Ukraine War

Russian Propaganda About Ukraine is Being Strangled at Birth

Much of the internet propaganda push from Putin is being prevented from distribution by the unseen layers of scaffolding that holds the web up. Another unforeseen consequence screws his splinternet

And you think YOU are frustrated by low bandwidth?

At least it’s better than no bandwidth when you’re trying to push propaganda out to people who are receptive, people in global audiences you’ve built using Facebook Domain Insights or Google Analytics for example.

Audiences that you can no longer reach.

If you’ve been frustrated on a low bandwidth internet connection you might have noticed all those links that show up on the bottom left of your browser window as your device is making a connection to the website your trying to access.

Usually it all happens too fast to be seen.

Connection after connection is made as you wait for the connection, layering, linking handshaking and data gathering. Twenty or more connections.

You might have seen some of the names flash up - Google Analytics, Facebook, AWS and so on.

The Russian gambit

Russia has been trying to emulate China and create its own independent version of the internet, generically known as a splinternet.

This is being done for a variety of reasons, including national security and censorship. The Russian government has been working on a project called the Sovereign Internet, which would essentially create a walled-off version of the internet that could be controlled by the government.

The Kremlin mandated that state-owned websites connect to its state-controlled domain name system servers by March 11 2022, and that certain parts of the sites be localized within Russia in response to Washington, London, and the European Union’s financial sanctions against Russian banks.

Furthermore, Russian financial institutions and other organizations were instructed to replace any security certificates that may have been or will be removed from them with Russian ones. (source: flashpoint-intel.com)

Too little too late

No matter what the Kremlin tries to do, they cannot get around a fundamental problem. Yes, they can eliminate ICANN website registration. That’s in process.

But there’s much more.

In the main it is American businesses which dominate the mass of third-party services. These span a huge spectrum from security add-ons to internet advertising tools and power the globe’s websites and apps outside of China.

The basic infrastructure of the internet whether cloud-computing services (mostly Microsoft, Amazon and Google) or which companies control the online advertising market, is almost completely Western-owned.

Russian news media cannot push the propaganda

The big state-controlled Russian media outlets are RT, Sputnik, Ruptly, Ria Novosti and Tass although Pravda plays a propaganda part too, albeit more traditional. Still crap.

While the Russian news sites can still operate, they have been stripped of their use of a complex web of almost-exclusively Western interconnected advertising, marketing and security services that have become a mainstay for how websites and apps function — politico.eu

Politico.com used a tool called ‘builtwith’ to examine the software and services used by these Russian media sites — in other words, they analysed some of those multiple connections I mentioned at the start.

And now sanctions bite

Many of these third-party Western companies have to comply with sanctions and have removed access to their services. Some of the software is freely available for download on the web, and is still in use by the Russian media.

But a lot of it isn’t.

And this problem cannot be solved quickly by the Kremlin.

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