MOSCOW – The Russian government said Wednesday that it is slowing access to Twitter, accusing the social network of failing to remove illegal content and signaling that the Kremlin is escalating its offensive against American internet companies that have long been a haven for free expression Offer.
It was a milestone in a country where the internet has remained essentially free, despite the authoritarian rule of President Vladimir V. Putin. But it didn’t go smoothly: when media regulators tried to slow down access to Twitter, dozens of Russian government websites went offline for about an hour, a crash that some experts said was most likely due to a technical glitch in the state’s operations attributed to the social network.
Russia’s telecommunications regulator said it was reducing the speed at which Twitter loaded for users in Russia, and it actually sometimes took longer than usual to load pictures and videos. Regulatory agency Roskomnadzor accused the American company of not removing posts about illegal drug use or child pornography or messages that “urge minors to commit suicide” for years.
“With the aim of protecting Russian citizens and forcing the Internet service to comply with the law on the territory of the Russian Federation, centralized reactive measures were taken against Twitter from March 10, 2021 – in particular, the initial throttling of the speed of the service in accordance with the regulations, “said the regulator in a statement.
“If the Internet service Twitter continues to ignore the requirements of the law, the measures against it will continue in accordance with the regulations, up to and including the suspension,” he added.
In a statement, Twitter said it was aware of reports that its platform “was deliberately and indiscriminately largely slowed down in Russia due to obvious concerns about content removal.”
Twitter said it has a zero tolerance policy on sexual exploitation of children and does not allow its platform to be used for unlawful conduct or for further illegal activities, including buying and selling drugs.
The action against Twitter, a website with limited following in Russia, was intended as a warning to other American internet companies, said Aleksandr Khinshtein, a MP who helped draft a law that would allow the regulator to slow down traffic on Wednesday to reporters.
He said that putting a brake on Twitter traffic “will force all other social networks and large foreign internet companies to understand that Russia will not quietly watch and swallow the obvious ignoring of our laws”.
Companies would have to comply with the Russian content rules or “lose the opportunity to make money in Russia,” he added.
Twitter – and to a much greater extent Facebook’s Instagram and Google’s YouTube – have given Russians the opportunity to speak, report, and organize openly despite the Kremlin controlling the television waves.
These social networks, along with Chinese-owned TikTok, played a crucial role in the anti-Kremlin protests that accompanied the return and imprisonment of opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny that year. Mr Navalny has around 2.5 million Twitter followers, and his investigation into an allegedly secret palace of Mr Putin, published in January, has been viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube.
Russian officials claim that Silicon Valley companies are discriminating against Russians by blocking some Kremlin-friendly accounts and handing a megaphone to Kremlin’s critics. They also said that social networks have refused to remove content that dragged children into the unauthorized protests in support of Mr Navalny.
In the past few weeks, the Kremlin has spearheaded an intensified drum beat criticizing American internet companies, calling them corrupt foreign forces.
“Online we encounter child pornography and child prostitution, with the sale and distribution of drugs, targeting children and young people,” Putin said this month. The Internet must “respect the moral laws of the society in which we live – otherwise this society will be destroyed from within,” said the president.
Twitter has a small user base in Russia, although it’s popular with journalists, politicians, and opposition activists. A report last year estimated that the service had 690,000 active users in Russia, which means any public backlash about the move is likely far less than if the Kremlin had imposed similar restrictions on Instagram or YouTube.
However, the Russian government’s persistent message to American companies was blunted when their own websites went offline for about an hour soon after the announcement. Russian officials blamed a device failure, saying the failure had nothing to do with crackdown on Twitter.
The Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media said in a statement that the problem with government sites was due to a device failure at a state telephone company and Internet service provider, Rostelecom.
The Russian agency made the announcement in a Twitter post.
US officials said over the weekend that they were planning to take revenge on Russia for a widespread hacking attack last year that exploited vulnerabilities in government and corporate computer systems in the US. Officials said the retaliation was planned in the coming weeks, but there was no immediate evidence that the failure of the Russian government’s websites on Wednesday was a sign of the latest volley in that cyber conflict.
Instead, commentators in Russia pointed to another possibility: Russian regulators botched the task of restricting access to Twitter and accidentally shut down government websites without outside interference.
“Russia’s slowdown on Twitter caused the outage,” Andrei Soldatov, co-author of Red Web and the authority on Russian Internet politics, said in an online post about the government website crash. What was in part intended as a warning shot for American Internet companies, he added: “Failed on all fronts.”
While trying to shut down the Messaging App Telegram in 2018, Roskomnadzor accidentally blocked the service for thousands of other websites, many of which were owned by small businesses that used the same web hosting services as the app. Telegram remained widespread in Russia.
Adam Satariano contributed to coverage from London.
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