Faced with the “stabbing in the back” of Evgeny Prigokhine, head of the Russian paramilitary group Wagner, the Russian authorities are further increasing their control over online information. As the NetBlocks observatory, which analyzes Internet traffic in real time, points out, the Google News newspaper article aggregator is now inaccessible in Russia for a large part of Internet users. An initiative that seems directly linked to the ongoing rebellion by the Wagner militia.
An increasingly closed internet
In fact, it is likely that the Russian authorities have asked the country’s main operators to block their subscribers from going to the platform and accessing many sources of information online. Said blocking is generally based on a modification of the connection parameters by the operators, remotely, in order to block the address of the Google News website.
This initiative is not the first in the country. In the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Google News had already been blocked in the country. An operation carried out by the Russian media regulator, which had later published a press release evoking the risk of “false information” coming from the West about the situation in Ukraine.
Like China, Russia has many local equivalents of the major US platforms. However, the latter were allowed in the country before the war in Ukraine and the blocking, among other things, of Facebook and Instagram.
For more than a year, Russian Internet users have been redirected to local tools, more controlled by local authorities, such as VKontakte (the equivalent of Facebook) or Yandex, the “Russian Google”.
Source: BFM TV
