On Wednesday, as many as 100 million Russians abruptly had their access to WhatsApp cut off, according to the Financial Times. Meanwhile, an app called Max that is quite a bit like WhatsApp—though based on the Chinese “everything app” WeChat—has been touted by celebrities, plugged by educators, and preinstalled on mobile devices. Many Russians may have no choice now but to start relying on it, even though it explicitly requires users to allow their activity to be shared with the government and has no apparent encryption, according to The Insider.
Yesterday, Russians’ access to WhatsApp competitor Telegram was also cut off.
If your rock-bottom expectations around civil liberties in Russia give you the impression that this type of crackdown is totally expected—well, you’re not entirely wrong. But this could still be a pretty big authoritarian step, especially if it succeeds in driving most Russians to Max.
A lot has changed in Russia since the start of the 2020s. A massive protest movement in neighboring Belarus was brutally suppressed with Putin’s support, changes to the political structure left little doubt that Putin will be president as long as he wants to be, and the rise and abrupt fall (and later, death) of support for Alexey Navalny—once seen as a plausible political rival—were all incremental steps away from Russia’s norms around free expression. And that was all before the current war.
Amid a series of protester arrests and efforts to censor block media sources just after the start of the all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Amnesty International called the free speech crackdown “unprecedented.” Now a few years later, such a thing seems somewhat more precedented.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that Russia’s authoritarian reach sometimes exceeds its grasp where these crackdowns are concerned. The state made a fool of itself by trying and failing to knock out Telegram back in 2018, only to end up degrading the functionality of a bunch of other internet services instead.
In December of last year, WhatsApp complained that Russia was arbitrarily slowing down its service—about a 70% slowdown, according to the Financial Times.
But this isn’t another slowdown. Russia’s internet regulator has simply removed WhatsApp Wednesday from its directory, essentially deleting it from the Russian internet.
WhatsApp’s statement to the Financial Times called this an “effort to drive users to a state-owned surveillance app,” and said Russia was trying to “isolate over 100mn people from private and secure communication.”
The Russian state justifies all this by claiming it’s an effort to secure tech sovereignty while under sanctions, and keep citizens safe from fraud and terrorism. And if there weren’t a thriving industry of scammers on WhatsApp, with only occasional large scale crackdowns it would be easier to refute that safety part. And plenty of countries, France for instance, have WhatsApp alternatives that top government officials encourage their citizens to use in the name of tech sovereignty. Also, documents uncovered by the ACLU strongly suggest that Meta, WhatsApp’s parent company, is complicit in U.S. government surveillance of its users.
All of which is not to defend Russian internet suppression, only to point out that if apps like WhatsApp were perceived as more trustworthy, it might make it somewhat harder for a state to foist an un-encrypted app on its people that makes government surveillance easy.
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