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Russia’s Online Censorship Has Surged During Ukraine War



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What’s the difference between Russia’s internet before and after the invasion of Ukraine? The answer: a thirtyfold increase in censorship.That was the finding of a report published on Wednesday by Citizen Lab, a group from the University of Toronto that studies online censorship in authoritarian countries. The new report was one of the first attempts to quantify the extent of Russian internet censorship since the war began in February 2022.To compile its findings, Citizen Lab analyzed more than 300 court orders from the Russian government against Vkontakte, one of the country’s largest social media sites, demanding that it remove accounts, posts, videos and other content. Before the war, Russia’s government issued internet takedown orders to Vkontakte, known as VK, once every 50 days on average. After the conflict began, that number jumped to nearly once a day, according to Citizen Lab.Often the court orders focused on getting VK to remove news from independent …

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