Peskov knows full well that Russian state-controlled TV is only there to manufacture outrage and does not provide any useful information which is why he fires up the VPN to figure out what's going on in the real world.
Technically, demanding that providers like Facebook and YouTube should be blocked where New Zealand's optical fibre cables land wouldn't work. There's no strand of fibre marked "Meta/Facebook" that operators can snip or unplug, and the cable landing stations aren't set up to filter incoming and outgoing traffic.
In reality, the only way to effectively block undesirable sites is to remove direct access for people to the Internet. No home connections, mobile data, and perhaps only supervised Internet access at public libraries for registered users.
That would be a tough sell in most circles, as free access to Internet information flows is attractive for users, and difficult to live without in 2022.
Recognising this, authoritarian regimes who wish to exploit the negativity that humans are naturally biased towards are building "splinternets" that redirect traffic towards their own "sanitised" sources instead of the online forums users expect to visit.
Meanwhile, on the free Internet in Western countries, Putin propagandists work hard on polishing the dictator's image, setting up fawning Facebook fan groups with hundreds of thousands of members, as the BBC recently reported.
If it went, I would miss social media. The people I interact with are interesting, funny and witty, and forgiving when I try to be as amusing and clever as they are.
Bar a strange guy who posts pictures from his extensive library of fish being gutted, my timeline is full of lovely people that inform and entertain.
There's no doubt however that internet-borne malevolent sites have caused, and are continuing to cause, enormous societal damage.
It's everywhere too. Despite the Internet service there being sketchy, a rift has appeared in my little village, with a few people becoming aggressive anti-vaxx extremists.
They're shunning others, and the village is just too small to be split like that. My neighbour who is triple-vaxxed like me wondered what we'll do after Covid is over, if we can go back to some sort of normality; that seems unlikely, given how radicalised people have jumped from one imaginary problem to another very quickly.
If it isn't fluoride in the water, it's 1080 drops to save what's left of New Zealand birdlife, or burning down mobile phone towers because Bill Gates has designed 5G with world-depopulating radiation.
The radicals are now fighting "mandates", causing themselves and others harm by ignoring public health measures. Their beliefs are so fervent that our intelligence services warn that those who have radicalised online will turn to terrorism.
In that sense, history's largest general purpose network, the amazing social experiment that is the Internet, has "democratised" the undermining of democracy and tolerance and tilted the political landscape towards fascist violence.
This is a people problem that shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. People gang up and hurt others based on the flimsiest of pretexts because they get a kick out of anger and outrage. Neither rhyme nor reason is required, just tasty lies that fuel outrage.
There's plenty of good work being done in this field, but the challenge will be how to take impersonal, passive academic terminology like "disinformation" and turn it into something hard-hitting that smacks, for example, rampant online misogyny in the head. Figuratively speaking, of course.
