Fans of shady government games should check out Floor 13, an early 90s game where you are in charge of a secret British agency charged with keeping the Prime Minister popular by any means necssary. I vaguely remember manipulating the press and torture being some of the options. Sadly, I was never able to play the game very much. My friends and I all had Macs, and were never able to get our Windows emulator to run it very long without crashing. And at some point afterwards, when we had access to PCs, we were defeated by its copy-protection scheme (despite having a legitimate copy!) and by then many more games were much more compelling.
Even if we'd been able to play it, though, it's not clear we'd have gotten much more out of it than we'd gotten by reading 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and being at the mercy of the administration of an American public high school.
As for this game, it seemed much more compelling in the intro screen, which resembled some sort of Twitter / Facebook wall and had some cool effects while scrolling. When the actual game started it seemed like a puzzle game combined with a paranoia game, which is great for those who are already convinced by the world the game depicts but not convincing otherwise. It might be a tougher game mechanic to figure out, but it might be more compelling if the UI were Facebook, Gmail, and Twitter clones, and the game was such that the player attempted to sift through volumes of intercepted correspondence and communication metadata, fingering bad guys, political opponents, and hapless citizens, and, with limited resources, decided who to investigate/hassle. The game could have real terrorists that need to be detected, rewarding real detections and penalizing false positives, or have super-cynic Floor 13 mode, where the player used the surveillance system to their own personal gain. Or, turn the system described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6882378 into a game (I posted then and still believe that the concerns there were, while possible, vague and improbable, but possibly a game could convince me and others otherwise).