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In mid-2021, after Russian officials raided his home, Roman Anin, the founder of IStories, an independent investigative outlet in Moscow, decided to leave the country. He set up a new base in Europe and went about getting his team safely across the border.
It meant that in February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, and the government intensified its pressure on independent journalists, Anin was already set up. IStories (Important Stories) is among about seventy independent Russian outlets now operating from exile after their homeland labeled three hundred journalists as “foreign actors” and twenty media outlets as “undesirable organizations” that threaten the country’s national security by criticizing the war or deviating from the government’s view.
The list of “undesirable organizations” includes Novaya Gazeta Europe, Meduza, Bellingcat, The Insider, GIJN, the Moscow Times, TV Rain, and IStories. Anyone who works with them faces the possibility of jail time. Their audiences can face persecution even for sharing a story. “We just say watch it, think about what you saw, tell people about it, but don’t share,” said Anin.
IStories and others now use mirrored sites (a method of duplicating an HTML version of their website that evades Russian censorship tools) and browser plug-ins, and ask their readers to use virtual private networks (which make a user appear to be browsing from another nation), to stay clear of the Russian authorities, which spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to shut them down.
But, said Anin and others, equally existential problems now come from the big technology and financial companies in the West that control access to audiences and revenue streams—both inside Russia and across the world.
As the European Union and United States imposed sanctions on Russia following the invasion, YouTube, a major source of both viewers and ad dollars, first prevented state-funded media from receiving money or viewers. But a month later, it paused AdSense—which pays publishers for running ads and is a major source of revenue, especially for smaller newsrooms—for all Russian outlets. A month after that, it expanded the measure to other monetization features. Russian users effectively had no way to make ad money from Google properties. They couldn’t even sign up.
Paying for media, directly or through donations, also became a lot harder. In compliance with the sanctions, the card processing company Stripe prohibited any use of its services for anyone in Russia and its occupied territories. International credit cards including Visa, Mastercard, and American Express, suspended their services in the country. Russians could only use locally issued cards, linked to Russian banks, and only for Russian companies.
Meta’s Instagram and Facebook were banned inside Russia at the outset of the war; the company was labeled an extremist organization. Alphabet has tweaked its algorithms so that Russian news stories are harder to find. In September, Apple banned certain VPN channels from the Russian version of its App Store to comply with Russian law, further reducing the methods Russians can use to get impartial information.
In September 2022, IStories released a documentary on YouTube whose title translates to “Guys Die for Nothing.” The documentary features several families in the remote eastern Russian region of Buryatia who lost their sons in the war. It gained over ten million views, which would usually have translated into thousands of dollars in ad revenue. Instead, IStories could only monetize views from outside the country—amounting to less than a thousand dollars.
“On one hand they are saying that they don’t want Russian propaganda to get money, but if you look at YouTube in Russia, it was mostly Russian opposition and independent media,” said Tikhon Dzyadko, the editor in chief of TV Rain, which is known in Russia as Dozhd, and also operates from exile. It has about fifteen million viewers per month—enough, previously, to secure a very decent revenue stream. “Now we are suffering,” Dzyadko said.
Mediazona, a site that focuses on investigations with no editorial or opinion content, initially managed to comply with its foreign-agent designation inside Russia. Its stories included a disclaimer explaining its status, for example. But, as the laws became more stringent, Mediazona had to leave the idea of compliance and the country itself. It was also hit hard when Visa and Mastercard pulled out of Russia, said Alexander Borodikhin, the site’s English-language editor.
The methods these outlets use to evade censorship within Russia cost them money and relevance with Western tech companies. TV Rain has developed a tool, a browser plug-in, that allows Russians to access blocked channels for a few hours at a time. But the way it is done ensures no money can be earned from those views. “We need to get more and more viewers in Russia,” Dzyadko said, “because that’s our mission. That’s why we exist. On the other hand, we get zero dollars from it—it’s a tough situation.”
Google’s algorithm penalizes mirrored sites, and so stories by independent Russian outlets that use them to sidestep censorship appear low in search results. That is especially relevant because 85 percent of mobile devices in Russia are based on Google’s Android platform. It’s hard to estimate the scale of the loss. But Lev Gershenzon, the former head of the Russian search engine Yandex News, estimated the Ukrainian outlets that were similarly affected lost about 70 percent of their audience and 80 percent of their advertising revenue.
Dmitry Kolezev is a Russian blogger and independent journalist who posts content on YouTube channels, TikTok, and Telegram, from exile in Portugal after he too was labeled a foreign agent. He was recently sentenced in absentia to seven and a half years in prison for an article he published on the war. But there is simply not enough money coming in from his work to support him and his freelance colleagues. “We are barely surviving,” he said by email.
His website lists ways to make donations, including through Boosty, PayPal, YouTube sponsorship, a paid Telegram channel, Patreon, and cryptocurrency. But each method involves a complex journey through international banking regulations and remains widely unavailable to Russians inside the country who wish to support him.
For major payment companies, said Natalia Krapiva, a lawyer who works for Access Now, a nonprofit that supports civil society organizations, the risk of being implicated in sanction violations means it’s “easier for them to just block the entire country at this point.”
The US government has approved exemptions for human rights actors. But to prove this, Access Now must make a case for each individual organization and defend it before the tech companies. That is especially pressing given that donations and subscriptions, often from foreign readers, are now the primary revenue source for all the independent media organizations mentioned here.
Their main hope for the future is, paradoxically, that the Russian government’s increased efforts to shut down their voices will eventually trigger a response. “My forecast is that the Russian government will try to block access more and more,” Dzyadko said. “I think they will eventually block YouTube. We need to hope that tech companies will help us here.”
Google, the independent Russian journalists say, is not acting nefariously or favoring the Russian government. In fact, a Russian court recently decided that it owed $20 decillion (a two with thirty-four zeros) to the Kremlin for blocking state media in the country. But it has little incentive to, for example, build VPNs into its browsers in a way that would allow ad dollars to flow. It is not technically easy, said Anin, and Russia represents a small portion of its revenue and consumer base.
The solution, Gershenzon suggested, might be improved dialogue between the people making the media and the people distributing it, to find a common ground. In general, Krapiva said, there is already better communication with bigger companies like Apple and Google because they have long since set up departments to deal with human rights complaints.
Gershenzon suggested that ultimately, a new kind of global trust index for sites, based on fact-checking rather than location, that he called the “information karma system” would allow a more focused gradation of trustworthy media than merely targeting an entire nation—loyalists, dissidents, and all.
Anin, too, feels the discussion will have to get into thorny and subjective territory that allows for more nuance. “Do we check the quality of the water that we drink—that we give to people? Yes, we do. Do we check the quality of the air? Yes, we do. Why don’t we check the quality of the information that is being spread all around the world?”
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