Reporters Without Borders and independent Russian media and journalists have called on the Big Tech companies to create an “Engineers against Dictatorship” group to prevent Russia’s online informational shutdown.
The journalists pointed out the alarming possibility of a total shutdown of Russia’s online informational space.
“Only two major platforms have partially survived the purge for now: Telegram and YouTube are the only spaces left for Russian journalists to try to inform their fellow citizens about the reality of the war waged in their name by Vladimir Putin. As campaign season approaches, we have strong suspicions that YouTube and Telegram could be totally blocked in Russia as soon as this autumn, making more than 140 million people hostages of the state’s propaganda apparatus.
We do not want to live in a new Cold War era.
There is an urgent need to reconnect Russian citizens with pluralistic information, and with the rest of the world,” reads the open letter.
The journalists addressed Apple’s CEO Tim Cook, Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov, YouTube’s CEO Neal Mohan, Twitter’s CEO Elon Musk, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai, LinkedIn’s CEO Ryan Roslansky and Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“For instance, allowing domain fronting within cloud solutions that the Kremlin will not take down would be of great help to bypass censorship,” journalists believe.
Among the signatories of the letter are Christophe Deloire (Reporters Without Borders), Galina Timchenko, СЕО and publisher of Meduza, Ivan Kolpakov, editor-in-chief of Meduza, Elizaveta Osetinskaya, founder of The Bell, Tikhon Dzyadko, editor-in-chief of TV Rain, Pavel Kanygin, editor-in-chief of Prodolzhenie Sleduet Media, Alexander Plushev, editor-in-chief of Plushev Channel, Sergey Smirnov, editor-in-chief of Mediazona, Ivan Zhilin, editor-in-chief of Kedr Media, Taisia Bekbulatova, editor-in-chief of Holod Media, Maksim Kurnikov, editor-in-chief of Echo, an others.
The initiative was also backed by Dmitry Muratov, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the chief editor of Novaya Gazeta:
“Totalitarian regimes destroy independent media in order to establish control over society through propaganda. This is not about simple censorship of individual publications and instant messengers; it is something new, global. Dangerous attempts are being made to destroy the very means of delivering content to people. These days in Russia, the entire “transport” of content delivery, in particular, YouTube and Wikipedia, is under the threat of destruction. Today, engineers can help journalism and society. They can find and implement reliable methods and algorithms to save YouTube, Wikipedia, and VPN. Today , free speech is a technology.”
