Authoritarian hellholes will make something up when they don't like you, but they'll also spy on everyone to decide who they don't like. At which point anyone attempting to resist them is going to want to get extremely familiar with operational security before they get dead, and a big part of that is things like encryption and steganography.
Encryption will not keep you hidden from an authoritarian government for long, and certainly not for long if you're trying to build a movement with any sort of wide-spread support.
