I have just gotten done watching the first installment of Chernobyl, a five part miniseries that dramatizes the nuclear accident and its repercussions. Watching this with the Rose Scholars program was very fulfilling to me, as I did not just watch the program but then got to engage in meaningful discussion about what we had all just witnessed together. The feature of the episode that stood out to me the most was how much the film highlighted the USSR’s efforts to downplay the accident and push misinformation regarding it. Engineers, firemen, plant workers, and civilians were seen formulating ideas of what happened, some having seen it with their own eyes. Yet when they presented their views to officials within the administration, they were called crazy and discredited. The final moments of the episode show an expert on nuclear reactors on the phone with a government official. The engineer tries to voice his concerns to the official regarding the safety of the workers and surrounding town, but is shut down, and told to only answer questions when they are directly posed to him. Another example of this governmental pressure was seen when a higher up in the company told the board to cut phone lines and not let anyone out of the town. This type of disinformation and censoring is customary for authoritarian governments, but it is still unsettling to see. I can’t help my train of thought from shifting over to the current debate over censorship in America, especially in the technology sector. It is hard to imagine the United States ever getting close to the level of censorship the USSR engaged in, but still it is eery to think that our largest tech companies are under scrutiny for the same topic. Remembering extremes like the USSR and Nazi Germany, and even present day North Korea simply strengthen my belief in the right to information, and it makes me excited to go into the political realm after college to help ensure that our country’s media doesn’t slide down that slippery slope of misinformation.