IStories: Roskomnadzor plans to use AI to monitor ‘manipulations and social polarisation’ online

Roskomnadzor, Russia’s censorship agency, is preparing for global monitoring of the Russian-language section of the Internet using artificial intelligence, IStories, who gained access to over 2 million Roskomnadzor’s documents, reports.

The agency does not have enough employees to search manually, and this is why it has been developing “an automated system for the comprehensive analysis of media materials and the search for points of information tension on the Internet,” called AS Vepr, for about a year in order to search for “forbidden information” more effectively.

It is assumed that AS Vepr will analyse posts on social and other media, and, based on this analysis, identify “points of information tension”, i.e., the distribution of publications that can cause a reaction in society. In addition, the system will predict the development of the situation, predict scenarios for the dissemination of information and “turning them into an information threat”, in order to then transfer data to the “authorised bodies”.

It is planned that AS Vepr will be supervising:

• “fake news” about major officials, the state and the country in general
• negative opinions about major officials, state bodies, or intergovernmental institutions
• manipulations of public opinion and polarisation of the society
• replacements and discreditation of “traditional values”

In total, there are 100 topics on the list that the system should track. In the “destabilisation of Russian society” section, among other things, there is “LGBT propaganda”, criticism of the environmental situation in the country, and references various media outlets, including Proekt, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, The Insider, MBH, Open Russia, and the ACF.

A team of experts, researchers and engineers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology led by the head of the Department of Machine Learning and Digital Humanities Konstantin Vorontsov was instructed to explore the possibilities for creating the AS Vepr system, IStories says.

AS Vepr is planned to be launched by the end of 2024, but the Ukraine War may cause it to be postponed.

In addition, Roskomnadzor is creating MIR and Oculus systems, which will be finding and blocking “forbidden information” in texts, pictures and videos on the Internet, using artificial intelligence.

The Oculus image recognition system will also find photos and videos of protest rallies and identify individuals on those. In addition, it will track photoshopped images of Vladimir Putin.

The list of violations mentioned in the description of Oculus includes “demonstration of attractiveness of LGBT culture representatives” and “images of individuals that do not correspond to the traditional image of a man and a woman (for example, masculine female faces, men with makeup)” .

In November 2022, the Belarusian group of hackers called Cyberpartisans announced that it had hacked the internal network of Roskomnadzor’s sister company. The hackers downloaded over two terabytes of documents and emails exchanged by the company’s employees, as well as systems tracking those. The hackers passed on all the information to the journalists of the German media outlet Süddeutsche Zeitung, as well as IStories and other Russian media. The leak is referred to as RussianCensorFiles.