Voice of Europe, RIA Novosti, Izvestia, and Rossiyskaya Gazeta were recognized as such that spread and supported Russian propaganda and the war against Ukraine.
Shouldn’t happen. The moment you want to “protect” your people, you’ve become authoritarian. If you can’t trust your people to reject russia propaganda, how can you trust them to elect their own leaders?
Given the number of people in today's world that rely on social media instead of well-sourced (or better-sourced, at least) publications for 'reliable' sources, it's highly important to minimize the extent to which such platforms can be used to manipulate the outcomes of elections.
Lol, that's the whole point of the bans, isn't it? But there's still a lot more western media outlets banned in Russian and China than vice versa, to be fair.
And if everyone had common sense an anarchist society would be possible. We have laws, that are inherently authoritarian, to make society work because society is too stupid to function without. To quote men in black "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it".
In that sense I don't see an issue with protecting your impressionable morons from deliberate foreign state propaganda.
So what's the alternative? Deliberately create a classist structure where you have a voting class and non-voting class of citizens? Seems like a worse idea than the current one. Democracy is not perfect, but it's the best we have.
Also worth mentioning that if your own political party decides to feed people populist shit then that's the country shooting themselves in the foot. When a foreign entity does the same things that's no longer shooting yourself in the foot, that's someone wanting you to shoot you in the foot.