Polina Petruseva, also known by her pen name Polina Danilevich, received a fine for this post in VKontakte, showing her native city, Smolensk in western Russia, under the occupation of Nazi Germany during World War 2. The reason was that the swastika was visible on a flag in the photo (Image: RFE/RL)
Russia has traditionally enjoyed a high degree of internet freedom and for many years, political control targeted almost exclusively TV broadcasts.
Now, ahead of the next election cycle, we begin to see the Russian version of a crackdown on free speech online taking shape.
The new online reality
A survey of rulings handed down by Russian courts in the past year (published by the Sova research centre and mentioned in last week’s Disinformation Digest) reached two important conclusions about the new reality: it is mainly the laws banning “calls to extremism”, and “extremism” that are used as the legal framework for cracking down on free speech online; and the number of cases is on the rise (138 cases in 2014 against 194 in 2015 and 3 convictions in 2007).
QUICK GUIDE TO SELF-CENSORSHIP ON THE RUSSIAN INTERNET
- DON’T QUESTION IF CRIMEA BELONGS TO RUSSIA
- DON’T QUESTION THE OFFICIAL WW2 NARRATIVE
- DON’T SHOW IMAGES OF NAZI SYMBOLS IN RUSSIA*
- AVOID USING THE SOCIAL NETWORK VKONTAKTE
- REPOST = ENDORSEMENT
*NOT EVEN ON HISTORICAL PHOTOS FOR ILLUSTRATION PURPOSES!
An unfortunate “Soviet” tendency
On Tuesday, independent outlet Meduza highlighted that Russian courts make no difference between sharing and writing posts; a number of times, citizens have been convicted for simply pressing the share button.
Sergey Smirnov of the human rights NGO MediaZone explains this as an unfortunate “Soviet” tendency, i.e. the practice when the authorities “simply pick these cases to reach a certain statistical result in their work.”
Andrei Soldatov, editor of agentura.ru, sees it as part of a tendency: “In contrast to traditional totalitarian systems, Russian authorities have been focused not on how to block access to information, but on how to suppress free discussions;[..] to intimidate them as much as possible so that they will not participate in discussions on important political issues”.
VKontakte passes information to the authorities
Second, Meduza finds that, last year, almost all cases occurred on Russia’s largest social network, Vkontakte.
This is because Vkontakte has Russian owners, says Sakis Darbinian from the online human rights NGO Roskomsvoboda:
“This means that law enforcement authorities can easily obtain any information of interest to the user. VKontakte unconditionally complies with […] the so-called law on bloggers [which] obliges the administrators of a social network to collect and store all logs, all registration data of users within six months. And if Facebook and Twitter aren’t happy about sharing this kind of information, VKontakte passes it to the authorities upon request. Without these data, it is impossible to make a criminal case and to prove guilt in criminal proceedings.”