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The buildings located on the Red Square: Kremlin wall (at left) and Saint Basil's Cathedral (at right), Moscow, Russia.(Stock Photo, Getty Images)

Unraveling viral disinformation and explaining where it came from, the harm it's causing, and what we should do about it.

The Russian government escalated its war against social media companies on Wednesday by slowing down access to Twitter in the country in order to protect Russian citizens.

But just like its done in the past, Roskomnadzor, the states communications regulator, appears to have botched its plan to censor a social media platform while at the same time taking down its own website offline, as well as those of the Kremlin and the Russian government, according to several experts and journalists.

Last week, the regulator warned Twitter that it could face heavy fines if it was found guilty of repeatedly failing to remove some 3,000 posts containing information about suicide, child pornography, and drugs dating back to 2017. The regulator added that if Twitter continued to ignore the takedown requests, it would block the platform completely.

But on Wednesday Roskomnadzor took matters into its own hands and took action against the social media company.

Starting March 10, 2021, centralized response measures have been taken against Twitter to protect Russian citizens and force the internet service to comply with Russian legislation, Roskomnadzor said in a statement on Wednesday morning, according to a translation by the Moscow Times.

The agency said it would be slowing down access to Twitter on cell phones and desktops, but according to multiple Twitter users in Russia who posted messages on Wednesday morning, the action so far has had little minimal impact. However, the Russian version of the outages tracking website Down Detector is reporting a spike in issues with Twitter in the country.

The Twitter slow down is part of an escalating stand-off between Moscow and U.S. social media platforms. The action comes just 24 hours after news emerged that Moscow is planning to sue Twitter along with Google, Facebook, Telegram, and TikTok for allegedly failing to delete posts it said illegally urged children to take part in anti-Kremlin protests.

However, it appears that while trying to slow down access to Twitter, Roskomnadzor may have inadvertently knocked its own website offline together with a swathe of other Russian government sites and services, including the official Russian government website and Kremlin.ru though the latter subsequently came back online with a warning that its not secure.

At one point the Russian authorities appeared to blame the outage on a U.S. cyberattack, with Senator Andrey Klimov referring to reports this week that Washington is preparing a digital attack against Russia in response to recent moves against U.S. targets.

But then Russias Ministry of Digital Development laid the blame for the websites going offline on malfunctioning equipment operated by Rostelecom, a Russian telecoms provider, claiming the outage had nothing to do with the efforts to throttle Twitter.

But Russian experts believe that the effort to slow down Twitter and the sudden removal of several government websites are related.

Andrei Soldatov, an expert on the Russian governments efforts to control cyberspace, said on Twitter Wednesday that the throttling of the social network is what caused the website outages in Russia.

Meanwhile, investigative journalist Alexey Kovalev pointed out that an almost identical incident befell Roskomnadzor in 2018 when it attempted to block Telegram. This was because Russias security services decided that Telegram was a tool for terrorists due to the messaging services strong encryption preventing them from seeing what people were saying to each other.

And Financial Times Moscow correspondent Max Seddon wrote that it looks like Russia managed to take all the government websites offline in its attempts to slow down Twitter...Another crushing success.

Twitter, which didnt immediately respond to VICE News request for comment, is only used by around 3 percent of the Russian population. But it has become a space for hyper-politicized speech in the country, according to experts, particularly around the poisoning, and subsequent arrest and jailing of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny.

Roskomnadzor has no power to actually block any website or service itself. In 2018, it provided a list of IP addresses of Telegram users to the internet service providers, who then implement the block.

Trying to avoid being shut down, Telegram switched its IP addresses to Google and Amazons cloud infrastructure. But because thousands of Russian businesses and much of Russias critical IT infrastructure depend on the same services when Roskomnadzor decided to block those addresses too, Telegram remained online while the websites of online businesses and services were blocked.

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Russia May Have Censored the Kremlin Website While Trying to Censor Twitter - VICE

Rodger Whitney| New Bern

I was wrong about censorship being just one step lower than murder. It is worse than murder.

The destruction of an idea or body of work that could potentially live for centuries is unacceptable. Now, those who would rewrite history, hide what we were, hide the attitudes that have brought us to this point in time so they do not have to look at the good, the bad and the ugly of humankind's existence have attacked Dr. Seuss.

