Russia: The Censored State

Russia's Information Iron Curtain Closes on Its Own People

Mar 15, 2025

Introduction

Censorship in Russia is not a new phenomenon. Peter the Great, who reigned from 1682-1725 and is a favorite historical figure to many Russians (and one of Vladimir Putin's role models), was known to have censored literature and news. State censorship waxed and waned over the centuries until the fall of the Soviet Union, when Russia saw a period of relative media freedom. With the advent of the internet, information became easily available to those Russians lucky enough to have access, and regulation was minimal. When widespread reports of election fraud in 2011 led to mass protests in the Russian Federation, though, the Kremlin's previous ambivalence regarding online censorship came to an end. Censorship of the internet didn't necessarily happen all at once, instead it built slowly over the following decade, reaching a crescendo after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Russia in the 21st century is governed by Vladimir Putin, oligarchs who owe him fealty, organized crime, and other "non-state" actors. The goal of those in power seems to be to grow their own wealth and maintain control at all costs. Unlike the old days of the Bolshevik Revolution and then the Soviet Union, when ideological purity was at least ostensibly the goal of censorship, modern Russia could be described as a for-profit enterprise where censorship and propaganda are used to divert attention from the crimes of those who run the country and to spread Vladimir Putin's distorted view of Russian history.

Roskomnadzor

The Russian federal agency responsible for mass media and internet censorship is, at least to a large extent, Roskomnadzor (the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media). While Roskomnadzor doesn't have the censorship and surveillance capability inherent in the "Great Firewall of China", that doesn’t mean it isn’t effective. The agency has a blocklist of well over a million URLs, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and has attempted to regulate Google under the "sovereign internet" strategy. YouTube, which has been extremely popular with the Russian people, has been throttled, with access to the platform decreasing by almost 50%. Roskomnadzor also dictates which radio and TV stations get licenses and can order Russian ISPs to block internet sites as well. According to the Council on Foreign Relations:

In November 2012, a new law came into effect requiring Roskomnadzor to set up a website blocklist, ostensibly to take down websites featuring exploitative content targeting children. Since then, the agency has used the list to punish websites which offend the regime. The government often tries to shut websites down entirely, and if the state cannot, it forces Russian internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to those listed websites. The censor is also charged with enforcing data protection rules for Russians—though, of course, protection from companies (not the regime).

From a technological standpoint, in addition to blacklisting websites, Domain Name System (DNS) tampering is used to redirect web page requests to sites approved by the government. DNS blocking and tampering is discussed in my previous post Censorship and Surveillance in the Digital Age: Part One.

Oculus, Facial Recognition, and Cameras

In 2023, Roskomnadzor unveiled Oculus, an automated AI system that searches the internet for banned audio and video content. This content can include "LGBT propaganda", protests, "extremism", and other content the Kremlin considers dangerous. Oculus also has facial recognition technology that can pick an individual face out of a crowd of protesters, find draft dodgers, and track undesirable people (including activists, dissidents, and journalists). It is believed that Oculus also can analyze up to 200,000 images a day and detect illegal content from just a few seconds of video, and as of 2023, plans were in place to continue expanding and improving the system.

According to Reuters, a new $660 million initiative to better censor online content has been put into place which will significantly upgrade the government's ability to suppress free expression. The initiative will also target Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), which are a common tool citizens use to bypass internet restrictions. For more information on how VPNs help in the war against government censorship and surveillance, see my post Censorship and Surveillance in the Digital Age: Part Two. The Kremlin already had a network of surveillance cameras with facial recognition capabilities in Moscow, but Oculus substantially improves upon this capability.

The Invasion of Ukraine

As noted above, censorship and surveillance efforts by the Russian government ramped up substantially after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Putin had expected the war to be over quickly, but seems to have been blindsided by the magnitude of the Ukrainian resistance and also by the international response. Things got worse as the conflict bogged down, more and more Russian soldiers and conscripts became cannon fodder, and reports of kidnappings and torture perpetrated by the Russian military grew. Putin could only do so much to manage international outrage. His government, though, could and would control the narrative at home. Any criticism of the war effort was criminalized. According to an article in the Associated Press:

After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, online censorship and prosecutions for social media posts and comments spiked so much that it broke all existing records.
According to Net Freedoms, a prominent internet rights group, more than 610,000 web pages were blocked or removed by authorities in 2022 -– the highest annual total in 15 years — and 779 people faced criminal charges over online comments and posts, also a record.

As of 2024 almost 800 people have been arrested or otherwise prosecuted. Examples abound. A 65 year-old woman was fined thousands of dollars for spreading false information on Facebook. An activist received a 7 year prison sentence for social media comments against Putin (also on Facebook - his comments were admittedly more aggressive). The editor of the Russian Wikipedia was arrested by Belarusian police after he criticized the invasion.

Conclusion

The last 15 years have seen a dramatic increase in censorship in Russia, especially since the invasion of Ukraine. The Russian government aspires to control the narrative around the war in Ukraine, limit any form of expression deemed subversive or critical, and instill fear in the citizenry by prosecuting hundreds of its citizens for social media posts or other forms of speech whenever such speech does not favor Putin, his oligarchs, or the Russian government.