The Russian government’s decision this week to ban WhatsApp and throttle Telegram is not a surprise for an authoritarian regime. Yet it also serves as a cautionary tale for westerners clamoring to regulate social media companies.
Thugs like Vladimir Putin perceive privately owned messaging services like WhatsApp (97 million monthly users in Russia) and Telegram (93.5 million) as threats to their power. The Kremlin cannot stand ordinary Russians having access to free services that render their conversations invisible to the security services.
Yet even a public accustomed to routine clampdowns on dissent reacted poorly. As the Telegram throttle went into place, Russian soldiers and pro-war military bloggers posted panicked pleas online. Earlier in the week, Ukraine persuaded Elon Musk to block Russian frontline access to his company’s satellite communication technology. One soldier complained: “The front is in shock. Starlinks are gone, now they’re jamming Telegram too. How are we supposed to fight? With carrier pigeons?”
Russia banned most Western social media companies in 2022, shortly after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. By August of last year, it started blocking phone calls through WhatsApp and Telegram while directing users to its homegrown “everything app,” called Max.
The state-run app, modeled after China’s WeChat, launched last year and is required to be preinstalled on every phone and tablet sold in the country. It’s also insecure by design.
Max does not have end-to-end encryption for its chatting services, and researchers have noted that it asks for permission to access the phone’s camera, microphone, contacts and location. This makes mass surveillance remarkably easy. Unsurprisingly, because it’s designed by a government and not a profit-driven company, it’s also quite buggy and unstable.
At the other end of Europe, Spain’s socialist government is proposing a ban on social media for minors and floating criminal liability for tech executives who fail to suppress “disinformation.” Spain is not Russia, but its rulers are tempted by the same impulses for control over communications technology.
While reasonable people can debate limits on teen social media usage, the threats to executives are in another category. Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez floated the proposals days after Musk criticized his immigration policies on X. Sánchez is pushing to enact a law that would make the “algorithmic amplification” of that kind of criticism a criminal matter.
The very concept of “disinformation” implies the state gets to decide who may speak, to whom and on what terms. The machinery of control is the same, and more often than not, it’s used to protect a regime. This is the beginning of a road that ends where Russia now is.
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