The Kremlin is raising an iron firewall around online Russia
PremiumPutin seems keen to block Russians off from external information
Until Friday, millions of Russians were tuning in to Western media to try and get an alternative view to their heavily partisan state-news channels. That’s now gone. Russia has embarked on an extraordinary effort to raise a national firewall, making its relatively open version of the internet look more like China’s. The websites of BBC Russia, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe are widely inaccessible to Russians. Facebook saw a “degradation" of service for Russian users, who were struggling to load videos on the site, said Meta. And then Russia’s media regulator Roskomnadzor announced it had blocked the site because Facebook had suspended Russian media accounts. State news agency TASS confirmed Friday that an array of media sites had been blocked because of “fake news items about Ukraine." The BBC has asked its journalists in Russia to stop working because of a law that could potentially punish reporters with jail.
“The blocks are coming so fast right now I’m not sure what’s on the list at the moment," says Kevin Rothrock, editor of Meduza, an independent Russian news site that was blocked along with several others. Rothrock has been appealing to Apple to approve an update to Meduza’s app, which might help circumvent the blockade. Whether this will work, though, and for how long, is unclear. “We’re going back to the Iron Curtain days," he said. “It’s going to be about sneaking stuff through."
Russians are already in something of an information vacuum, with most TV news channels overseen by the state. So effective is the propaganda machine that, for example, a 25-year-old woman in Kharkiv, a Ukrainian city assaulted by Russian cluster munitions, was reportedly unable to convince her mother in Moscow that people around her were dying—or that she was in danger. The mother insisted Ukraine’s government was killing its own people.
The crackdown leaves just two independent Russian media firms still going, according to Rothrock: Media Zone, which was set up by two former members of Pussy Riot; and Novaya Gazeta, whose editor-in-chief won the Nobel Peace Prize last year. It also appeared to have spared YouTube—for now. But Russian users reported that videos were slow to load on the site, according to Downdetector Russia, which tracks network traffic in the country, suggesting the Kremlin may be “throttling" traffic.
That is a particularly disturbing development since Russians rely on YouTube much more than Facebook for access to information, entertainment and news. YouTube is Russia’s second most popular website after domestic search giant Yandex, according to SimilarWeb, a traffic monitoring company.
About 22% of Russian internet users had access to a virtual private network in 2020, according to Top10VPN.com, a review site for VPN tools that let people access websites blocked by the Kremlin. Last September, however, the Kremlin had banned popular VPN tools like ExpressVPN, NordVPN and IPVanish, threatening fines for anyone who used them. Only government-approved VPNs remain legal in Russia. It’s unclear how many people still have VPN access since the ban.
Another important channel of information for Russians is the enormously popular Telegram instant messaging service. “Telegram is the No. 1 source for on-the-ground information coming out of Ukraine in the combat zone," says Rothrock, and is a source for videos that are then uploaded to other platforms like YouTube, Twitter and TikTok [which imposed usage restrictions in Russia, saying that this was to avoid run-ins with its harsh ‘fake news’ law].
Last heard, Telegram was still going strong in Russia, though its founder, Pavel Durov, hinted at potential self-censorship on the conflict. Telegram channels were “increasingly becoming a source of unverified information related to Ukrainian events," he said on the app, adding that it might block some of those channels. But 30 minutes after posting that statement, he made a U-turn: “Many users asked us not to consider disabling Telegram channels for the period of the conflict, since we are the only source of information for them," he wrote. “We have decided not to consider such measures."
The big question now is how robust Putin’s Iron Firewall will be. It is unlikely to be as well-resourced as China’s, where people are accustomed to an array of high-quality alternatives to Western online platforms, from Alibaba to Sina Weibo.
Instead, millions of Russians who have grown used to YouTube, Wikipedia and Facebook will suddenly lose access to such services. They may just make do or get better at finding workarounds. Whether it leads them to agitate for change is another matter, but given the heavy-handed nature of the Kremlin’s policies till now, that seems unlikely any time soon.
Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology.
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