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Many emigrate from places such as Russia because they were merely afraid that at some point the nuts will get screwed tight enough that they won't be allowed to doomscroll what they want and goon to what they want to on their mobile devices. Or ban being gay, or ban talking about being gay, or do a number of other things the young view as backwards and retarded.
It is not very pronounced in Russia because emigrating to the first world from the second world is hard. The other way around seems like a much easier choice.
No one, and I mean absolutely no one, emigrates out of Russia for that reason. They do it for the money. Also it's not a "at some point" thing over there, these things are already banned.
It does not appear that your knowledge on Russian emigration is enough to justify your absolute confidence in such a claim as "absolutely no one". Or to put it more bluntly, you really should know better than to say something like that which is pretty much 100% guaranteed to be wrong.
As for "those things are already banned", they were not banned a few years ago, and yet more things weren't a few more years ago, and yet more aren't banned yet but there's talk of it. There was ideologically-tinted emigration for all those years.
I'll venture I wild guess I have better knowledge of emigration out of Eastern Europe that exceeds yours, given that I am an Eastern European emigrant.
I was being bombastic, but ideological emigration is not a thing on any statistically significant scale. I suppose you can make the argument that a country might get it's ass kicked if the ideological emigrants are von Neumans and von Brauns, but even that rests on many assumptions of dubious quality.
I'll grant you have better knowledge of your personal cohort of emigrants, but so far you have not shared how that extrapolates, and in fact are being vague enough that it could be any other country than Russia and any time period within the last 30 years. Needless to say I do not claim that the ratio of those looking for money vs. those looking for freedom of speech is the same in 2000s Estonia and 2020s Russia.
I am not aware of many emigrants from Russia who did it for money and did not bring their family, so your argument about family, job and home hardly applies.
It's easy to dismiss the anxiety-wracked youths as someone who don't really impact the country's economy upon leaving. But I'm not convinced that even the money-targeting STEMlords' decision is completely unaffected by ideological differences. Seems like there'd be less friction in moving for a 100% raise in spending power/salary if the destination country is less restrictive on your habits than your home country, and vice versa.
Additionally, the more you restrict websites registered in your country without outright hard-firewalling yourself away from the world, the more people will just stick to foreign websites through VPN rather than developing your own infosphere.
Sorry for being vague, but I'm a little paranoid. For what it's worth you're right my connections to Russia are a bit distant (second cousin tier), bit I do have them, it's also true that it's been a while since moved (but it's more 15-ish years than 30)
We've had Russians living in the west that got canceled for not condemning Putin, do you think their anxiety, and assurances that they moved out for ideological reasons, might have something to do with that?
You never talked to a westerner that moved to China? I've never heard one of them mention restrictive government as a factor in their decision. Also, I think it's completely wrong to call western government and society less restrictive. They might be more encouraging of degeneracy, but they definitely do not leave you alone to do your own thing, even when you're not harming anyone.
Sure, I'm fine with that. I don't mind people accessing porn through bespoke darkweb gates, I just don't want companies like pornhub and onlyfans operating in broad daylight,
This is fair, I'm not asking for a biography, just a bit of context.
I'm more familiar with the Russians who never needed to be cowed into condemning Putin by canceling because they were doing that back in Russia, with great enthusiasm, and were anxious because of potential retaliation from the Russian government, not the Western blob. There are a few emigrants I personally know who have voiced relief in private after moving out. Admittedly, I also know someone who moved out for money, and then came back when living in Russia offered more money.
True, but it's a different kind of restrictive. One could even argue prospiratorial restriction by "society" is, if anything, more natural and easier to roll with than arbitrarily-tyrannical restriction from top to bottom by faceless bureaucrats and cops.
I think Russia as a state will be worse off after formally kicking out all the platforms that were hosting badspeak and not having a big enough slice of the internet to compensate locally. But maybe that's just wishful thinking.
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