democracy.
You may have nothing to hide right now, but sometime in the future, your kids might have NOWHERE to hide from the Authoritarian Regime.
More guides incoming!