The seemingly sisyphic efforts of the Russian authorities to get social networks to remove pro-navalny content, however, have made it clear what is increasingly becoming a major security gap for the Kremlin: the availability of inexpensive, fast, and mostly uncensored internet access in almost all Countries populated corner of the country’s 11 time zones.
The government has tried, and for the most part failed, to contain the internet. For example, last year ended the two-year effort to block the Telegram messaging network, a ban that users could quickly bypass.
On Friday, the Russian telecommunications authority Roskomnadzor announced that YouTube, Instagram and the Russian social network VKontakte had begun canceling “calls for children to participate in illegal mass events” on the orders of the Russian attorney general.
Facebook, which owns Instagram, denied removing content.
“We have received requests from the local regulatory authority to restrict access to certain content that encourages protest,” Facebook said in a statement. “Since this content does not violate our community standards, it stays on our platform.”
The other social networks did not immediately respond to requests for comments.
The biggest problem, the regulator said, was TikTok, the Chinese-owned app that hosts seconds-long viral videos, often musically themed. Videos tagged with the hashtag #Navalny on the network had been viewed more than 800 million times by Friday.
In a clip that was “liked” more than 500,000 times, a young woman teaching pithy English gave tips on how to sound like an American – “I’ll call my lawyer!” – when arrested during the protests.
“The highest level of activity continues on the social network,” Roskomnadzor said in a statement referring to TikTok. “New appeals appear, which in some cases are artificially spread.”
