Up until Friday, millions more Russians were tuning in to Western media channels 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-free and open version of the Internet look increasingly like China’s. The websites for BBC Russia, Voice of America, Deutsche Welle and Radio Free Europe were widely inaccessible to Russian users, according to multiple reports and network tracking services. Facebook had seen a “degradation” of service for Russian users who are struggling to load videos on the site, Meta Platforms Inc. said. And then media regulator Roskomnadzor announced it had blocked the site because Facebook had suspended Russian media accounts.
Russian 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 time. TikTok — which is owned by a the Chinese tech company ByteDance Ltd. — had not seen impact on its services in Russia, according to a spokesperson.
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“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 by Roskomnadzor on Thursday, along with several other news sites. Rothrock has been appealing to Apple Inc. to approve an update to Meduza’s app, which his engineering team believes might help circumvent the blockade. Even if that works, it’s unclear how long it would be before it’s blocked again.
“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 herself was in danger. The mother insisted Ukraine’s government was killing its own people.
The crackdown leaves just two independent Russian media companies still publishing, 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. On Friday, however, Russian users were reporting 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 as it is doing to Twitter Inc.
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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. (Facebook ranks 12th.) YouTube parent company Alphabet Inc. did not respond to a request for comment.
About 22% of Russian internet users had access to a VPN (virtual private network) in 2020, according to Top10VPN.com, a review site for VPN tools, meaning they could visit websites that were blocked by the Kremlin. (1)Last September, however, the Kremlin banned popular VPN tools like ExpressVPN, NordVPN and IPVanish, threatening fines for anyone who used them. Only government approved VPNs are legal in Russia. It’s unclear how many people still have VPN access since the ban, which will make it even harder for Russians who are eager to circumvent the blockade to do so now. 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.
For now, Telegram is still going strong, though its founder, Pavel Durov, hinted at potential self-censorship about 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.”
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The 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 Group Holding Ltd. to Sina Weibo.
Instead, millions of Russians who have grown used to YouTube, Wikipedia and Facebook will suddenly lose access to popular 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 till now, that seems unlikely any time soon.