Alexey Navalny asks Google, Meta to launch 'information front' against Putin over invasion

Russia’s jailed opposition leader and most vocal critic of Vladimir Putin’s regime, Alexey Navalny, on Thursday called on the tech giants Google and Meta/Facebook and other social media giants to launch an ‘information front’ against Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine. Navalny suggested that social media must challenge Putin’s grip on the information and must get facts out to ordinary Russians about the reality of the ongoing war. He urged the West to support a huge ad campaign to snub Moscow’s war propaganda machine. The embattled pro-democracy leader urged that the Western media must run a campaign to show what he described as the “brutal and bloody reality” of the Kremlin’s so-called “special military operation.”   

'Truth and free speech' hits Putin's regime like javelins: Navalny 

In a series of tweets fired from his official account, Navalny claimed that “truth and free speech” hits Putin's “insane regime” no worse than javelins. Labelling the Russian leader as a “war criminal” Navalny stated that the West needs to comprehend that at least 75% of Russians do not support the war in Ukraine, but are unaware of the situation due to the Kremlin’s stringent policies that limit the freedom of expression and free flow of information inside Russia.

Navalny then informed that one of the State Duma deputies from Putin's United Russia party, also a former journalist, had demanded the imprisonment of a local deputy for calling Putin a "tyrant" and starting an anti-war movement. He also iterated the recent arrest of a Russian citizen who posed standing on the street holding Tolstoy's book "War and Peace,” to condemn the ongoing conflict. 

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“Do not forget that the main propagandist of the war now is no TV at all, but the Russian IT giant Yandex,” asserted Navalny, adding that it is heavily regulated and the main source of information for 41% of the Russian population. “Majority of Russian citizens have a completely distorted idea of what is happening in Ukraine. For them, Putin is waging a small, very successful war with little bloodshed,” said Navalny, adding that Russians believe that the war in Ukraine is a hoax and that Moscow has ordered a “military operation.”

Hundreds of Russians are facing charges for speaking out against the war, warned Navalny as he appealed to both Google and Meta and a number of Western political leaders on launching a crackdown on Russian war propaganda  in “a thread about how to open a second front against the Kremlin war criminal.” As Russia launched a military invasion in Ukraine, Russia’s state media regulator, Roskomnadzor, had immediately put out a warning over “false” information. It also threatened domestic internet resources and ad networks with a fine of up to 5 million rubles if found distributing “unreliable socially significant information.”