The war in Ukraine: digital aspects and censorship

The war in Ukraine is undoubtedly one of the worst tragedies that happened in our lifetime. Much has been written, many analyzers have said their opinion on the matter, so I will abstain from stating mine here. This post aims to show another aspect of the war: what effect it has on free speech online and the digital world in general.

First, a disclaimer, I will not take any side and will try to remain as objective as possible. The war in Ukraine is actually two wars: real-world and informational. I will focus on the second one here, but before that: a brief trip to the past. The internet is largely regarded as the experiment that escaped the lab. It was meant to be decentralized from the get-go: people exchange information between each other using an open set of protocols with peer-to-peer communication. But then, something happened in 1990: Sir Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web. This new technology revolutionized the Internet so much that the two terms are now used interchangeably. The goal was noble: give universal access to documents.

The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.

– As stated in the first WWW website

The initiative was not instantly popular: it saw widespread usage in CERN and not much else. This changed after Mosaic, the first graphical browser with support for images and forms, and HTTPd, the first web server that could process forms, were released. Thousands of websites were created in less than a year. Of course, this was just the beginning. Less than two decades after the rise of the World Wide Web, we saw the rise of the companies we know today: Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc. These platforms were so popular that the internet de facto centralized around them - even some new words got coined (e.g., “googling”). This does not mean that there are no other sites or platforms online, no. It means that the majority of online users flock to these platforms to access and share content.

So, you might be wondering, how does this have anything to do with the current situation? In a couple of ways, which will be outlined in the next paragraphs.

The first aspect is censorship. Both sides in the war have taken measures for censoring their respective enemies. First, EU bans Russian media outlets on the continent. Major platforms like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Microsoft etc. all start blocking RT and Sputnik in an unprecedented move. Google and the “neutral” DuckDuckGo pledge to remove results or rank them lower in the list. Centralized Internet makes all that possible - a central entity may decide to play “Ministry of Truth” and decide which information to include and which to drop. It goes further, DNS censorship and outright access denial to the IPs of the websites have been done in some, if not all, bloc member states. Ukraine even asked ICANN to remove root DNS records for Russian domains, which ICANN, thankfully, refused to do. An act of censorship, recently seen only in countries with limited free speech like Iran and China, is taking shape right in front of our eyes. Russia also has an answer to this: it blocks access to Meta platforms (Facebook, Instagram) and declares them as terrorist, forces Spotify out of the country and blocks Twitter and other various media websites. All of these actions from both sides affectively limit the opposite point of view so that they can only push their own propaganda to their citizens. This brings us to the next point.

Propaganda always goes hand-in-hand with war. These days, spreading disinformation is easier that it used to be, though. Almost everyone has a smartphone in their pocket, a social media account and follows some kind of “influencer”. This makes the users participate, willingly or not, in the massive amount of propaganda that is delivered from both sides. A funny example is when the US president famously gathered TikTokers to “sway public opinions about the invasion” (aka to spread propaganda). Media is also doing their part: from stories like Snake Island, the Ghost of Kiev and analyzing the physical and mental state of the Russian president to claiming the latter bathes in deer blood, nothing is off-limits. As I said, propaganda is natural in such cases. The issue comes when you are exposed to only one-sided propaganda - you see only one point of view and are gradually brainwashed to think a certain way by the journalistic sewage that comes in excessive amounts from the little screen where you read the news. There is a brink of truth in everything and seeing both points of view may help you reach a somewhat plausible conclusion. This, however, will not happen by reading only about deer-blood bathing and claims that Russia has not lost any troops in the war and will not suffer economically whatsoever.

The final aspect is somewhat new: cancel-culture. In the last couple of years, freedom of speech and expression in the west has suffered from this phenomenon. You may have guarantees that the state will not persecute you, no matter what you say, but cancel-culture will make sure that you face the consequences of your words. I will not assess whether this is right or wrong, it is too complicated for me to do so. However, we are seeing instances of cancel-culture that are borderline stupidity: vandalized Russian churches, proposals for expelling Russian students, denying participation to contests for Russian athletes, cancelling Tchaikovsky performances and even removing the letter “Z” from advertising campaigns. All of these are half-assed attempts to show a stance that are doing more harm than good. If you want to show a stance: go and protest, donate to charity, expel diplomats, but do not “cancel” culture or the common person for something, which they have no control of.

Now, how do these points affect technology? In my opinion, we see a shift towards decentralization of the internet and more concerns about anonymity, censorship and privacy. We see a gradual increase of Tor bridge users not only in Russia, but in the world since the beginning of the war (24.02.2022). The number of directly connected users seems to remain relatively the same. Telegram, while not ideal, has become one of the main ways of exchanging information for both sides (see here and here). Signal also saw increased usage in Ukraine and Russia on 28.02.2022, according to CloudFlare CEO. The number of Bitcoin and Ethereum transactions remain relatively the same, but this is bound to change as cryptocurrencies become the norm and as we saw how easy it is to cut off an entire country from the centralized global banking system SWIFT. So even in these dark times, there are some positives that can be drawn.

Finally, my appeal to the reader is: do your own research, don’t take anything as 100% truth, try to see other point of views, revolt against censorship and centralization attempts and try to use decentralized privacy-respecting tools.