Previous Subchapter → 8.1 Information Sovereignty
In our Ukraine Narratives documentary, we reported on how Russia implemented major restrictions on reporting surrounding the Ukraine conflict, with the country’s media regulator Roskomnadzor restricting social media and demanding outlets reporting on undesirable news or referring to the conflict as a war, invasion or an attack on Ukraine delete their posts or face being blacklisted.
Since the release of that documentary, restrictions have gotten tougher, in March 2022 the Russian parliament (the State Duma) amended the country’s media laws several times in order to broaden their scope and increase the punishments for defiance, now not only is “discrediting” the Russian military illegal, so is “discrediting” any Russian state body operating abroad, punishments include:
And in April 2022 the Duma went further by unveiling a new bill to expand the criteria for Russia’s so-called “foreign agent” regulations, the “foreign agent” regulations are a series of rules that have existed in Russia since 2012, where political groups receiving foreign funding have had to declare themselves as “foreign agents” and prominently showcase these declarations on their media posts, but the Duma’s April plans essentially removed the foreign funding criteria, allowing news outlets and NGOs to be designated as agents even if they didn’t receive any money from abroad, instead authorities could rely on the vague criteria of “foreign influence” to justify the foreign agent charge, in July 2022, these changes were approved and became law.
Later in March 2023 the law against “discrediting” Russian forces was extended again, increasing maximum prison sentences and expanding the scope of the law to include all Pro-Russian volunteers in the conflict, where previously only the official Russian military was protected, silencing critics of paramilitary units like Wagner Group or Rusich.
To put things simply, if you go too far in criticising any of the arms of the Russian forces operating in Ukraine, you can be branded a foreign puppet, you can have your finances crippled and you can be shut off from the outside world for over a decade if the authorities can tick a few boxes, making independent reporting on controversial topics like the Ukraine conflict essentially impossible. A noose is being wrapped around the neck of Russia’s media, they are being strangled more and more as the war goes on, and as the conflict progresses the Russian government has become increasingly more intolerant of dissent.
As a result of these deranged laws, many Russian opposition journalists and publications have been forced to relocate outside of Russia in order to continue publishing about the war without fear, while others have been forced to stop reporting on the war or close their doors altogether.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, Roskomnadzor has deployed a brand new tool to streamline their censorship process, a new AI known as “Oculus” which is designed to scrub anti-war material and other content the Russian authorities deem undesirable from the net at record pace, reportedly scanning more than 200,000 images a day, one every 3 seconds, compared to the 106 images a day processed manually by Roskomnadzor’s regulators, safe to say this is all a far cry from the days of Glasnost.
And again, as described in the Ukraine Narratives, this media crackdown is not just limited to Russia, it’s happening in the West too, previously we reported that YouTube had blocked access to RT across its platform,
but now things have escalated a lot further than that, Russian state media outlets RT and Sputnik are now legally banned entirely across the EU and UK, with their broadcasts cut off and their website blocked.
In response to the EU’s censorship policies, Google explained their approach towards Russian media in a March 2022 blog post titled “Helping Ukraine”, where they announced they were working to “significantly limit recommendations globally for a number of Russian state-funded media outlets” and remove Russian state media apps across their platforms, they also promised to prioritise content from “authoritative” news sources.
In the post, they also noted that they had linked the EU’s takedown requests to a platform called the “Lumen Database”, the request they provided, sent by the European Commission, contained a number of disturbing remarks:
It demands that the banned Russian state publications be blocked from “transmission or distribution by any means such as cable, satellite, IP-TV, internet service providers, internet video-sharing platforms or applications”, it also singles out search engines as playing a “decisive role” in providing internet users with access to the content of their choosing, and “[facilitating] the public’s access to the content of RT and Sputnik”, including a demand that all RT and Sputnik related content be removed from search results.
The request also mentions issues relating freedom of speech, but it describes freedom of speech as “the right to report objectively on” and “the right to receive objective information on current events”, and says that this right can be “restricted for legitimate public interests in a proportionate manner”.
In short, the EU Commission has decided that an outlet only has a right to free expression if the Commission believe it reports “objectively”, if the Commission believes an outlet isn’t reporting objectively, it has every right to erase the outlet from the internet, and stop you from finding in search results, even if you are specifically looking for it.
And as a result of this, Google, the search engine almost everyone in the Western world and most of the wider world uses, will go out of its way to promote sources it considers to be authoritative, and downgrade those it believes not to be authoritative, taking the choice of users to find what they’re searching for away in exchange for feeds curated by companies and governments.
Curiously, according to the European Commission itself, this media ban apparently is compliant with Article 11 of the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights which relates to Freedom of Expression and Information.
(10) In view of the gravity of the situation, and in response to Russia’s actions destabilising the situation in Ukraine, it is necessary, consistent with the fundamental rights and freedoms recognised in the Charter of Fundamental Rights, in particular with the right to freedom of expression and information as recognised in Article 11 thereof, to introduce further restrictive measures to urgently suspend the broadcasting activities of such media outlets in the Union, or directed at the Union. These measures should be maintained until the aggression against Ukraine is put to an end, and until the Russian Federation, and its associated media outlets, cease to conduct propaganda actions against the Union and its Member States.
The Article reads as follows:
Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.
The freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected.
This Article clearly states that media of any type, whether it be the news, opinion pieces, analyses or works created for artistic expression are protected under EU law, there is a promise of a lack of government interference relating to published works.
