Pages from the U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center report released on Aug. 5, 2020, are seen in this photo. Long before waging war on Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin was working to make Russia’s internet a powerful tool of surveillance and social control akin to China’s so-called Great Firewall. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick)
Russia’s increasingly strict online censorship measures have paradoxically exposed major shortcomings in the Kremlin’s efforts to make the Russian internet a powerful tool of surveillance and social control akin to China’s so-called Great Firewall
Cloudflare continues to operate four data centers in Russia even though Russian authorities ordered government websites to drop foreign-owned hosting providers as of Friday. In a March 7 blog post the company said it had determined “Russia needs more Internet access, not less.”
ProtonVPN, which Droz says has been inventive in finding ways to circumvent Russian blocking, reports clocking ten times as many daily signups than before the war. VPN services tracked by researchers at Top10VPN.com found Facebook and Twitter downloads surging eight times higher than average. Its research found the Kremlin to have blocked more than 270 news and financial sites since the invasion, including BBC News and Voice of America’s Russian-language services.
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Article URL : https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/war-censorship-exposes-putins-leaky-internet-controls-83425364