Russia attempts to slow down access to Twitter

Russia’s internet censor said on Wednesday it would slow down access to Twitter in a dispute over the social media platform’s refusal to delete content, describing the move as a prelude to a possible full ban of the site.

Communications watchdog Roskomnadzor said it would slow down Twitter’s photo and video loading speeds on all mobile devices and half of desktops until the social network deleted 3,168 posts dating back to 2017 that it said “encourage underage suicide and contain child pornography as well as information about drug use”.

The move comes as Russia is seeking to reduce the influence of foreign social networks after opposition activist Alexei Navalny’s supporters used them to organise nationwide protests in January.

Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, warned last week that “society will collapse from the inside” if the internet did not “submit to formal legal rules and the moral laws of society”.

Putin likened protesting to the scourges of “child pornography, child prostitution and drugs”, accusing Russia’s opposition of “dragging children and teenagers out on to the street in order to muck about, fight with the police, and then hide behind the kids”.

The rollout of the restrictions, however, suggested that Russia lacks the technical capabilities to restrict the web in that way that China, for instance, is able to — despite the recent launch in 2019 of a so-called sovereign internet aimed at potentially shutting the country off from the outside world.

Twitter, which did not respond to a request to comment, functioned largely as normal in the hours following the announcement. In that time, users reported outages on several Russian government websites including those of the Kremlin, the cabinet, parliament and the internet censor itself. Google, local search engine Yandex, YouTube, mobile provider MTS and several websites whose domain use the “t.co” Twitter uses for shortened web addresses were also affected, according to outage monitor Downdetector.

Though state-run internet provider Rostelecom blamed the outages on an equipment failure, they echoed the failed attempts of censors to block messaging app Telegram in 2018. Roskomnadzor took down more than 16m websites before finally admitting defeat two years later — by which time Telegram had grown its Russian audience from 10m to 30m.

The attempted Twitter slowdown was the first public use of the deep packet inspection technology introduced after Russia started building its sovereign internet in 2019.

Though popular among the media, opposition activists such as Navalny and some politicians, Twitter’s monthly audience of 700,000 active users in Russia is a tenth of YouTube’s and a tiny fraction of Instagram’s, according to a report late last year by market research firm Brand Analytics.

Yet though former president Dmitry Medvedev said last month that Russia was “legally and technologically” prepared to disconnect from the global internet, the restrictions on Twitter show Moscow is still struggling to limit web traffic efficiently, according to Andrei Soldatov, a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis.

“Putin is really getting crazy about the internet and apparently demanding more restrictions, but they’re sort of short of ideas,” Soldatov said.

Russia’s biggest target for deep packet infiltration technology is likely to be the videos on Twitter, YouTube and TikTok that have driven up attendance and exposed police violence at recent protests, Soldatov added.

“If you just want to cut off live streaming, it’s easy, you just need to identify a specific type of traffic and shut it down. But with Twitter it’s more difficult, because you need to identify a subset of traffic and then identify photo and video,” he said. “And in such a big country like Russia, the DPI needs to be much more powerful. You need to have special equipment that processes huge amounts of traffic, and it’s really difficult.”