Over time, attacks on Mark Twain and other classic writers as well as artists and statues have been tolerated. We cannot allow censorship, the greatest threat to a free America, to continue.

Whether by social media persuading people not to view or use products and images and books, or by the removal of artworks, statues or books from a library, Censorship threatens truth...and the ability to learn from the mistakes of the past.

Slavery was a mistake. It is a mistake that has existed with Whites owning Whites, Whites owning other races, Africans owning Africans...a mistake that continues now with sex trades and other equally bad situations. We cannot learn from these mistakes if we do not know them.

We cannot learn about our country if we do not know, acknowledge and understand the struggles of the Civil War, the good of those who tried to end domestic slavery.

We cannot learn about music, art, literature and freedom of the press if censorship is allowed.

Write or e-mail your state and federal legislators. Write and email the business giants that threaten free expression...and contact the publishers of Dr. Seuss and let them know that knuckling under pressure sends a very bad message.

A free country cannot be without uncensored free expression.

Rodger Whitney

New Bern

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Letter to the editor: Censorship threatens the truth - New Bern Sun Journal

But the nostalgia and thrill of bonding over a book makes it all the more crushing when an offensive paragraph stops the young reader in their tracks.

It's hard to imagine a children's library collection without those titles. It's up to librarians, then, to determine whether those books and others with racist content still deserve a spot on their shelves, said Deborah Caldwell Stone, director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom.

"We may make a reevaluation of those books and their place in the canon," she told CNN. "It doesn't mean that people should stop reading the books or not have them in their collection, but they should be thinking critically about the books and how they are shared with young people."

The books may still stay on shelves

Parents, critics and readers of all ages reignited arguments over offensive children's books this week when Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced it would cease publication of six of the famed author and illustrator's books that contain harmful portrayals of minority groups.

Librarians have been paying close attention to the debate for years. Staff members who lead story times or curate displays are more likely now to select more inclusive titles than stalwarts like Seuss and Ingalls Wilder, Caldwell Stone said.

"The fact is that library collections are dynamic," she said. "There's only so much shelf space, and over time collections will shift."

Some libraries may move an offending book to the adult collection or historical archives, where it can live as a "historical artifact" that reflects the dominant attitudes of the time it was published.

But perhaps the most important consideration a librarian has is the wants and needs of their readers -- is a book reflective of the community the library serves? Is it still popular among readers? If a librarian decides a book is "no longer serving the needs of the community," it may be weeded out, Caldwell Stone said.

Offensive books can be conversation starters

"Little House's" stories of homesteading in the West and the Neverland adventures of a boy who flies but never ages are tales of daring, friendship and resolve. But both also contain racist depictions of Native Americans and fictional indigenous people, text that is often accompanied by offensive artwork in many editions.

And in Dr. Seuss' "If I Ran the Zoo," one of six books by the famed author that will no longer be published, characters intended to be of East Asian descent, with long wispy mustaches and closed eyes, carry a caged animal on their heads. It also features two people drawn as members of an unnamed African tribe with dark skin, large bellies and grass skirts.

The lens of nostalgia, coupled with the fact that most parents likely haven't revisited children's books since their own childhood, may've caused some adult readers to forget these offensive details. If parents do choose to introduce these books to their children, though, they can use the texts as launchpads for discussion of complicated topics like racism, Caldwell Stone said.

"The decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises is a chance for adults to think critically about the books, decide whether or not to share them with the children in their lives and to engage in that conversation about race and racial prejudice," she said.

Librarian Lindsey Patrick read "Little House on the Prairie" with her young daughter and repeatedly probed her about why Ingalls Wilder's portrayal of Native Americans as cruel and unsophisticated was wrong. Some of the questions went over her daughter's head, Patrick wrote in a blog post for the library, but her daughter recognized that the "Indians" in the book were more offensive stereotypes than fully formed characters like Laura, Ma and Pa.

"Maybe my daughter didn't walk away with a full understanding of white privilege, but she can now better identify when someone is being 'snotty' to another person for racial or cultural differences," she wrote in 2019. "She also has a better understanding of our country's treatment of its native people."

