Having been raised in a democracy and raising my kids in a dictatorship, I think there's a lot of misunderstanding from both side. People in democracies cannot comprehend how anyone in a dictatorship could live anything else than miserable, and people in dictatorship mostly see people in democracies as hypocrite imperialists who lie to themselves about who truly rules.
The funny thing is that, well, it mostly all depend on how much you care and how corrupt the people in charge are, totally independent of the system. A dictatorship in Singapore works better than a democracy in Mexico for most metrics except anything that will make the power feel it's not in perfect control. The only difference in a dictatorship is the complete insecurity of the leaders who can't fathom that... we'd frigging vote for them would they ask nicely :D And you can completely ignore the party(ies), and live an entirely fulfilling and useful life, in both systems. I wouldn't argue for doing this but I see it all the time from both side and I envy it sometimes.
So this whole debate about censorship, it's really just a debate about insecurity. They don't censor the truth here, they don't censor debate or discussion, they only censor what nobody cares about: critics of the party. So it's a lot less "terrible" or "inhuman" than I thought it would be coming from a democracy. And I think the way to make it change isn't to whine and yell at it as much as you can, but to embrace the competent leaders when they come and give confidence to them we'll give them 10x more power by voting directly for them. And lay the final trap. At least my origin democracy became a democracy when it started doing just that after 2 centuries of massacres and revolts followed by authoritarian counter reactions in a seemingly endless cycle of aggressive "activism". It simply ended when we went to war in mass without being forced and convinced the rulers we'd vote for them anyway as a result, sheeples we are, which we did the first election. Trapped.