A few weeks ago, my mom wrote in our family chat: “A 63 year-old man just got sentenced to 7 years of prison for posts on social media. Looks like it’s time I tape my mouth over.”

I looked up the story. The man is a railroad worker. In March of last year, he wrote two posts on the Russian clone of Facebook, VK1:

We’re singing songs on TV while killing children and women at the same time. We, Russia, have become godless. May God forgive us.

And:

Russian airplane pilots are bombing children.

Two women who saw these posts reported him for “discrediting the Russian military.”

The court then determined he made his statements after “forming a persistent disdain towards the decision by the government’s legislative and executive branches to use Russia’s armed forces to normalize the socio-political situation in Ukraine, i.e. his actions were motivated by political hatred.”

Which amounts to 7 years now.

This isn’t the first news story of this sort, but it stuck with me because of how I received it, w…