The first casualty of war is truth. Russia's communications agency cut off access to foreign news sites eight days after it invaded Ukraine. Facebook was banned because of its fact-checks of Russian state media posts. The ban on the photo-sharing website for the country's 80 million users sent shock waves through Russia's influencer industry. Russia's Prosecutor General's Office asked a court to designate Meta as an Extremist organization. Andrew Sullivan is the president of the Internet Society lobby group. He said that Russia's bans mark the splintering of the internet along geographical, political, commercial, and technological boundaries, and are the antithesis of how the internet was designed and meant to function. Russia's internet was not completely free before the invasion. TikTok was already removed from the internet. The war hasn't gone as planned, as the Kremlin tries to hide the fact that 122 million internet users in Russia are affected. There is still work being done by the company in the country. The most popular social media site in Russia is the messaging service, with over 65% of internet users active on it monthly. Insider used the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) explorer to see what the internet looks like for users in Russia. Insider worked with researchers at OONI and analysts at Top10VPN who were able to look at what the news site looks like in Russia using a virtual private network. According to OONI, Russia censors websites in different ways, issuing a list of sites to internet providers to block themselves or throttle services in a centralized way. Russia's internet will look for people without a PureVPN. When Insider visited blocked sites, they mostly displayed the same thing: An apologetic message explaining the site is unavailable, and pointing users to various Russian state block lists and official websites. There isn't much else to explain, and no reference to the invasion that Russia describes as a special operation. An error message shows up when a Russian device tries to access Facebook. The page was included in the Unified Register of Prohibited Sites and the Federal List of Extremist Materials. We used machine-learning to translate, so the translations may not be precise. Similar messages are displayed on other blocked sites. In Russia, there are millions of followers on the popular social media platform. In the run-up to the block, Russian social media users posted emotional videos. She said in Russian, "I am not afraid of admitting that I do not want to lose you." The Russian users of the service are likely to get an error page when trying to access it. We apologize, but this resource is locked by state authorities. The first paragraph of the body text states that there is a register of domain names, internet site page indexes and network addresses that are not allowed in the Russian Federation. The page directs users to the banned websites of the Ministry of Justice and the broadcast regulators. Russian internet users are using tools like private browsers and Virtual Private Network to circumvent internet censors. On the eve of the country's ban on the photo-sharing website, demand for VPNs, which obscures a user's actual address, jumped 2,000%. In the week before the Ukraine invasion, SensorTower saw a 2,692% spike in demand for virtual private networks. Russian internet users who aren't tech savvy may not think to use a secure virtual private network, so instead they are facing a growing number of error pages and a lack of independent news coverage of the invasion. It leaves Russians cut off from multiple means of global communication and information sharing, and vulnerable to misinformation about the war being waged by the Kremlin. Keep reading.
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