For Russian citizens, getting information is becoming more and more difficult. Under a new law, people who spread “fake news” now face up to 15 years in prison. Result: the Russian media are gagged and hundreds of websites were blocked, including those of foreign media and social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, BBC News or Deutsche Welle.
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However, Russian citizens do not let it go. In order to circumvent this censorship, they massively install VPNs. According to Top10vpn.com, demand increased by around 1000% between February 24 and March 8. The analysts ofappfigures even see a 1268% growth in VPN app downloads. At the top of the list are relatively unknown offers, namely “Secure VPN”, “VPN Proxy Master” and “VPN – fast, private & secure”.
In order to help users even more, the supplier Tunnel Bear announced that it wanted to offer a traffic volume of 10 GB “ to anyone connecting from Russia “. Obviously, the Russian regulator Roskomnadzor does not see this rush with a good eye and has already ordered Google to remove VPN offers from its search results.
Currently, as the supplier recalls Surfshark in a blog post, it is not forbidden to use a VPN in Russia. On the other hand, certain services allowing discreet surfing have been blocked, such as Tor for example. If censorship continues to be circumvented, it is not impossible — unfortunately — that the Russian government will go further and ban the use of VPNs, under penalty of prison. Technically, it would in any case be feasible to detect Russian Internet users who connect to VPN services.