It's a chance to add new books to the canon

The debate around Seuss and other popular classics is an opportunity for librarians to reevaluate the books that belong in canonical children's literature -- that is, books that are considered the best-loved and are frequently taught and read.

"I don't think that older books will be left behind -- I think that the canon will be expanded, and our understanding of what is important literature will be expanded" to include the experiences of Black Americans, people of color and other marginalized groups, Caldwell Stone said.

Librarians at the Brooklyn Public Library have for years left classics on the shelves and for story times select titles that celebrate "the diverse voices and experiences that help create the fabric of the Brooklyn community," said Amy Mikel, the Brooklyn Public Library's director of customer experience.

Books with offensive content remain available to check out, she said, but they better serve readers as a "springboard for conversations and healing." The library's attention remains on widening its selections that center members of historically marginalized groups.

Spotlighting books that feature diverse characters while sidelining, but still offering, books that reduce diverse characters to stereotypes is an option that sticks to librarians' anti-censorship stance and, hopefully, carves out a place for more books to join the wider canon of notable children's literature, Caldwell Stone said.

"It's always been the role of libraries to foster cultural understanding," she said. And with a larger emphasis on books that don't rely on stereotypes and prejudice to entertain, librarians hope, libraries can be havens for readers from all backgrounds.

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Libraries oppose censorship. So they're getting creative when it comes to offensive kids' books - CNN

A few months ago, Kirk Nesset was released from federal prison. A former professor of literature at Allegheny College, he was prosecuted for possession of child pornography in 2014.

At the time, the FBI and Pennsylvania State Police found more than 500,000 images in his home.

Some images depicted the rape of infants. Other images depicted the sexual abuse of older children. This case is unbelievable, Assistant U.S. Attorney Christian Trabold said when Nesset was sentenced. It is the most child pornography that I have seen in 15 years as a federal prosecutor.

This month, Nesset had a poem published in one of the most prestigious poetry magazines in the world.

For its February issue, Poetry included the work of currently and formerly incarcerated people, their families, and the artists, poets, and teachers who work in carceral spaces. The editors did not investigate the backgrounds of those who submitted, and Nessets poem was accepted. Understandably, when readers found out what this poet had been incarcerated for, they were upset. Right now, more than 2,000 people are petitioning the Poetry Foundation, which publishes Poetry, to remove Nessets poem from circulation.

There was a time when I might have signed their petition, too.

But in the past few years, I have spent time working with incarcerated writers. As a writing mentor in PEN Americas Prison Writing Program, I corresponded with a man who participated in the gang rape of a woman. He sent me his work, and I did my best to help him revise it. Over time, we got to know each other. Like many sex offenders, he had been molested as a child. Like me, he loved to read and write. He was also someone who wanted to turn his life around. If his work had been accepted by Poetry, I would not have tried to remove it.

I have never met a prison volunteer who supports crime. But most prison volunteers believe that a criminal can reform and move beyond their crime. As one of my colleagues from the Prison Mindfulness Institute once said to me, We all have the Buddha inside of us. In other words, we all have the potential to have compassion for ourselves and each other. Just as I have compassion for the victims of sexual abuse, I also have compassion for their abusers. I also dont think its my place to bar writers from publication after they are released from prison.

At the end of the day, most prisoners will be released. I hope they all have the resources and support networks to find a positive sense of purpose in their lives. Like many progressive activists who work to ban the box that allows employers to discriminate against formerly incarcerated job applicants, I also hope editors will not discriminate against formerly incarcerated poets, novelists, playwrights and other writers who submit their work.

As someone who has seen the consequences of sexual abuse, I know how important it is to support victims. I also know how important it is to challenge the culture of punishment and retribution in the United States, a country with the highest incarceration rate in the world. Lets not confuse punishment with compassion for the victims of violent crimes. And lets not forget that some of the worst crimes are committed by people who are also victims.

If a pedophile should not have their poem published, why should a rapist or a murderer have their short story, play or essay published, either? In this vein, there seems to be no reason why those who started the petition against Nesset should not start new petitions to retract work published in PEN Americas prison writing anthology and other anthologies, magazines, journals and newspapers. After all, if Nesset is censored, then a lot more writers should be censored, too.

