“If this is not a display of excessive power, then what is?”

How foreign bigtech companies censor the Runet and at the same time talk about human rights

Influential technology corporations such as Google, Meta and Apple until recently seemed to be the flagships of progress. Techno-optimists believed that the rapid spread of the Internet - a free platform where everyone could express themselves, find like-minded people and create horizontal connections - would lead to democratization around the world. It has long been clear that the hopes associated with big tech were not justified; dictators around the world have learned to manipulate the Internet for their own purposes.

But by 2024, it can be stated: tech giants not only do not help democratization, they organically fit into authoritarian systems. Novaya Gazeta Europe tells how in 2024 big tech is helping Putin censor the Internet and how Russian politicians in exile are still unsuccessfully fighting it.

In March 2022, during the early days of Russia's military aggression against Ukraine, Apple, along with several other Western technology giants, said it was "deeply concerned" by the actions of Russian authorities and was taking a number of measures in response to the invasion: suspending sales of its products in Russia and " limits a number of services for Russians,” including Apple Pay.

In Russia, specialized stores of Apple equipment were closed, but very soon intermediaries established supplies through parallel imports. There has been no shortage of iPhones in Russia for three years of hostilities, and some new products appear on sale in Moscow earlier than in European countries. According to human rights experts, the company has the tools to stop gray exports to Russia, but does not do so.

The Russian legal entity Apple still operates in Russia and brings in, albeit small, profits. In 2023, Apple Rus earned 2 billion rubles

(which, however, is a small part of pre-war revenue. In the last pre-war year, 2021, the corporation earned more than 300 billion in Russia).

As part of voluntary restrictions and in connection with US sanctions, some Russian applications were also removed from the App Store: for example, applications of sanctioned banks, Russian Railways, or CityDrive car sharing. But paradoxically, at the same time, the App Store is also subject to the requirements of the Russian Roskomnadzor.

"The Real Villain"

In the summer of 2024, it became known that the company had removed several popular VPN applications from its store, including NordVPN, Proton VPN and Red Shield VPN. In September 2024, the GreatFire project, which monitors the status of censored sites, reported that over the two summer months, Apple removed another 60 VPN applications, most of them non-publicly. According to GreatFire, then the total number of VPN applications removed from the Russian App Store reached 98 and continues to grow.

Such services allow you to bypass bans on access to information by Russian authorities. Now for Russians remaining in the country, this is the only way to access the websites of independent publications blocked by Roskomnadzor. VPN services have been banned in Russia since 2020. In 2024, several more laws were adopted: a ban on the popularization of services for bypassing blocking and a ban on the publication of statistics on the operation of VPNs in Russia.

The App Store also removes other services as part of the censorship requirements of the Russian state: dating apps related to LGBTQ+ and independent media apps , for example, Sibir.Realii. The corporation also removed from its podcast platform the content of The Insider and Meduza, which were declared objectionable, and even Echo of Moscow, the BBC Russian Service and Kholod, which did not have such status. In January, the corporation turned to the creators of the podcast “Hello, you are a foreign agent” with a request, due to claims from Roskomnadzor, to independently remove the season “Sisters” about female relatives of Russian military personnel from Apple podcasts. (Olga Churakova and Sonya Groysman did not delete the content; it is still available on the site).

Removing apps from the Apple store has attracted a lot of attention also because the company has created a closed, self-contained infrastructure. Apple users, unlike, for example, owners of Android smartphones, cannot install applications from sources other than the company's official store. Because of this, deleting an application from the App Store makes it simply impossible to use it on an iPhone.

Another issue that worries human rights activists is the pressure that Apple, thanks to its monopoly on installing applications on iPhones, can exert even on services that do not belong to it: for example, on Telegram.

In 2021, Russian authorities wanted to remove Navalny’s team’s messenger bot, but Durov was out of their reach. Then they turned to Apple with a demand to put pressure on the owner of the company. Apple threatened Durov with removing Telegram from the App Store if he did not make concessions,

- and it worked.

