Weekly Digest: Inside Russia’s censorship machine

A new document leak sheds light on how the Kremlin’s censorship machine is policing the internet in Russia – and even Belarus.

Belarusian hacktivist group Cyber Partisans hacked the Main Radio Frequency Centre (GRFC), an organisation that employs some 1000 people and is part of Roskomnadzor, the Russian government censorship agency. The group provided documents to independent journalists from several media organisations, including RFE/RL and Mediazona.

The documents show the scale of GRFC’s daily monitoring of the internet to scan for “protest mood” and for negative sentiment concerning Vladimir Putin personally (and particularly messages concerning his health). The agency prepares regular reports to the presidential administration and uses an internal messenger to communicate regularly with law enforcement agencies such as the Interior Ministry and the FSB security service.

GRFC is also developing its artificial intelligence systems to monitor the internet more efficiently, aiming to build a sophisticated censorship system on par with the Chinese one. The agency apparently cooperates with Yandex, Russia’s tech giant that operates the country’s most popular search engine system.

Interestingly, the documents also show that Roskomnadzor also censors internet publications in Belarus, formally outside the Russian government’s jurisdiction. 

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The scandal over Richard Sharp’s appointment as chair of the BBC has escalated over the past week, with growing calls for his resignation over a potential ethics breach in the process of his appointment. 

According to allegations reported in January, Sharp helped Boris Johnson, prime minister at the time, secure a loan shortly before his appointment in early 2021 by introducing businessman Sam Blyth to Johnson’s office.

The report by a parliamentary committee published on Sunday argues that “Sharp made significant errors of judgment in failing to disclose his involvement in the loan”, as The Guardian summarises. The opposition Labour party followed up to say that Sharp’s position as BBC chair is “increasingly untenable”.

Sharp has apologised for not disclosing the information during his pre-appointment hearing but says that there was no conflict of interest in the process of his appointment – while he did introduce Johnson’s office to Sam Blyth, who later helped provide a loan to Jonson, Sharp says he wasn’t involved in any talks about a loan.

Bonus — Three more stories you might want to check out:

• The Guardian: BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout 

• Politico: New York Times sues EU over von der Leyen’s Pfizer texts
• Axios: Yahoo to lay off more than 20% of staff as it shrinks ad biz

Source of the cover photo: Royal Television Society

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