As New York Times Magazine poetry editor Reginald Dwayne Betts put it in a Slate article, Its easy to be righteous in the anger at his crime. This guy was a pedophile. But shit, I carjacked somebody! If I was in that issue I could see the person I did that to asking, Why the hell is this guy in here? In fact, the only reason hes in here is because he carjacked me and went to prison! Thats why the outrage seems false, because theyre only willing to do it on this case. In contrast to how easy it is to be upset right now, it is more difficult to decide who should be censored and who should not.

While tough on crime has been the promise of every Republican president from Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan through Donald Trump, it should not be the promise of editors who publish poems. It certainly should not be the promise of readers who identify as progressives. As Betts suggests, there is a disjunction between the anger directed at Nesset and the rhetoric of prison abolition that many of these same liberals expound. Indeed, just a few years ago, some liberals were upset that Harvard University did not admit a writer who was convicted of murdering her disabled son.

Of course, none of these cases are the same. But, in the case of censorship, Im in no position to draw the lines between them. And to be frank, I dont think anyone else is, either.

To end with a quote from the petition to the Poetry Foundation, Nessets time served does not equate to the lifetime of emotional, physical, and psychological trauma victims of child pornography and sexual assault endure. This couldnt be more true. Moreover, readers have every right to be upset, especially since Nesset has the same elite background as so many poets who end up in Poetry. But in the end, censorship will lead to more problems. And if these censors extend their arguments to other writers, it will also lead to a hell of a lot more censorship.

I dont think this is the right path for progressive activism or for literature.

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Censoring poems by people incarcerated for a certain type of crime is a slippery slope (opinion) - Inside Higher Ed

MOSCOW Margarita Simonyan, the editor in chief of the Kremlin-controlled RT television network, recently called on the government to block access to Western social media.

She wrote: Foreign platforms in Russia must be shut down.

Her choice of social network for sending that message: Twitter.

While the Kremlin fears an open internet shaped by American companies, it just cant quit it.

Russias winter of discontent, waves of nationwide protests set off by the return of the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, has been enabled by the countrys free and open internet. The state controls the television airwaves, but online Mr. Navalnys dramatic arrest upon arrival in Moscow, his investigation into President Vladimir V. Putins purported secret palace and his supporters calls for protest were all broadcast to an audience of many millions.

For years, the Russian government has been putting in place the technological and legal infrastructure to clamp down on freedom of speech online, leading to frequent predictions that the country could be heading toward internet censorship akin to Chinas great firewall.

But even as Mr. Putin faced the biggest protests in years last month, his government appeared unwilling and, to some degree, unable to block websites or take other drastic measures to limit the spread of digital dissent.

The hesitation has underscored the challenge Mr. Putin faces as he tries to blunt the political implications of cheap high-speed internet access reaching into the remote corners of the vast country while avoiding angering a populace that has fallen in love with Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and TikTok.

Theyre afraid, Dmitri Galushko, a Moscow telecommunications consultant, said of why the Kremlin hasnt clamped down harder. Theyve got all these weapons, but they dont know how to use them.

More broadly, the question of how to deal with the internet lays bare a dilemma for Mr. Putins Russia: whether to raise state repression to new heights and risk a public backlash or continue trying to manage public discontent by maintaining some semblance of an open society.

In China, government control went hand in hand with the internets early development. But in Russia, home to a Soviet legacy of an enormous pool of engineering talent, digital entrepreneurship bloomed freely for two decades, until Mr. Putin started trying to restrain online speech after the antigovernment protests of 2011 and 2012.

At that point, the open internet was so entrenched in business and society and its architecture so decentralized that it was too late to radically change course. But efforts to censor the web, as well as requirements that internet providers install equipment for government surveillance and control, gained pace in bill after bill passed by Parliament. At the same time, internet access continues to expand, thanks in part to government support.

Russian officials now say that they have the technology in place to allow for a sovereign RuNet a network that would continue to give Russians access to Russian websites even if the country were cut off from the World Wide Web. The official line is that this expensive infrastructure offers protection in case nefarious Western forces try to cut Russias communications links. But activists say it is actually meant to give the Kremlin the option to cut some or all of Russia off from the world.