“This case shows how Apple is becoming a super-moderator of platforms that should be autonomous and free to manage their content,” said Benjamin Ismail, a specialist with the Apple Censorship Project, which monitors censorship in the App Store. “If this is not a demonstration of excessive power, then what is?”

“Not new, but absolutely two-faced”

The participation of Western corporations in Russian censorship reached a new level in 2024, but this cannot be said to be a new trend.

In the same pre-war 2021, Apple not only put pressure on Durov and Telegram, but also removed Navalny’s teams from its Smart Voting store. In China, where the corporation has been operating since 2009, thousands of applications are unavailable in the App Store, according to Apple Censorship data. This service tests a selected selection of applications in all countries where Apple has a presence. An app's unavailability on the App Store in a particular country does not necessarily mean that it was removed for censorship reasons. But such a methodology can give a rough idea of ​​the scale of government intervention. In the Apple Censorship ranking, the top countries for the number of inaccessible applications, in addition to China, are Afghanistan, Russia and Latvia.

In 2017, Apple was forced to answer uncomfortable questions from US senators about censorship and helping dictators. Then representatives of the corporation stated that they comply with the laws of the countries where they work, even if they do not agree with it in everything.

But the Russian case is different even from the Chinese one. For example,

a selective approach to the implementation of Russian legislation is noticeable: for example, the removal of applications from Russian sanctioned banks from the App Store directly contradicts the article of the Russian Criminal Code, which prohibits compliance with foreign sanctions.

Apparently in this case, the threat from the US government seems more significant to Apple.

“The practice of deleting applications at the request of Roskomnadzor is absolutely hypocritical,” says cyber lawyer and co-founder of Roskomsvoboda Sarkis Darbinyan. — The company claims to protect privacy and freedom of information, but it itself helps censorship in countries with digital authoritarianism and explains this by its apoliticality. And they are not concerned that laws in the countries where they operate sometimes contradict international law and human rights.”

Human rights and the rights of dictators

Despite the fact that Apple’s influence on democratic institutions around the world cannot be overestimated, the creator of the iPhone, Steve Jobs, always took a distinctly neutral political position and almost did not speak out on political topics. The same approach is shared by his successor as CEO of the company, Tim Cook.

Social networks, broadband Internet and the iPhone have changed the rules of the game in politics, but dictators have also learned to use them

In 2008, Barack Obama became the first president to actually win thanks to the Internet. He collected record-breaking donations for his time through Facebook and a specially created platform My.BarackObama.com. Moreover, a significant part of the funds was brought not by major sponsors, but by ordinary citizens. Obama attracted a record number of volunteers to his campaign through online platforms. His speeches and speeches were divided into memes. He promoted himself through viral advertising.

A few years later, new technologies played a decisive role in the “Arab Spring,” the events of which would later even be called the “social media revolution.” In 2011, protesters in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, due to censorship of traditional media, actively used Facebook and Twitter to spread information about repression and organize rallies. In Egypt, this led to the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak. Around the same time, the Russian segment saw its own examples of large-scale political mobilization via the Internet: for example, in 2010, people united to fight forest fires, then during the 2011 elections - to observe the elections. The Internet also became the main platform for collecting and publishing evidence that showed the scale of the falsifications.

A politician who used the Internet for promotion, like Obama, appeared in Russia. Alexey Navalny, a lawyer from Moscow, began his career with a blog on LiveJournal (now blocked), where he published investigations into corruption. Then he and his team began using YouTube for their political campaigns: videos about officials’ mansions and government procurement schemes received tens of millions of views and brought people to protests. Navalny, even whose name was secretly forbidden to be mentioned by both officials and pro-government media for almost 10 years, used the Internet as his main platform and did without state-controlled platforms.

However, pretty soon they started talking about the other side of Internet freedom - about falsifications. Not all the information that was widely circulated on the Internet turned out to be true. In addition, politicians have learned to manipulate the Internet space: the largest Internet platforms are flooded with bots. Moreover, if at first they were used mainly by authoritarian regimes, now they are a tool that is also used by those who call themselves democratic forces . The biggest scandal surrounding the Cambridge Analytica analytical center showed that the personal data of users collected by social networks can be a powerful weapon in the hands of dishonest political strategists.

