MOSCOW – Margarita Simonyan, chief editor of the Kremlin-controlled RT television network, recently called on the government to block access to Western social media.
She wrote: “Foreign platforms in Russia must be closed”.
Your choice of social network to send this message: Twitter.
Although the Kremlin fears an open Internet shaped by American companies, it simply cannot abandon it.
The winter of discontent in Russia, waves of protests across the country triggered by the return of opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, were made possible by the country’s free and open Internet. The state controls television waves, but Navalny’s dramatic online arrest on arrival in Moscow, his investigation into President Vladimir V. Putin’s alleged secret palace and his supporters’ protest calls have been broadcast to an audience of many millions.
For years, the Russian government has put in place the technological and legal infrastructure to restrict freedom of expression online, leading to frequent predictions that the country could be heading towards Internet censorship similar to China’s great firewall.
But even when Putin faced the biggest protests of the years last month, his government seemed reluctant – and, to some extent, unable – to block websites or take other drastic measures to limit the spread of digital dissent.
The hesitation underscored the challenge that Putin faces as he tries to mitigate the political implications of cheap high-speed Internet access reaching the remote corners of the vast country, avoiding irritating a population that has fallen in love with Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and TikTok.
“They are afraid,” said Dmitri Galushko, a Moscow telecommunications consultant, of why the Kremlin did not control it more tightly. “They have all these weapons, but they don’t know how to use them.”
More broadly, the question of how to deal with the internet poses a dilemma for Putin’s Russia: whether to raise state repression to new heights and risk a public reaction or to continue trying to manage public discontent while maintaining some appearance of an open society. .
In China, government control went hand in hand with the initial development of the Internet. But in Russia, home to a Soviet legacy from a huge pool of engineering talent, digital entrepreneurship flourished freely for two decades, until Putin started trying to contain online speech after the anti-government protests of 2011 and 2012.
At that point, the open internet was so ingrained in business and society – and its architecture so decentralized – that it was too late to radically change course. But efforts to censor the web, as well as the requirement that Internet service providers install equipment for government surveillance and control, have gained momentum in bills after bills passed by Parliament. At the same time, Internet access continues to expand, in part thanks to government support.
Russian authorities now say they have the technology to enable a “sovereign RuNet” – a network that would continue to give Russians access to Russian sites even if the country were excluded from the World Wide Web. The official line is that this expensive infrastructure offers protection in the event of nefarious Western forces trying to cut Russia’s communication links. But activists say the goal is to give the Kremlin the option of isolating part or all of Russia from the world.
“In principle, it will be possible to restore or enable the Russian web segment to function autonomously,” Dmitri A. Medvedev, vice president of Putin’s Security Council and former prime minister, told reporters recently. “Technologically, everything is ready for that.”
Amid this year’s domestic unrest, Russia’s saber-rattling of Silicon Valley has reached a new intensity. Navalny made specialized use of YouTube from Google, Instagram from Facebook and Twitter to reach tens of millions of Russians with their official meme-ready depictions of corruption, right up to the $ 850 bathroom brush he claimed to have identified on a property used by Mr . Put on.
At the same time, Russia seemed powerless in trying to prevent these companies from blocking pro-Kremlin accounts or forcing them to remove pro-Navalny content from the air. (Mr. Navalny’s voice is resonating on social media, even with him behind bars: on Saturday, a court kept his prison sentence of more than two years.)
Russia’s telecommunications regulator Roskomnadzor has come to publicly criticize American internet companies, sometimes several times a day. On Wednesday, the regulator said the Clubhouse social voice chat network violated “citizens’ rights to access information and distribute it for free” by suspending the account of a leading state television presenter, Vladimir Solovyov. On January 29, it claimed that Google was blocking YouTube videos containing the Russian national anthem, calling it “blatant and unacceptable rudeness directed at all citizens of our country”.
The Clubhouse apparently blocked Solovyov’s account because of user complaints, while Google said that some videos containing the Russian anthem were mistakenly blocked because of a content rights issue. The Clubhouse did not respond to a request for comment.
In addition, as protest requests across the country proliferated after Navalny’s arrest last month, Roskomnadzor said social media was encouraging minors to participate in illegal activities.
Russian social network VKontakte and Chinese-owned app TikTok partially complied with Roskomnadzor’s order to block access to protest-related content. But Facebook declined, saying, “This content does not violate our community standards.”
Despite all its criticisms of American social media companies, the Kremlin used them extensively to spread its message around the world. It was Facebook that served as the main tool in Russia’s effort to influence the 2016 presidential elections in the United States. On YouTube, the state-controlled network RT has a total of 14 million subscribers to its channels in English, Spanish and Arabic.
Simonyan, editor of RT, says he will continue to use American social media platforms as long as they are not prohibited.
“To stop using these platforms while everyone else is using them is to capitulate to the opponent,” she said in a statement to The New York Times. “To ban them for everyone is to beat that opponent.”
A law signed by Putin in December gives his government new powers to block or restrict access to social networks, but has not yet used them. When regulators tried to block access to the Telegram messaging app from 2018, the two-year effort ended in failure after Telegram found ways to get around the restrictions.
Instead, the authorities are trying to attract Russians to social networks like VKontakte, which are closely linked to the government. Gazprom Media, a subsidiary of the state-owned natural gas giant, has promised to turn its long-dying ruTube video platform into a YouTube competitor. And in December, she said she bought an app modeled on TikTok called “Ya Molodets” – Russian for “I’m great” – to share short videos on smartphones.
Andrei Soldatov, a journalist who co-wrote a book on the Kremlin’s efforts to control the internet, says the strategy of persuading people to use Russian platforms is a way to prevent dissent from going viral in times of crisis. As of April 1, all smartphones sold in Russia are expected to come preloaded with 16 Russian apps, including three social networks and a response to Apple’s Siri voice assistant, called Marusya.
“The goal is for the typical Russian user to live in a bubble of Russian apps,” said Soldatov. “Potentially, it can be quite effective.”
Even more effective, say some activists, is the acceleration of Putin’s selective repression machine. A new law makes online libel punishable by up to five years in prison, and the editor of a popular news site served 15 days in prison for retweeting a joke that included a reference to a pro-Navalny protest in January.
In a wide circulation video this month, a SWAT team in the port city of Vladivostok, in the Pacific, can be seen interrogating Gennady Shulga, a local videoblog that covered the protests. An officer with a helmet, glasses and combat uniform presses Shulga shirtless against a tile floor next to two bowls of pet food.
“The Kremlin is missing out on the information race,” said Sarkis Darbinyan, an activist for internet freedom. “Self-censorship and fear – that’s what we’re going for.”
Oleg Matsnev contributed reports.