In principle, it will be possible to restore or enable the autonomous functioning of the Russian segment of the web, Dmitri A. Medvedev, the vice chairman of Mr. Putins Security Council and a former prime minister, told reporters recently. Technologically, everything is ready for this.

Amid this years domestic unrest, Russias saber-rattling directed at Silicon Valley has reached a new intensity. Mr. Navalny has made expert use of Googles YouTube, Facebooks Instagram and Twitter to reach tens of millions of Russians with his meme-ready depictions of official corruption, down to the $850 toilet brush he claimed to have identified at a property used by Mr. Putin.

At the same time, Russia has appeared powerless trying to stop those companies from blocking pro-Kremlin accounts or forcing them to take down pro-Navalny content. (Mr. Navalnys voice is resonating on social media even with him behind bars: On Saturday, a court upheld his prison sentence of more than two years.)

Russias telecommunications regulator, Roskomnadzor, has taken to publicly berating American internet companies, sometimes multiple times a day. On Wednesday, the regulator said that the voice-chat social network Clubhouse had violated the rights of citizens to access information and to distribute it freely by suspending the account of a prominent state television host, Vladimir Solovyov. On Jan. 29, it claimed that Google was blocking YouTube videos containing the Russian national anthem, calling it flagrant and unacceptable rudeness directed at all citizens of our country.

Clubhouse apparently blocked Mr. Solovyovs account because of user complaints, while Google said some videos containing the Russian anthem had been blocked in error because of a content rights issue. Clubhouse did not respond to a request for comment.

In addition, as calls for nationwide protest proliferated after Mr. Navalnys arrest last month, Roskomnadzor said that social networks were encouraging minors to take part in illegal activity.

The Russian social network VKontakte and the Chinese-owned app TikTok partly complied with Roskomnadzors order to block access to protest-related content. But Facebook refused, stating, This content doesnt violate our community standards.

For all its criticism of American social media companies, the Kremlin has used them extensively to spread its message around the world. It was Facebook that served as a primary tool in Russias effort to sway the 2016 United States presidential election. On YouTube, the state-controlled network RT has a combined 14 million subscribers for its English, Spanish and Arabic-language channels.

Ms. Simonyan, the editor of RT, says she will continue to use American social media platforms as long as they are not banned.

To quit using these platforms while everyone else is using them is to capitulate to the adversary, she said in a statement to The New York Times. To ban them for everyone is to vanquish said adversary.

A law signed by Mr. Putin in December gives his government new powers to block or restrict access to social networks, but it has yet to use them. When regulators tried to block access to the messaging app Telegram starting in 2018, the two-year effort ended in failure after Telegram found ways around the restrictions.

Instead, officials are trying to lure Russians onto social networks like VKontakte that are closely tied to the government. Gazprom Media, a subsidiary of the state-owned natural gas giant, has promised to turn its long-moribund video platform RuTube into a competitor to YouTube. And in December it said it had bought an app modeled on TikTok called Ya Molodets Russian for Im great for sharing short smartphone videos.

Andrei Soldatov, a journalist who has co-written a book on the Kremlins efforts to control the internet, says the strategy of persuading people to use Russian platforms is a way to keep dissent from going viral at moments of crisis. As of April 1, all smartphones sold in Russia will be required to come pre-loaded with 16 Russian-made apps, including three social networks and an answer to Apples Siri voice assistant that is called Marusya.

The goal is for the typical Russian user to live in a bubble of Russian apps, Mr. Soldatov said. Potentially, it could be rather effective.

Even more effective, some activists say, is the acceleration of Mr. Putins machine of selective repression. A new law makes online libel punishable by up to five years in prison, and the editor of a popular news website served 15 days in jail for retweeting a joke that included a reference to a January pro-Navalny protest.

In a widely circulated video this month, a SWAT team in the Pacific port city of Vladivostok can be seen interrogating Gennady Shulga, a local video blogger who covered the protests. An officer in a helmet, goggles and combat fatigues presses Mr. Shulga shirtless to a tile floor next to two pet-food bowls.

The Kremlin is very much losing the information race, said Sarkis Darbinyan, an internet freedom activist. Self-censorship and fear thats what were heading toward.

Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.

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China Censors the Internet. So Why Doesnt Russia? - The New York Times