DISINFO: US censor people on the internet while Russia doesn't
SUMMARY
It is the United States that blocks social media, and prevent its politicians and citizens from accessing it, the same can be seen toward Russian politicians and citizens trying to access these social networks.
Meanwhile, the Russian authorities are quite the opposite. It adheres to democratic standards and no one is blocked. Neither on VKontakte nor on Odnoklassniki.
RESPONSE
Recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative about censorship in the West, portraying Russia as protector of freedom of speech and the press.
According to the 2020 World Press Freedom Index, Russia is in 149th place out of 180 countries. And Reporters Without Borders noted pressure on the independent media, blocking websites, and draconian laws became even more severe in the last years.
Additionally, a 2012 law allowing Russia’s internet oversight agency, Roskomnadzor, to order the blocking of websites supposedly engaged in criminal activity has been used extensively to censor political speech, leaving publishers and users of blocked sites no legal recourse. Most recently, the “Yarovaya” and “sovereign internet” laws—which entered into force in 2018 and 2019, respectively—have imposed new surveillance and censorship requirements on tech companies and undermined any remaining legal or technical capacity that they might have to protect user privacy from surveillance or supply users with uncensored information, including from outside the country.
The message is consistent with the broad pro-Kremlin narrative that seeks to discredit democratic societies by painting the latter as totalitarian systems that want to persecute anyone who expresses their views, while in fact, the recent decision by internet companies are a response to either Disinformation (including Pro-Kremlin disinformation and malign influence campaigns) and crimes that might be contained within the speech itself. A good example is incitement and this is what happened when former President Donald Trump actually "ordered" his supporters to march to the Capitol on January 6th.
Read our post “Russia is the world champion in free speech” or our analysis “Four factors affecting press freedom in Russia”, or more cases that claim that the West Falsely Claims Russian Media Not Free, or that Russia is the most liberal country and that there is no restriction of foreign media in Russia.
The same case has another claim that Navalny is just a tool, not a real opposition leader.