Telegram ultimately not so “rebellious” against the Kremlin
Parliamentary elections were held in Russia last week from Friday to Sunday. Without surprise, Vladimir Putin’s party emerged as the big winner with 49.46% of the vote, far ahead of the Communists and their 19.61%. It must be said that the latter were almost the only ones to still have the right to face the power in place, all the others having been purely and simply prohibited. However, certain offensives were put in place to try to counter the hegemony of this totalitarian power, but they were faced with censorship from above. The overall problem is that tech giants like Apple and Google have dangerously played the game of this extremist policy.
Navalny en bloc
Daring to oppose Vladimir Putin is not easy and can even prove to be very dangerous, even fatal. And it is not Alexeï Navalny who will tell you the opposite. The Russian lawyer and opponent of the regime has miraculously escaped poisoning in 2020 and today is having a bad day in prison for a sentence of two and a half years. However, even locked in a labor camp, he does not forget his commitments and his desire to debunk as much as he can with the power in place. These legislative elections were therefore a new opportunity for him to try new things. He and his team have therefore set up an app with instructions for voters to vote against the Russian president’s camp.
Each time, and depending on your constituency, you will find the instructions there to be sure to make the most appropriate choice if you do not want to support Putin’s representatives. This is the concept of “Smart Voting”. As we can imagine, he did not like it and the sanctions fell quickly.
a Telegram too complacent
This application has indeed received the wrath of Roskomnadzor, the Russian telecoms gendarme. In less than two he was ask Apple and Google to remove it from their respective stores. Navalny sympathizers then turned to Telegram. Rebelote, the two American giants therefore passed the message in turn to the Russian messaging service, asking him to take care of his bot before being excluded. Pavel Durov, its founder and yet far from being a big fan of the Kremlin, executed without a fight in the face of this pressure from above.
The reason given involves Russian law which, as in many countries, prohibits the continuation of election campaigns once the polling stations are open. Navalny’s bot could therefore be considered illegal from Friday. Except that it was deleted on Monday. With its end-to-end encryption and anti-establishment habits, we thought Telegram would show less eagerness to obey.
To explain his gesture, Durov confided that developers like him had no real choice but to resign themselves to following the rules laid down by Apple and Google. Under cover of non-compliance with the conditions of use, he deplores that the two American companies have yielded to the blackmail of the Russian government. He even sees it as a destabilizing way of doing things for the future of democracy in the country and elsewhere, believing that “Application blocking by Apple and Google sets dangerous precedent that will affect free speech in Russia and around the world “. He forgets that Telegram does not need Google to exist (it is possible to install the app as an APK file), and even if it is more complicated for iPhone owners, it quickly lowers the arms to our liking.
Read also: ProtonMail rocks activists’ IP and loses the trust of its users
The example of Telegram today shows well the fragility of such a grip on the market for applications by Google and Apple that can destroy a business with a single click. And when the decision of an app’s life or death is made for political purposes, a big problem of conscience arises.
