The war between Russia and Ukraine, which since its long prelude had a strong component of narrative dispute between Moscow, Kiev and the West, has now reached the means of distributing information and disinformation.
Communications regulator Roskomnadzor said on Friday it would limit Facebook in the country over what it called censorship of the social network against RIA-Novosti, one of Russia’s top state-run news agencies.
The reason was the agency’s coverage of the war. In posts, she calls the conflict a “special military operation aimed at protecting the Donbass republics and denazifying Ukraine”. Nines out of the propaganda modeled on Vladimir Putin’s speech when announcing the action, the network heeded the usual complaints in the West.
First, self-proclaimed republics are part of the issue, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine has much broader goals. Second, the question of Ukraine’s reputation in Russia as a country that harbors neo-Nazis in the government and in the Armed Forces is, of course, contested as a prejudiced generalization.
For Facebook, this is disinformation, and the RIA has been suspended for 90 days. The veto was seen as a “violation of human rights and fundamental freedoms, as well as the rights and freedoms of Russian citizens”, in a joint note from the agency with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the country’s Attorney General.
It is a lively discussion in several countries, but in Russia it is part of the dispute between the Kremlin and what it considers suspicious foreign agents, like all “big techs”. The war only made things worse, but there have been similar clashes in the past, and the government has sought to control social media as much as possible.
The nature of the access limitation was not disclosed, nor the position of the social network. Facebook had previously suspended accounts of other Russian state media such as TV channel Zvezda and Gazeta.ru. There are no similar actions against Telegram, a network that emerged in Russia and preaches full freedom, being widely used in the country to spread the Kremlin’s versions of everything.
The impact will be somewhat lateral in practice, not least because the Russians prefer to use the local version of the network, VKontakte, which is controlled by an ally of Putin.
But there are other signs of small daily disruptions, and there is no mention here of the police repression of the anti-war protests on Thursday (24), which took 1,800 people to jail across the country, which has increased policing in large cities. Or even the adhesion of celebrities and intellectuals to the anti-war movement.
Currency exchanges, ubiquitous like Brazilian bakeries, have no hard currency to exchange. This is, in part, a move to try to stem their rampant exchange against the ruble. But it may also reflect an increase in demand.
This was achievable even with the ruble. According to the Russian Central Bank, $1.1 billion was withdrawn from ATMs in just one day on Thursday, an all-time high. In the streets of central Moscow, there are several cashless machines, to the dismay of tourists like the German Horst Jung, who was looking for an exchange office or a terminal on Friday morning on Pyatinskaya Street, south of the Kremlin.
“Do you have rubles?” he appealed, unsuccessfully, to the report. He also complained of another problem: a renewed glut of questions from hotel clerks. They require full documentation of all establishments visited before the current one, something that has not happened since the 2000s.
“Security reasons,” said the manager of a hotel near Paveletskaia train station. For the same reason, some companies are reinstalling metal detectors that were popular at the height of Islamic terrorism in the capital, also in the 2000s.
Other problems affect the objects of desire of the wealthiest Muscovites. Shipments of vehicles from Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Audi, Citroën and General Motors to Russia were interrupted.
Events of Maslenitsa, a famous folk festival, have been suspended in Moscow. And even leaving the country is complicated: the Russian airline S7 will stop flying to Europe, and the American Delta has broken the agreement it had with Aeroflot — in turn, banned from landing in the United Kingdom, which in return had its flights vetoed. the Russia.
