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Notes -
The laws themselves aren't new, the enforcement has changed.
Before everyone was on the Internet, enforcement was hardly necessary. The media oligopoly was on board with it and self-censored. Any would-be politicians would need the de facto consent of the media to run a campaign. They didn't bother listening in on pub conversations to find people to arrest. Commoners had no reach anyway, so there's no real point going full Stasi. That left a handful of enforcement actions against a small-time publisher here, a politician who goes off script there, but that was it.
Nowadays people can find each other via the Internet, and there's a lot of discontented people who know there are more and can organize. It has removed the media's role as approval committee, and upended politics. So now in some places they suddenly find it worthwhile to arrest people at their house over tweets.
The early 2010s were a transition period, where the media lost their grip but the enforcement had not yet been stepped up.
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