For the Kremlin, the Russian elections brought decisive successes even before the polling stations closed: Internet companies, which for a long time avoided Moscow pressure, withdrew programs from President Vladimir Putin's most important opponent.
On Friday evening, the social media provider Telegram blocked an automated program, a so-called bot, to query the election recommendations of the imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalnyj.
Friedrich Schmidt
Political correspondent for Russia and the CIS in Moscow.
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Telegram adorns itself in Russia with a dissident image, the founder of the service, the Russian Pavel Durov, once left the country after a conflict with the rulers and resisted unsuccessful attempts by the media regulator Roskomnadzor to block the service a few years ago.
Durow justified the exclusion of the Navalnyj bot on Saturday night with the fact that the day before the election traditionally had to be free of election advertising.
However, the elections for the Duma, the lower house, had already been going on for a day in a number of regions;
In addition, Telegram left untouched deceptive copies of the Navalnyj program recommended by candidates for the power camp.
"Dangerous precedent for freedom of expression"
Durow himself referred to the decision of the American companies Apple and Google to remove a Navalnyjs app from their smartphone programs Apple Store and Google Play on Friday morning. According to this, Durow fears that American corporations could also take Telegram out of their offer if the service continued to offer the Navalnyj offer called “Smart Voting” in its own program. Durov spoke of the decision of Google and Apple as a "dangerous precedent that affects freedom of expression in Russia and around the world."
Navalnyj's chief of staff, Leonid Volkov, accused Durov of hypocrisy and warned Apple and Google that they had engaged in “cheap blackmail”, which opened the “Pandora's box” for more control.
The American corporations had given in after weeks of demands from the Russian rulers following a meeting in the Federation Council, the Russian upper house, to which corporate representatives had been summoned.
Only one clip was known from the meeting in which the member of the House of Lords Andrei Klimov, head of a committee “to protect state sovereignty”, challenged an Apple representative as to whether the Apple Store was being regulated by “artificial intellect” or “Martians” .
Threat of prosecution
Russian authorities had previously openly threatened Apple and Google, among others, with fines and criminal prosecution of employees if they did not give in to demands against Navalnyj's election recommendation system. The New York Times newspaper and the business news agency Bloomberg reported, referring to Google, that Navalnyj's app had really been removed from Google Play in the face of threats of criminal prosecution of corporate employees.
Google then went even further, citing Roskomnadzor, calling on Navalnyj's colleague to delete the recommendation lists created in the online word processing program Google Docs, and then blocking the lists even for users in Russia who could only access them via VPN detour. On Saturday evening, the Google video portal YouTube, up to now the most important channel for Navalnyj's corruption hunters, blocked two contributions to the “smart voting”. However, it is not only the threat of criminal prosecution that has registered its successes for the Kremlin: Experts emphasize that the technical means of the Russian authorities against unpleasant Internet content have become significantly better since the days of the lost struggle with Telegram, including through control nodes in the networks.