[Spooky23]

You may have been ignorant of the history and term, but the author deliberately selected that title.

The protagonist here chose to be a useful idiot to help the Russian state attract self-described dissident voices to a Russian propaganda outlet. If you chose to make your living that way and care about your work, embracing backups is a good idea.

Unlike his kremlin patrons, western society doesn’t generally “disappear” people like him, we just ignore.

[michannne]

What is your point? My point is that if, at some point in the last 40 years, the phrase "being disappeared" became synonymous with the Dirty War in Argentina, most Americans did not get that memo. Whether or not I myself was ignorant of the connection is a moot point, the post I replied to claimed that the article's author should have been aware of the connection - to which I say, if that's the hill you choose to die on, be my guest, but I can assuredly say I'm not alone neither is the article's OP in being ignorant of such a connection.

[sdoering]

I see from other comments that you don't seem to understand that the commenters here argue that the author himself not only "got the memo" but also the he used the term conscious of the fact what it means to a lot of people in a lot of places.

He deliberately compared the deletion of his stuff by YouTube to people being captured, detained, more often than not tortured and too often killed. He wanted to invoke this image to paint YouTube in as bad a light as possible.

In doing so he not only compared apples to oranges but also showed quite strongly that he is missing empathy and a sense of proportion.

I strongly suggest that he slept in a real bed last night. Ate a good meal. Did not get hurt by prison guards. Wasn't punched in the gut, starved, electro-tortured, got his fingernails ripped out, had to stand on a box with his underpants over his face while wires hung from his hands fearing electrocution. And so on.

I doubt that the victims of being disappeared (nor their families) would see what happened to him and his spinning of the story and say: 'Oh yeah. There is someone who had the same fate as we.'

It actually doesn't matter that you or others did not get the reference. Making this reference is the problem, even if not a single one of his audience would miss it. He intended it and devalued the horrible experiences of real victims to blow his felt victimhood out of proportion and generate more enragement.

[michannne]

Again, you could make the same argument about brainwashing and it would fall equally flat. But, as I mentioned in other replies, you do you.