Considered “extremist activities”, Facebook and Instagram are banned in Russia

On Monday, a Moscow court rejected the appeal of Metathe parent company of Facebook and D’instagram, which refuted the accusations of extremism made by Russia. Considered to be carrying out “extremist activities”, Facebook and instagram are now banned in Russia. According to Reuters, the company’s lawyer, Victoria Shagina, explained to the magistrates that Meta did not carry out extremist activities in Russia and that she opposed Russophobia. Arguments that did not convince justice.

At the heart of this legal battle, there is first Russia’s decision to ban Facebook for restricting access to Russian media content to its members. Meta had justified this blocking by the fact that its platform independently verifies the content posted online, and that it displays posts warnings for the content of four Russian public media. Then Russia had blocked access to Instagram, guilty of no longer moderating posts and comments that called for violence against Vladimir Putin and his troops sent to Ukraine.

WhatsApp is not affected

It should be noted that the adjective “extremist” was usually reserved for groups such as the Taliban and the Islamic State, but recently it has also been applied to Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Anti-Corruption Foundation of Alexei Navalny, imprisoned since returning to Russia after escaping poisoning. Despite this ban, Facebook and Instagram are accessible in Russia, but neither Meta nor its members can monetize the content.

According to the Tass agency, the activity of WhatsApp on Russian territory would not be affected by this ban but Meta is not entitled to profit from it. ” The decision does not apply to the activities of the messenger WhatsApp of Meta, due to its lack of functionality for the diffusion public information, reads the court statement.

Twitter, Facebook, Google, VPN… How Russia censors content on the Internet

Since the invasion of Ukraine, the regulator Russian telecommunications company Roskomnadzor has forced Google to remove tens of thousands of new URLs that link to resources accessible by vpn. This includes foreign and local media that refuse to play along with state propaganda. TwitterFacebook and YouTube are also affected by this censorship.

Posted on 03/10/2022 by Fabrice Auclert

For Russia, all means are good so that the local population does not have access to any image or information related to the invasion in Ukraine. An unspoken censorship that began with a law prohibiting the media from using the term “invasion”. It is considered a ” fake news ” and it is punishable by 15 years in prison ! It is for this reason that Russian media, not linked to the government, have decided not to write any more articles on the situation in Ukraine or that major international newspapers have asked their reporters to leave the country.

Another recent government decision: the blocking of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube from Russian territory. Again, this is to prevent access to articles and videos that report on the news on the front since the start of the war in Ukraine. New stage in this witch hunt Made in Russia, the censorship of content offered in Google. More concretely, the Russian telecommunications regulator Roskomnadzor forced the search engine to remove tens of thousands of new links that point to “banned” content. Prohibited, because it is accessible on VPNsprivate networks.

A law prohibits VPNs and proxies

It should be noted that in Russia, since the end of 2012, a law makes it possible to “blacklist” and block websites, publications and online news outlets that challenge official government discourse. As explained Torrent Freakthis law was reinforced in 2019 by blocking all tools that hide its IP adress, and therefore to be identified on the network. A law that limits and prohibits the use of VPNs, Tor and tools like proxies. The only condition for publishers to continue their activity: to provide access to the data of their servers…

This is why Google complied with the will of the Russian regulator and de-indexed the links that pointed to “banned” sites to make inaccessible local and foreign media articles that reflect the reality in Ukraine. To flush out the deleted content, and the origin of this deletion, our colleagues rely on the Lumen database. Every day, this independent site lists all requests to remove links, and often these are copyright issues. Except that since February 22, two days before Russia entered Ukraine, Google has been forced to delete hundreds of links a day. Even thousands like last March 5.

Towards a sovereign Internet cut off from the world

Soon, Roskomnadzor will no longer need to police the networks since Russia is simply planning to disconnect from theInternet world, and to use only servers controlled and placed on its territory. VPNs will then become useless since it will be impossible to change your IP adress and use an international address.

” There will be no need for global international filtering since by default there will simply be no external traffic, except for gateways under full control of Rostelecom and othersanalyzes Alexey Shkittin, a Russian opponent, under house arrest because his company was marketing tools to anonymize his IP address. Internal traffic will be decrypted by DPI(Deep Packet Inspection) and blocked if necessary. It will be impossible to build a VPN gateway, as well as to use the bypass systems built into browsers. Thus, the planned sovereign Internet is essentially a closed system at the structural level of network management, or a sovereign segment of the international network, which operates on the model of the global Internet, but is completely separate from it.. »