Андрей Солдатов - The Red Web - The Struggle Between Russia's Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries

“I briefly explained to them how news stories are selected, what factors affect the ranking, what principles are used for annotation and for headlines,” recalled Gershenson. “I showed screenshots related to the war in Georgia.” Gershenzon tried to explain why it was normal to have a couple of references to Georgian media, out of fifteen altogether.

Surkov interrupted him, pointing his finger to the headline from a liberal media outlet in the Yandex ranking, “This is our enemy,” Surkov said. “That’s what we do not need!”

Gershenzon soon left the room, and Surkov told Yandex’s leadership that the Kremlin needed Russian business success stories. He clearly tried to leave the impression they wanted to be friends, but Kostin requested access to the interface of Yandex News that had Gershenzon explained to them. When the two Kremlin officials finally left, the Yandex people gathered to talk over what had happened. “Everybody was impressed, and clearly shocked,” Gershenzon said. He tried to persuade the Yandex management to not cooperate too closely with the Kremlin. “I told them, guys, these are not our terms, we do not need to talk their language, we do not need to talk in terms of enemies and friends.”

Surkov and Kostin wanted to control not only traditional media but also what Russia’s growing Internet audience was seeing on Yandex. They wanted to define a political agenda every day and every hour. When they pressured Yandex to exclude Georgian sites from the algorithm, they wanted to control not only Russian media, traditional and online, but also the wider Russian-speaking Internet.

Yandex refused to provide access but instead decided to put greater effort into explaining how the news was chosen.

Kostin returned to Yandex once again in spring of 2009. Eventually they came to some sort of agreement. The Yandex operating model was to have relations with all media they had added to Yandex’s database of news; the outlets were called partners. They agreed to treat Kostin as a partner. What did he get? Inside Yandex Kostin was given a special name, “interested representative of a newsmaker,” and a special phone number to call in case the presidential administration had any questions about the news headlines the Yandex News algorithm selected. Gershenzon recalled, “It was clear, of course, that they were not very interested in algorithms; they were interested in one thing, that they have only what they wanted in Yandex News, and what they do not want will be removed. But we were playing this game very successfully.” Kostin called, and Gershenzon sent back explanatory letters. The reaction from Kostin was, “All your explanations are extremely unconvincing.”

In most cases these angry calls were caused by the Kremlin’s own public relations mistakes. They might present some sort of initiative they wanted to promote and request progovernment media to publish stories about it, but these media just copied the message over and over again. The Yandex algorithm immediately identified the flood of almost identical stories as duplicates and ranked the story very low.

For some time the game satisfied the Kremlin. Yandex withstood the pressure and did not give in.

On September 6, 2008, Medvedev changed the structure of the Interior Ministry, which acts as a national police force. The department dedicated to fighting organized crime and terrorism was disbanded and a new department established, charged with countering extremism. Similar changes were made through all regional departments. With a new global financial crisis hitting Russia, the authorities feared popular uprising. The new department and the FSB launched a massive program to monitor any kind of civil activity, including surveillance of religious organizations, political parties not in parliament, and even informal youth groups. Most of the effort was invested in building huge databases on would-be troublemakers and developing and installing systems to control movements on all kinds of transport. The intention was to have technologies and logistics that could be used to prevent activists from reaching the demonstration. The Interior Ministry, the FSB, and local authorities started to buy advanced surveillance technologies, ranging from drones to closed-circuit television cameras to face recognition systems, all installed on railway stations and the Moscow Metro. [13] Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, “A Face in the Crowd: The FSB Is Watching You!” OpenDemocracy, November 15, 2011, www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/andrei-soldatov-irina-borogan/face-in-crowd-fsb-is-watching-you .

Simultaneously the Kremlin was desperately searching for new methods to deal with the ever-growing blogging community and independent websites. For some years liberal bloggers had complained of trolls. In Internet slang, a troll means a person who sows discord by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community—a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog—with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion. It is possible to post anonymous posts on LiveJournal.com, an option the Russian “trolls” exploited to the fullest. Meanwhile liberal media websites suffered a series of attacks known as distributed denial of service, or DDOS, which were carried out by “hacker patriots,” who also attacked government agencies in Estonia, Georgia, and Lithuania. The DDOS is a sort of attack in which a targeted site receives so many requests for access that it simply shuts down. It is a simple, cheap, and effective way to disrupt a website, at least temporarily.

But who were these hacker patriots? During the 2000s the Kremlin had created large pro-Kremlin youth organizations, which mostly consisted of youth recruited in Russia’s regions. Two of the most important organizations were Nashi (“Ours”), the oldest movement, built up under direct guidance of Surkov, and Molodaya Gvardiya (“Young Guard”), the youth wing of the pro-Kremlin political party United Russia. It was hardly surprising that activists of both movements were caught trolling and launching DDOS attacks against the Kremlin’s opponents. [14] In spring 2007 Estonia had angered the Kremlin with its decision to move a Soviet war memorial out of the center of the capital. After a massive nationalistic campaign against Estonia in the Russian press, on April 27 Russian hackers launched a series of cyber attacks on the websites of the Estonian government, parliament, banks, ministries, newspapers, and broadcasters. Most of the attacks were the distributed-denial-of-service type. Estonian foreign minister Urmas Paet accused the Kremlin of direct involvement, and Estonia requested and received NATO assistance in responding to this new form of aggression. But Estonia failed to present proof of the Russian government’s involvement, and in September 2007 the country’s defense minister admitted he had no evidence linking cyber attacks to the Russian authorities. Two years later, in May 2009, Konstantin Goloskokov, one of the “commissars” of the pro-Kremlin Nashi movement, admitted to the Financial Times that he and some of his associates had launched the DDOS attacks on Estonia in 2007. See Charles Clover, “Kremlin-Backed Group Behind Estonia Cyber Blitz,” Financial Times , March 11, 2009, www.ft.com/cms/s/0/57536d5a-0ddc-11de-8ea3–0000779fd2ac.html#axzz3QDihM3bC . In September 2013, Novaya Gazeta journalists infiltrated the “trolls factory” and published the investigation. The “factory” was based in a mansion near the rail station Olgino, outside of St. Petersburg, and was led by Alexey Soskovets, once involved in Nashi and Molodaya Gvardiya. See also Alexandra Garmazhalova, “Gde zhivut trolli. I kto ih kormit” [Where the Trolls Live. And Who Feeds Them], Novaya Gazeta , September 9, 2013, www.novayagazeta.ru/politics/59889.html . But for a while the tactics helped maintain a façade of plausible deniability for the Kremlin.