I based my comment mainly on my knowledge of communist Czechoslovakia and other East Bloc countries. There the country was hardly lawless and the state was pretty efficient in its efforts to find and punish dissidents. Laws were being bent and corruption was high, but I'd never heard of anyone bribing their way out of dissent charges. There were plenty of people who were relatively well-off and/or were willing to snitch to rise in the ranks.

Totalitarian regimes don't need to be failed states. These countries had functioning rule of law and bureaucracy before WW2, and this apparatus was fully used by the new totalitarian governments. So I think they're the closest model that we have for how our ("western") societies might work after sharing undesirable information is made an offence.