By 2024, governments in many countries are thinking about how to properly regulate the Internet in order to preserve freedom of expression, but limit the possibility of manipulating public opinion. But no state has yet come up with a good solution.

Nevertheless, modern Western corporations cannot exist in isolation from international rules and at least nominally express respect for human rights. On the official Apple website, for example, a document is published on the corporation’s policy regarding human rights and freedoms.

Thus, the document states that Apple not only respects basic rights to information and privacy, but believes “in the power of technology to unite and inspire people around the world,” and also that “business should be a force that stands for good."

It is the company's policy that Apple adheres to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as adopted by the United Nations, while at the same time operating in strict accordance with the laws of the country in which it does business. Moreover, the document does not directly say what to do if local laws contradict the Universal Declaration: Apple simply refers to another document - the UN Guiding Principles for Conducting Business. At the same time, these Principles themselves very clearly spell out the responsibility for the company’s compliance with human rights, even in cases where this contradicts local laws.

“It is clear that companies must comply with the law and interact with the authorities to some extent,” says Darbinyan from Roskomsvoboda, “respond to cases of real fraud, remove content with child porn or malicious links. But for countries with digital authoritarianism there must be a special approach to such requirements, special verification.”

The principle of openness

There is another principle that Apple declares in its documents, but does not implement in practice: openness and transparency of decisions.

“We want everyone - from our customers to our competitors in the industry - to know our values. We work with a wide range of people - from trade unions, human rights activists to local opinion leaders - to ensure that our progress is meaningful and visible. We are in touch with all interested parties: UN agencies, governmental and non-governmental organizations, representatives of civil society and experts in the field of human rights,” the corporation declares in its program documents.

At the same time, human rights activists say that in reality Apple is hiding from activists behind a wall of silence.

“We wrote detailed reviews, filed appeals, contacted the company’s European office, explained why their actions harm democratic institutions in Russia,

- says Darbinyan. “But in response to all requests they received complete disregard. We see no opportunity for dialogue; The company doesn’t seem interested in him at all.”

Apple does not respond to requests from journalists. All interaction of the largest technology giant with media around the world consists, in fact, of publishing press releases on the official website and well-rehearsed public presentations of new products.

The head of Apple Censorship, Benjamin Ismail, also complains about this: “Apple systematically refuses to comment on cases [of deleting applications to journalists]. And technology publications that depend on access to Apple products are often unable to provide critical coverage for fear that the company will stop working with them.”

Novaya Gazeta Europe sent a request to the Apple press service for this publication; company representatives read the letter, but did not consider it necessary to answer our questions.

Other tech giants

From time to time, human rights activists raise claims against other representatives of big tech.

Since the summer, Russian authorities have made their first attempts to slow down YouTube in Russia. And by December, the drop in traffic on this site became truly large-scale . The Russian segment of YouTube has traditionally been a platform successfully used by bloggers independent of the authorities. Views on many independent media sites fell sharply after the start of the war and the introduction of censorship, but videos on YouTube continued to receive millions of views.

Russian opposition politicians, for example Yulia Navalnaya , the widow of Alexei Navalny, who died in a Russian prison, turned to Google with a request to actively oppose blocking, especially since they have successful experience of such resistance - at one time the Russian authorities were unable to block Telegram.

As human rights activist Darbinyan notes, Google is easier to contact than Apple. For example, YouTube sometimes deletes some videos at the request of the authorities, but upon appeal, they most often restore them.

Google indeed does not remove everything that the Russian government asks it to do. In Russia, the corporation has accumulated 33 billion rubles in fines for refusing to get rid of “illegal content.”

A relatively successful case where activists from Russia managed to convey their point of view to Google is the case of Google Discover. It's enabled by default on all Android devices and shows users a selection of recommended articles when they open a new tab in the Chrome browser. In 2023, references to materials from Tsargrad and Komsomolskaya Pravda continued to appear there. Russian and foreign media talked a lot about this problem. In November 2023, the Agency reported that the service no longer promotes Russian propaganda publications.

However, the problem remains that Google lowers the results of Russian independent media in the general search for users from Russia, because all of them are officially blocked in Russia.