Another important addition to this fundamental right, is that “the freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected”, meaning that outlets spanning a variety of fields, affiliations, opinions are protected by European law, nowhere in this article is a distinction made between outlets that appear to be “objective” and outlets that appear to “promote distortions”, as the Commission’s interpretation suggests.
In fact, the specific inclusions of “pluralism” and “non interference […] regardless of frontiers” as fundamental rights seems to leave no room to draw these arbitrary lines. EU lawmakers seem to be imagining exceptions that don’t exist in order to justify these restrictions, which go against the fundamental right of free expression.
And this right is seemingly being violated not only within the EU as a whole, but also as part of the rights of EU member states:
Sandra Pereira, a Portuguese member of the European Parliament, posed a parliamentary question to the European Commission relating to this regulation, under the topic “Media censorship imposed on Member States by EU regulation”. She said the following:
With this regulation, the EU is overstepping its powers and encroaching on those of the Member States. The regulation infringes Article 37 of the Constitution of the Portuguese Republic, which has the following to say on the freedom of expression and information: ‘1. Everyone shall possess the right to freely express and disclose their thoughts in words, images or by any other means, as well as the right to inform others, inform themselves and be informed without hindrance or discrimination; 2. Exercise of said rights shall not be hindered or limited by any type or form of censorship.’
Pereira received an answer from a Commission Vice President, Věra Jourová:
The temporary restriction, limited both in terms of content and geographical scope, was based on the fact that RT (formerly Russia Today) and Sputnik are under the permanent control of the leadership of the Russian Federation and essential and instrumental in supporting the Russian aggression against Ukraine as well as the destabilisation of its neighbouring countries. It aims to protect the European public order and security from such a significant and direct threat and is a justified restriction to the right to freedom of expression and information enshrined in Article 11 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights since the outlets have been essential and instrumental in Russia’s systematic, international campaign of media manipulation and distortion of facts in order to enhance its strategy of destabilisation of the Union and its Member States. RT France has brought an action for annulement against this measure. On 30 March 2022, the President of the General Court rejected RT France’s request for an interim measure. A final judgement still needs to be delivered.
Jourová doesn’t seem to realise or acknowledge that Article 11 is formulated without setting specific exceptions in place which would exempt certain kinds of media from this fundamental right. At no point is another countries’ state media mentioned, nor that a statement or work needs to be factual in the first place to have a right to be expressed.
Her response, together with the Council Decision (CFSP) 2022/351, seem to show a reckless disregard for EU law.
We have to remember that Article 11 is not just described as a right, but rather as a legally binding fundamental right, a foundation; How can this right be fundamental and binding if exceptions to it can be arbitrarily invented by politicians when it suits them, exceptions that simply don’t exist in the original text?
And in a shocking display of hypocrisy, just a week after these bans on Russian media were put in place by the EU and UK, the Media Freedom Coalition, a grouping of various countries including EU nations and the UK, put out a statement expressing their outrage at Russia’s decision to block Western outlets.
Comparisons to 1984 and George Orwell are very tired and old these days, but there is a real feeling of doublespeak going on when the nations of the Media Freedom Coalition are restricting the media, then bashing other countries for doing the same thing.
And this hypocrisy goes even further, a blog from the “International Forum for Responsible Media” notes that “the day after World Press Freedom Day” the EU announced “that it would extend the ban on three other state-controlled Russian media outlets”, in that announcement the European Commission listed the following outlets as being banned for, in the Commission’s words, “promoting disinformation”: “Russia Today, Sputnik, Rossiya RTR/RTR Planeta, Rossiya 24/Russia 24, and TV Centre International in or directed at the EU – such as via cable, satellite, IPTV, platforms, websites and apps”.
Half a dozen press outlets banned in all forms, the day after press freedom day, by members of the Media Freedom Coalition… The jokes write themselves.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the list was later expanded again to include 9 more publications: NTV/NTV Mir, Rossiya 1, REN TV, Pervyi Kanal, RIA FAN, Oriental Review, Tsargrad, New Eastern Outlook and Katehon.
These are regulations that have directly caused problems for us, as we’ve had to censor our own production to avoid going against EU law, which means when discussing RT we’ve had to scrub their links from our sources list and show quotes from their sites as plain text, rather than website screenshots, because we’re not allowed to reproduce their content.
You may have also noticed earlier that when showing examples of maps being used to delegitimize Ukraine, we had to edit out the example of this tactic being used by Pro-Russian think-tanks, that’s because the example we had was from an article by Katehon, which is on the sanctions list.
Later in the documentary, Chapter 9.5, we talk about how a fake video of a supposed war crime was spread around by Pro-Russian outlets; We’ve had to remove some of the examples we used there as well, because they were from RenTV and Tsargrad, sanctioned outlets.
In every one of these instances, these regulations have made the information environment worse, not better.
This whole system is absolutely absurd, because it’s impossible to dissect Russian propaganda if you can’t refer to what it says, and it’s unreasonable to expect reporters to cover a conflict between Russia and Ukraine without being able to refer to prominent Russian sources, but these are compromises that we have to make, otherwise we would be at risk of having our content blocked in Europe, something that doesn’t sit right with us as Europeans. Unfortunately this is the game we have to play, these rules aren’t as severe as they could be, but these are editorial decisions we shouldn’t have to make.
So I just want to put out a heartfelt message to the people behind these regulations, I’m sure you mean well and you think what you’re doing is in our best interests, but fuck you. Sincerely, fuck you, go fuck yourself.