Russia prevents Telegram protests under fake pretexts

Russian authorities have been doing everything to thwart public demonstrations in defense of the popular messenger Telegram, which they are targeting with restrictions.

A report detailing a number of such cases across the country has come out amid mounting complaints of disruptions, signaling that Moscow may have already started blocking the app.

Russia prevents Telegram protests under fake pretexts

Officials in several Russian regions, from Moscow to Siberia, have been resorting to various excuses to deny permission for protests against the crackdown on the messaging service Telegram.

The motives cited include snow removal, tree inspection, and even restrictions not seen since the Covid era, the Associated Press revealed in a report on Saturday.

Organizers of an event in the Altai region were sent home after the local authorities told them their claims of an internet clampdown were “at odds with reality.”

Attempts to hold demonstrations against the widespread online censorship were made by representatives of different segments of the Russian society.

The political forces behind them included even ultranationalists supporting the war in Ukraine and communists who are otherwise backing the Kremlin.

Some of those who took part in public acts of defiance or unauthorized rallies were arrested, while others chose to hold indoor meetings to avoid trouble.

And where citizens were eventually permitted to express their discontent, like in Krasnodar, they were only allowed to gather on the outskirts of the city.

Protests of any kind have been quite rare in Russia since the suppression of the anti-war movement in 2022 and amid growing political prosecution under laws stifling dissent, AP remarked in its article.

The restrictions on Telegram were the latest step towards placing the Russian internet under state control, after the blocking of numerous websites and VPN services.

This move, however, was criticized by many pro-government voices as the messenger is not just popular with ordinary people but widely used by officials, state agencies, and even the military.

Russia begins blocking Telegram earlier than expected

Moscow has been accusing Telegram of failing to comply with its regulations, particularly regarding removing content prohibited in Russia.

Its telecom and media watchdog, Roskomnadzor (RKN), started slowing down traffic through the messenger last month, when the agency also restricted access to WhatsApp.

Meta’s application was the most popular messaging platform in Russia before Telegram overtook it in January by reaching nearly 96 million active users.

Russian authorities have been urging them to switch to a government-approved alternative called MAX. Critics, including Telegram founder Pavel Durov, say it is a tool for surveillance and political censorship.

In mid-February, the Telegram channel Baza claimed the RKN plans to begin blocking Telegram on April 1. The regulator neither confirmed nor denied reports quoting the post.

Meanwhile, a growing number of reported outages across Russia in the past week or so have indicated that attempts to completely restrict access to the messenger may have started earlier than expected.

According to data from the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) quoted by the Riga-based independent Russian news website Meduza, issues with the messaging service have spiked since Friday.

On that day, anomalies were registered in 72% of the conducted tests, while the messenger was accessible in less than a third of the cases (28%), as revealed by OONI, a global platform detecting the blocking of websites and apps to measure internet censorship.

Sites like Downdetector and Сбой.рф have received thousands of complaints from many regions and cities in the vast country, including the capital Moscow and Russia’s second-largest city, St. Petersburg. The problems affected both the mobile and the desktop versions of Telegram.

A survey conducted by Meduza among its Russia-based readers showed that for a total of 88% out of nearly 7,500 respondents, the messenger was not functioning properly. For 17%, it wasn’t working at all, and 46% reported it was slow and unreliable.

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