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Amid the heap of regulatory crackdowns and digital media bans in recent years, it’s hard not to get further fatigued by the level of censorship underway in Russia. If the day ends in “y,” there’s seemingly something happening on this front. But last week, Russian authorities moved to complete the blocking of all major U.S.-based social media networks, in addition to restricting access to Telegram, to push the country’s own state-backed alternative.
There’s a dangerous, not-so-hot-take reason for that…
Before the invasion of Ukraine, Russia played a game of cat and mouse with Western tech giants. We saw throttling, fines, and the occasional labeling of Meta as an “extremist organization.” This is something I actually don’t completely disagree with, though for different reasons. But more recently, we’ve seen the outright banning of services like Instagram, X, Facebook, Snapchat, FaceTime, and as of this week, WhatsApp and YouTube.
This leaves just ByteDance-owned TikTok, which appears to be safe from censorship, at least for now.
It would be easy to shrug off all these bans and take solace in the existence of reliable VPN providers, but there are almost none left. As I wrote on Security Bite in 2024, Apple removed nearly a hundred VPN apps, including those with legitimate secure data practices like ExpressVPN and NordVPN, as well as Norton Secure, Proton, and Bitdefender’s offerings, to comply with local regulations. By limiting access to VPNs, the Russian government can more effectively control the flow of information and monitor its citizens.
It’s reasonable to assume nearly all of the low-quality VPN apps that still sit on the App Store today could log user data, including browsing history and IP addresses, and sell it to third parties such as advertisers or even be forced to fork it over to governments. In authoritarian regimes like Russia, these VPNs might serve as tools for surveillance rather than protection.
And that brings us back to the “dangerous reason” for this week’s scorched-earth policy. The bans aren’t just about blocking Western influence; they are about funneling the entire population into a single app called Max (and I’m not talking another HBO rebrand).
Marketed as a “sovereign” super-app similar to China’s WeChat and what Elon Musk aspires X to be, Max is the state-backed platform that authorities are aggressively pushing as the mandatory replacement for WhatsApp and Telegram. It’s not just a chat app, though. It integrates payments, digital IDs, and government services like Russia’s Gosuslugi, which is a portal used for everything from registering property to booking doctor appointments.
The danger in this case is centralization. By forcing 144 million people onto a platform that is legally required to integrate with SORM (Russia’s System for Operative Investigative Activities), the FSB is effectively foaming at the mouth with the level of backdoor access into the private conversations, financial transactions, and geolocation data of the entire country.
With credible VPNs banned and popular encrypted Western forms of communication blocked, Russia is further descending into darkness. For users in Russia, I fear there is no longer a choice for privacy. It’s now be monitored or be offline.
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