Live Journal was a US social media site 15 years ago where young people wrote and discussed their diaries… but it also became a conduit for free press in Russia after Putin clamped down on Russia’s fledgling independent media. Over time, the Russian government experimented with approaches to control this website, and the lessons from that seem unfortunately familiar (from paid trolls to ultimately buying out the site to impose censorship).
If interested, I suggest you listen to the podcast. Reply All is a podcast that focuses on oddities across the internet, and so they are covering this more as a curiosity than as a political warning, but follow what happens and the result may be a chilling forewarning of what may be coming here someday.
Reply All link on Gimlet media