I consider banning it uncharacteristic to such. I can hardly consider a state where people are not allowed to access Reddit (as well as HN, Wikipedia or StackExchange) freely and anonymously a healthy civilized democracy. It can still be a very civilized society in general but tightening control on the people like this indicates the government is going slippery slope.

Many national subreddits are taken over by power hungry mods who now have behind the scene help from nation-states. Despite ample evidence and other subreddits highlighting consistent systemic biases there is no way to remove mods or change policies. I understand it is difficult to make it completely unbiased as subjectivity and a lot of other factors will influence what counts are right or wrong in that scenario, and mods are not even paid either. But then this always made it ripe for influence from other areas as a part of information warfare and here we are with the outcome

I’d think it doesn’t specifically mean anything for civilized or democracy or slippery slope to block a bunch of western sites.