How Russia tries to censor Western social media

Google and Meta face the threat of multi-million-dollar fines for failing to delete content that the Russian government considers illegal – but a close look at court papers reveals these are often simply posts about protests in support of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

In the summer of 2018, a Russian poet writing under the pseudonym Siberian Viking posted a caricature on his Facebook account. It showed the double-headed eagle of the Russian coat of arms, with the bird’s heads replaced by faces of President Vladimir Putin and the then-prime minister, Dmitri Medvedev.

Alongside it was a short poem, alleging that the eagle was twice as greedy as others, lied twice as much and carried out surveillance with four eyes. It ended with an emotional cry: “When will Russians awaken to remove this contagion?”

The Russian government told Facebook to remove the post because of its “blatant disrespect towards the state, the constitution and the president of the Russian Federation”. Facebook did not comply, and the post featured in one of more than 60 lawsuits launched against Western social media in Russia this year, resulting in fines of more than $2m.

It’s not clear how many of the fines have actually been paid. But the cases highlight the difficulty of operating in a country where restrictions are placed on freedom of speech and political activity – most notably the ruling in June this year that the Anti-Corruption Foundation headed by jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny is an “extremist” organisation, on a par with the Taliban or the Islamic State group.

According to the head of media regulator Roskomnadzor, Andrei Lipov, social media companies are obliged to find and remove “the most dangerous things”, which he listed in an interview with the Kommersant newspaper as “child pornography, suicide, drugs, extremism and fake news”.

But a close examination of the more than 600 posts listed in court proceedings against Google, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter reveals that just nine concern child abuse or drugs, and only 12 refer to suicide. The overwhelming majority are calls to attend pro-Navalny demonstrations.