Before Facebook and its powerful local competitors VKontakte and Odnoklassniki arrived, the blogging platform of choice for the web-savvy minority of Russians was LiveJournal, then owned by US-based company Danga Interactive. But, in August 2008, something happened that prompted rapid change: a short, brutal, televised war erupted between Russia and its neighbouring ex-Soviet republic of Georgia. Online coverage of the war provoked widespread sympathy for Georgians across the world, prompting the Kremlin to wake up. It realised that its propaganda machine had atrophied - it was neglecting a nascent medium that had developed entirely outside its control.
Read more: Monetising misinformation: inside the fake news capital of the world
In September 2008, a visit by then-presidential adviser Vladislav Surkov to the offices of Yandex, Russia's domestic search engine, presaged what was to come. "I briefly explained to them how news stories are selected and what factors affect the ranking," recalled Lev Gershenzon, chief of news at Yandex. Surkov interrupted him, pointing his finger to a headline from a liberal media outlet in the Yandex ranking. "This is our enemy," Surkov said. "This is what we do not need!"
Surkov launched a campaign to bring Russian online media under the Kremlin's direct control. At that time, blogs - predominantly LiveJournal - were still the domain of the political opposition. Many blogs that questioned the ruling elite, however, were infiltrated with pro-Kremlin below-the-line comments.
In early 2012, a series of leaked emails from Surkov's close associates revealed the existence of a covert programme to flood LiveJournal and comment sections of online news media with pro-Kremlin sentiment. The aim was to undermine the opposition and promote the government narrative in domestic and international affairs. The far-reaching scheme involved prominent bloggers co-opted by the Kremlin and an army of pro-Putin youth activists. The grunts in the Kremlin's online army were allegedly paid 85 rubles (£1.17 at the 2012 exchange rate) per comment, and 200 rubles if they successfully provoked a discussion thread. They became known as the 85 Rubles Bunch.
But it wasn't until 2014 that state-sanctioned trolling reached fever pitch. Multiple investigations by Russian and foreign reporters revealed a large-scale online propaganda operation on the outskirts of Saint Petersburg. It employed dozens of writers, whose job was to disrupt any online discussion about Russia's war with Ukraine with aggressive comments and fake-news stories impugning Ukraine and the west. Theses were distributed via legitimate-looking news outlets and promoted by armies of Twitter bots. Read more: We need to talk about the internet's fake ads problem
Today, the Kremlin has solidified its grip on online outlets. It employs a full-scale censorship agency, Roskomnadzor, which threatens to block news websites that don't comply with its ever-tightening, labyrinthine regulation. Russia's defence minister Sergei Shoigu recently announced the creation of "propaganda troops" in the Russian army. According to the human-rights group Sova, the number of prosecutions for sharing what's described as "extremist" content has risen from ten in 2007 to 216 in 2015, resulting in fines and prison terms. A recent report from Agora, a human-rights group, lists 97 laws and regulations passed in 2016 that directly affect the ability of news organisations to operate online - compared with just five in 2011. New websites are blocked every day and there is talk of a blanket ban on services that allow users to circumvent these blocks. In five years, the Kremlin - spooked by the 2011-2012 protests against election fraud in Moscow - has brought the internet in Russia under almost complete control. The very people who, 20 years earlier, helped build the foundations of the Russian internet - such as Putin's adviser, German Klimenko, and the prominent web entrepreneur Igor Ashmanov - are now vocal proponents of ideas like banning foreign social networks that are positioned as endangering Russian national security.
Read more: Forget Google, Uber, Amazon and Spotify. In Russia, Yandex rules
What's peculiar in Russia's case is that it uses the west, not China or the Gulf states, as its supposed model for repression. Examples are used of people in the UK being arrested for Facebook posts or because of the Investigatory Powers Bill. When defending the government's right to prosecute Russians for "inflammatory" social-media posts, another prominent internet isolationist Denis Davydov, CEO of the Safe Internet League, has used the example of "hundreds of cases in the UK and US" where people were jailed for "microblog re-posts" (it's unclear as to which particular cases he was referring). Vyacheslav Volodin, one of Putin's most trusted domestic policy aides, has claimed "Americans are jailed for slandering Obama online." These are used as justification for tougher jail terms.
Russia's idea of strengthening global cyber-security is erecting more borders and restrictions in a network that is borderless by nature - so that each nation is free from meddling by outsiders. By "meddling", Putin means any dissent they cannot control - which must, clearly, be attributable to outside influence. That Russia itself is a meddler does not cause any cognitive dissonance: Russia, it's said, is under a sustained information attack. The response is simply tit-for-tat.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
