Reface has pulled its app out of Russia due to the fact that the Kremlin wants total control of the narrative around the war in Ukraine.
After Putin ordered his troops to invade Ukraine late last month, the startup took an early decision to try to use its app as a conduit to circumvent the Kremlin's media censorship. Reface messages urging Russian users to take to the streets to protest against the war.
Anti-war messages were served to Reface users in Russia. The startup says it sent 13 million anti-war push notifications.
The negative reaction from users in Russia who flooded the app with one-star reviews was caused by the anti-war content.
The image is called Reface.
The negative reaction of users in Russia to the destruction of houses and women and children killed in Ukraine is being interpreted by Reface as a sign that the Russian audience doesn't care about that.
We decided to remove the Reface app from the Russian App Store because we realized that we weren't able to compete with the state propaganda in Russia. Downloads and subscriptions are disabled.
We don't want to profit from the Russian market or associate with it in any way. Reface says that every person in Russia must feel the effects of sanctions and technological isolation due to the war of their state against Ukraine.
The decision to pull its apps out of Russia was made by Reface, according to the startup's CEO and co-founder.
He said that they had not been restricted by Russia's Internet censor.
The screengrab is from TechCrunch.
It is another small sign of how the Internet experience in Russia is being separated from the mainstream web, not just because of the Western sanctions against Russian banks, named business execs and certain other entities in the country.
Reface's app was originally built for pure entertainment and was intended to let users visualize themselves as celebrities in famous movie scenes.
Reface users entertained themselves by changing into Jack Sparrow and Iron Man. We encourage everyone to take photos with the Ukrainian anthem and swap themselves into Zelensky. Zelensky has more followers than West. Reface summarizes the changed consumer landscape in a post.
The app allows users to swap out clips of the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, for images of Ukrainian soldiers uploaded by users.
It encourages users to spread the pro-Ukraine synthetic media on their social networks.
In another twist to this parallel infowar that's being fought online alongside actual war-on-the-ground in Ukraine, deep fakes of the president have appeared online to try to undermine the country's war effort.
It's not clear where these fakes came from, but earlier this month, the Centre for Strategic Communications warned that Russia might use altered videos to try to manipulate public perception of its invasion.
Meta takes down deepfake of Ukraine’s President Zelensky surrendering
Reface, a viral face-swap app from Ukraine, adds anti-war push notifications
Russia’s war hits Yandex, the ‘Google of Russia’
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