For years, Russian authorities have been meticulously expanding their legal and technological tools to carve out Russia’s section of the internet into a tightly controlled and isolated forum.
And it has devastating implications for access to information, privacy, and freedom of expression of every internet user in Russia.
A new Human Rights Watch report finds that authorities have doubled down on online censorship, internet disruptions, and surveillance since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Thousands of websites have been blocked, including for independent media outlets and human rights organizations, opposition politicians’ web pages, and social media platforms, for failure to comply with Russia’s draconian legislation regulating online activity.
Some foreign websites and platforms have stopped providing services to users from Russia due to sanctions and political pressure.
And accessing blocked websites and apps, like Instagram or Facebook, is largely impossible in Russia without a Virtual Private Network (VPN), a tool that allows users to circumvent censorship. Yet authorities increasingly block them.
This creeping control allows the authorities to carry out widespread and nontransparent blocking and throttling of unwanted websites and censorship circumvention tools, as well as internet disruptions and shutdowns under the pretext of ensuring public safety and national security.
Read more about the Russian government’s expanding arsenal to control the country’s internet infrastructure.
