Russia’s digital scramble to control the ‘coup’ narrative
The infamous information manipulation strategies of the Kremlin were seriously tested over the weekend following Wagner Group mercenaries’ near-descent on Moscow. Russian censors were swift to respond on some fronts. News sites and aggregators became inaccessible online — Google News was blocked by five major internet service providers, including the country’s state-owned telco, Rostelecom. Social media platforms, including the super-popular social media and messaging app Telegram, also faltered, with service shutdowns in Moscow, St. Petersburg and along the route from Rostov-on-Don — which the Wagner Group swiftly, if briefly, occupied — to Moscow.
Russians looking for real information about why Wagner troops traveled all that way only to turn around, and why Wagner’s leader hightailed it to Minsk, were hard-pressed to find it. It wasn’t surprising. Since Russia’s war on Ukraine began, news outlets that aren’t aligned with the Kremlin have scarcely been able to operate, and the vast majority of independent media and their journalists now work outside the Russian territory. In the days since the not-coup, even more websites have been taken down, and searches on Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s name were blocked on Yandex, Russia’s leading search engine, and on VK, the country’s answer to Facebook.
While Russia watchers observed Kremlin-aligned media handling the incident somewhat clumsily, Prigozhin seemed to have captured much of the narrative thanks to his Telegram channel, a signature platform that he has leveraged for some time. Prigozhin has long been a savvy propagandist and early player in the global disinformation game. He launched and led Russia’s Internet Research Agency, the troll farm that became notorious for its attempts to malignly influence the 2016 U.S. national elections.
The particulars of this week’s events aside, I find myself thinking about the broader effects of the past 16 months on Russia’s information environment. Sure, Russia was never shy when it came to internet censorship — years of evidence from groups like OONI and Freedom House make this clear. But the invasion of Ukraine, as well as the government’s growing need to control what information people can access, has put Russia in a digital quarantine of its own making. Major social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, have been blocked since the start of the war. Hundreds of thousands of websites, many of them reporting and publishing news to high standards, are no longer accessible. And more sites and applications seem to discontinue their services in Russia every day.