As Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine has stalled and dragged on, the Russian government and its affiliates have tightened their control over information, broadened censorship powers, and generally fostered an atmosphere hostile to dissent in ways we haven’t seen before.

The Kremlin has banned foreign state-funded news outlets, casting them as subversive propaganda, and private companies loyal to the regime have indiscriminately scrubbed all traces of their work from the internet. Those same companies are censoring officially designated “misinformation” on behalf of the government, while relaxing their preexisting censorship rules to allow for the praise of extremist forces fighting on their side and calls for violence against people from the opposing side. The government, meanwhile, has been working behind the scenes with social media influencers to push their preferred narrative onto the population.

Except, wait — these are actually all things that have happened in the United States and across the West since Putin invaded Ukraine. The Russian president has predictably used the war to make his already authoritarian political system even more so. But we’ve seen an alarmingly similar trend take shape in Western countries. With little notice, Western governments and tech giants have taken unprecedented steps to control the flow of information around this war, with consequences we may not fully understand for some time yet.