A large number of MAGA social media influencers were exposed over the weekend as being being based in other countries.Podcaster Matt Binder posted screenshots showing that Charlie’s Voice Rising, a popular Charlie Kirk fan account, is based in Eastern Europe (non-EU).One popular influencer wrote "wa...
I don’t care to join in on the rest of this discussion but:
The definition of “illegal” could change in a future government. This is one of the strongest arguments for internet privacy in general: what is legal today may be “illegal” tomorrow or even “legal but the government doesn’t care about the law”
In a broad sense sure, and that’s a great reason to use a VPN (especially if you listen to VPN ads on youtube)!
It really isn’t a good reason in this example, though. At least, not as an explanation for setting your location to be outside of the US. Use of a VPN is identifiable (unless you set it up yourself, which isn’t anonymous) so it will make no difference where you’re located if the authoritarian government you’re supporting gets replaced with an even more authoritarian one that decides to prosecute people being mean to them online, and it can only serve to incriminate you if the data ever gets leaked (like what happened here).
Generally this is true, but within the scope of this hypothetical it doesn’t really change that this fundementally doesn’t make sense.