The search algorithm is in such a way that it perceives blocked resources as unnecessary to the user, and Google does not make special exceptions for authoritarian countries, where many resources are not available for political reasons.

The sanctions were voluntarily imposed on Russian users and voluntarily imposed by Bigtech in connection with Russia's aggression against Ukraine. Back in March 2022, Google turned off the advertising show to Russian users, and later - the monetization of YouTube views for the Russian audience. However, Russian YouTube accounts could still, for example, receive income from audience views from other countries. Now it has become impossible.

Difficulties in the spread of independent information also arise on the Facebook and Instagram sites META. The company has been declared an extremist organization in Russia, but users from Russia are still going there through the VPN. At the same time, the sites as a whole pessimize the issuance of political information: investigations or news about the war simply do not fall into the tape of readers. Moreover, not only Russian, but also Belarusian, Moldavian , and even Ukrainian journalists are massively faced with this problem.

They can press

In the summer of 2023, representatives of a civil society from Russia discussed the participation of large Western technological companies in Putin's censorship with European politicians at a large conference in Brussels. In particular, Dmitry Muratov, editor -in -chief of Novaya Gazeta, Laureate of the Nobel Prize of the World, then voiced the idea of ​​the initiative “Engineers against dictatorship”. Journalists then turned to Bigtech with an open letter. It remained unanswered.

Then, at a meeting in Brussels, the deputy chairman of the European Commission Vera Yousova performed . She said that for years she believed that Bigtechus should stay away from politics, but with the beginning of a full -scale war changed her opinion. “They can do more in terms of fact, in terms of ensuring the access of Russian citizens to YouTube, to more closely interact with independent journalists in exile.”

In January 2024, she also publicly addressed Google and META “The fight against misinformation and promoting the freedom of the media - these are two sides of the same medal. We want large technological companies to be engaged in both that and that, ”said the deputy chairman of the European Commission of the Financial Times,“ this means providing visibility on the Internet of reliable information, and not the propaganda of Minsk or the Kremlin. ” However, the deputies of the European Parliament at the same time noted that so far "large technological companies have not shown any readiness or interest in solving this problem." Recently, the American president also arranged a meeting with technological giants. He asked Bigtech to help bypassing content blocking.

European and American authorities are now actively engaged in the regulation of technological companies, but with regard to their own interests: in Europe there are several antimonopoly laws and laws are adopted that must limit the dominant position in the advertising market of several technological giants, including Google and META. Tiktok was banned in America because of fears that the social network collects data from American users in the interests of the Chinese authorities.

But as for the behavior of Bigtech in Russia, the Western authorities have not yet interfered. “Hypothetically, states can put pressure on,” says Grigory Asmolov, a specialist in the field of digital humanities, teacher of the Royal College of London. - The American authorities are quite effectively engaged in Tiktok. But they need it when it comes to themselves, and not third political structures or states. So such a scenario is hypothetically possible, but not very likely. We see that he has not yet been realized, ”he explains.

“Everyone has one rhetoric: we are a large company, we have many different processes, even if we wanted to quickly change something, we cannot”, ”

- An independent journalist, who participated in several non -public meetings with Bigtech, retells the general mood of the industry representatives.

“There were several attempts to organize negotiations, but Google, EPL and other companies at such meetings are represented not very high -ranking employees,” says Sergey Parkhomenko, coordinator of the editorial board. - In the leadership of these companies there were always people appointed specifically for negotiations with the “public”. But they do not affect anything and the weight of their promises has no promises. ”

Andrei Richter, professor at Komeislav University in Bratislava, notes that Bigtech should not be directly accused of violating human rights. “It will be correct to say that Apple and other corporations sometimes contribute to governments, including the Russian government, to violate human rights. But there is no general legal punishment for them at the moment. International laws are written not for corporations, but for states. ”

Richter also notes that Bigtechus periodically “receives clicks on the nose” from international institutions and human rights activists. “For example, their role in the censorship of Runet is mentioned in his last report by the UN specialist to protect the right to free expression. But the police, Oonovskaya, who could punish them for such actions, does not yet exist. ”