Russia’s great firewall: As Putin clamps down, activists get creative

Russian motorists travelling on the M-11, a motorway between Moscow and Saint Petersburg, were confronted by a series of surprising messages when they tried to charge their electric cars last week.

“Glory to Ukraine” read an electronic message on one charging station; “Putin is a d---head” read another. Russian energy company Rosseti, which owns the stations, later said the machines had been hacked by a Ukrainian company that supplies parts for the stations.

Diners considering a meal at Romantic, an upscale restaurant in Moscow, were similarly surprised when they went online to check out its Google reviews. “Food is great, but your leader is killing innocent people in Ukraine!! Stop this war,” read one review, part of a massive campaign to spread messages critical of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to unsuspecting Russian readers.

In recent days, Russia has effectively blocked Twitter, Facebook and TikTok, but VPN upatke has soared. Credit: Getty

In recent days hacktivist collective Squad303 has been promoting a tool that allows people to send free text messages criticising the invasion to randomly selected Russians.

According to the group, two million messages were sent to Russian mobile phones within 48 hours of the tool going live. “Thank you for that! Don’t stop!” the group said on Twitter. “Ukrainians are fighting with real guns. We can at least with our smartphones.”

These are some of the inventive, and at times outlandish, tactics anti-Putin activists are turning to in their efforts to puncture the Russian government’s rapidly intensifying blockade on independent information.

Freedom of expression in Russia has been increasingly strangled during Putin’s two-decades-long rule: watchdog group Reporters Without Borders last year ranked the country 150th out of 180 countries in its Press Freedom Index.

But Russia’s information ecosystem was significantly more free than in other authoritarian states such as China and Iran until the Ukrainian invasion. Russians could access stories, often translated into Russian, from western media outlets such as the BBC. Meanwhile, reporters at independent newspapers such as Novaya Gazeta continued to risk their lives by publishing highly critical coverage of Putin.

Those days are now over.

In recent days, Putin has dramatically tightened his grip over what Russians can see and hear in an effort to shut them off from the outside world. The state communications authority, Roskomnadzor, has blocked Twitter and Facebook. The same goes for the BBC, the US government-funded service Voice of America and German broadcaster Deutsche Welle. TikTok has suspended new posts in Russia and Netflix has stopped streaming in the country.

Dmitry Muratov,the editor of Nobel Prize-winning paper Novaya Gazeta, has opted to censor Ukraine war coverage rather than be banned. Credit: AP

The Echo of Moscow, one of the country’s last remaining independent radio stations, shut down last week as did popular web-based television channel TV Rain. The lower chamber of Russia’s parliament has approved a new law that threatens prison time for anyone who publishes what the Kremlin deems to be false information about the country’s invasion of Ukraine. Newspaper Novaya Gazeta, which won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, is no longer covering the war in Ukraine, choosing censorship over shutting down entirely.

“We are looking on helplessly as Russia’s independent media are being silenced to death,” says Jeanne Cavelier, the head of Reporters Without Borders’ Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk.

In a bid to access independent information, Russians are turning to virtual private networks (or VPNs) that trick their internet browsers into thinking they are in another, less restrictive country. Google’s App Store in Russia has seen a massive uptick in downloads of VPNs, with demand for some apps surging by as much as 2700 per cent week-on-week since the invasion began.

Meanwhile, the BBC has turned to the antiquated technology of shortwave radio in a bid to evade the censor’s net. This allows Russians with old-fashioned portable radios to hear its world service for up to four hours a day.

A resident watches a live broadcast of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s President, as he delivers an address, on a television in Moscow, Russia, on Monday, Feb. 22, 2022. Credit: Bloomberg

Those not sufficiently motivated or technologically efficient are left to rely for information on Putin’s propaganda machine. Russian broadcasters are banned from using the term invasion to describe what is transpiring in Ukraine, instead calling Russia’s intervention a “special military operation”.

Meanwhile, Russian television hosts describe their Ukrainian opponents as “Nazis” and present the Russian troops as liberators.

Ilya Fomin, a postdoctoral fellow at Macquarie University who grew up in Russia before moving to Australia, says in recent days Russian media has claimed to have discovered evidence of biological and nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

“It makes little sense and is very hard to believe,” he says. But many Russians do.

Fomin points to a generational divide: younger Russians are more tech-literate and eager to seek out independent news sources while older Russians rely on state television and are more accepting of the official line.

Christopher Paul, a senior social scientist at the Rand Corporation, says: “The internal propaganda apparatus has been cranked up to 11 and is broadcasting narratives that may seem ridiculous to us in the west but play much better in Russia, [where the audience] has been fed a steady diet of propaganda for pretty much their whole lives.”

Paul says Putin deploys a “firehouse-of-falsehood propaganda model”, flooding the zone with incoherent and inconsistent explanations for what is taking place in Ukraine.

“If the Russian propagandists are finding one explanation isn’t getting the traction they want, they are happy to change tunes,” he says.