How censorship works in Russia

Censorship is the go-to tool for manipulating information employed by the Russian media, that is used in the absence of any kind of feedback from the audience. The media is willing to ignore pressing issues that can make people see large businesses and the government in a negative light. This all has gone so far that the well-known meme about “comrade major” came to life.

The largest internet search engine in Eastern Europe — Yandex, is known for censoring any kind of mention of mass protests. This became apparent during the events in Moscow in summer 2019 that came as a result of rigged elections to the Moscow Duma. Since then, the “comrade major” meme has been adopted by journalists, opinion leaders, and people in general, to refer to the special services that moderate the internet space by (in this example) filtering the information displayed by Yandex and its most popular news aggregator. In fact, falsification in news has solidified its place in the modern Russian folklore.

Here are just some of the episodes illustrating the problem mentioned above:

• “Aeroflot”’s SSJ 100 crashed on May 5, 2019, with 41 dead.

The airline company Aeroflot, thanks to its contractual ties, forced Rambler (with all of its media outlets) to keep their company’s name out of the news of the plane crash. I was employed by the Rambler holding at the time and was one of the employees who were given this order (verbally, of course).

As it became known after all the investigations, it was Aeroflot’s fault, namely their substandard methods of pilot training and control, that brought on this tragedy. Doing damage control, Aeroflot initiated positive publications in a matter of days in several large private blogs and Russian media outlets, some of which gave a false representation of the technical causes of the crash and particular factors that lead to the loss of human lives on board.

• A leading opposition politician Alexey Navalny catches Russia’s leading business press outlets in silencing the results of a large-scale anti-corruption investigation

In December 2019 the Anti-corruption Foundation, a non-commercial NGO, founded by Navalny, published the investigation into an employee of VGTRK, Russia’s largest state-owned media company, Ms. Asker-Zade. It was uncovered that she had access to luxuries such as a private jet and a yacht, that was definitely beyond her payroll and that of her unofficial partner Andrey Kostin, who also happens to be the president and chairman of VTB, Russia’s second-largest bank. The investigation raised valid concerns of corruption and caused a huge public response, but within just days of its publication, all external media erased any mention of the investigation. This fact caused such an outrage the owner of Vedomosti, Demian Kudriavtsev, had to make a public apology on TV, for not publishing the investigation in any of the 3 largest business media outlets owned by his holding. He, however, failed to mention the reason for not doing it.

The practice of censorship is rooted in Russian mass-media, there are entire lists of topics that journalists are forbidden to work on. The examples above illustrate how independent journalism is crippled and made impossible on a daily basis, and these are just the well-known cases, the list could go on and on.