A woman on her phone walks past a mural depicting Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine, Moscow, 20 September 2022. Photo: EPA-EFE / MAXIM SHIPENKOV
Russia’s media regulator Roskomnadzor has confirmed that it has blocked popular messaging app Signal for “violations” of the country’s anti-terror legislation, state news agency TASS reported on Friday.
Rumours of an imminent ban gathered pace on Friday morning as users across Russia reported issues sending and receiving messages on the secure messenger service, with monitoring agency SBOY.RF saying it had received over 2,000 complaints of the app glitching.
Signal is considered one of the most secure messaging apps due to its end-to-end encryption of both messages and calls, which shields correspondence from interception by service providers and law enforcement agencies.
On its official X account, Signal said on Friday evening that it was “aware of reports that access to Signal has been blocked in some countries” and recommended users activate the app’s built-in censorship circumvention feature to continue accessing it.
News of Signal being blocked came just a day after thousands of Russian users reported being unable to access video sharing platform YouTube. In July, State Duma Deputy Alexander Khinshtein announced that the Russian authorities would begin slowing YouTube speeds down by as much as 70% in apparent retaliation for the platform’s removal of pro-Kremlin channels.
Mikhail Klimaryov, the head of Internet Without Borders, a conference series and hackathon focused on combating Russian digital censorship and propaganda, suggested that the government may have decided to ban Signal to stem the exchange of information about the ongoing incursion into Russia’s southwestern Kursk region being carried out by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, a humiliating reversal for the Kremlin that threatens to undermine its domestic propaganda narrative.
“Somebody in the ‘intelligence agencies’ probably mentioned to someone else that the AFU communicate via Signal, and therefore a decision was made to ‘disrupt communications between enemy units’. By blocking it across the whole country”, Klimaryov wrote on his Telegram channel.
