Recent revelations have shown that local Russian authorities are utilising groups of public volunteers in order to patrol cyberspace. Local groups of students have been assigned the task of hunting down so-called ‘extremist’ material online, and reporting those who are responsible for it.  As the Putin regime cracks down on internet freedoms and the word ‘extremist’ is becoming increasingly flexible, frequently being used against the Kremlin’s political opponents, this new internet crusade has worrying implications for freedom of speech in Russia. 

In Yekaterinburg, the Ural Association of Telecom Operators began hiring residents to fight ‘extremism’ on social networks in order to help the city budget save the significant sum of 250,000 rubles.  The local initiative was set up in order to conduct “a comprehensive sociological analysis in the field of countering extremism on the Internet.

The association’s press service has said that the extra government resources could be used on other projects, for instance; improving communal areas, patching up roofs in children’s nurseries or even preparing schoolchildren from low-income families for the new academic year.  Open Russia has conducted a survey of this new branch of ‘civic activity’ to determine what it’s really all about.

The beginning: ’Cyber Squads’

The NGO “League of Safe Internet” (LSI) was established in 2011 by businessman Konstantin Malofeev, who founded the television channel “Tsargrad”.  In the same year, under the leadership of the LSI, the first youth-based Cyber Squad began its work.

Its members were engaged in searching for banned extremist materials and identifying the propaganda of paedophilia, drugs and suicide. All information is transferred to the LIS and then sent to the authorities for inspection. According to the organisation’s website, in 2013 35 criminal cases were opened as a result of its research.

Cossacks Against Internet Extremism

In November 2016, the League and the First Cossack University announced the creation of a Cossack Cyber Squad, designed to conduct a war against banned materials on the internet.

“Young Cossacks must protect the borders of our Motherland not only on the ground, but also in cyberspace” commented the director of the League, Denis Davydov.

On April 12, 2017, the University’s cyber squad gathered at a rally where they talked about fighting websites which are, in their words, “the devil’s work”.

Students seem to be the group most likely to become involved in this new category of ‘cyber-squad’ activity.  Volgograd State University, Surgut State University, universities in Kazan, Perm, Stavropol and other large Russian cities are also significant contributors to these associations.  The goal of the volunteers is not to shut down pages on social networks, but rather to develop a strategy along with the authorities to combat cyber fraud, suicide propaganda and extremism.

The Youth Guard

In 2017, the chairman of the Belgorod NGO “City Youth”, Alexander Melnikov and the former regional coordinator of “Media Guards”, Sergei Selishchev created a voluntary Cyber Squad in the region. The participants manually trawl through the personal social network pages of young people in the region in search of compromising material.

According to Selishchev, if only one instance of extremist material is found on the social network page, the bots sends a message to the user asking them to delete it. However, cases of more than one piece of ‘extremist material’ are found, the perpetrators are reported to the authorities.

In February 2017, a 22-year-old woman from Belgorod was convicted for ‘offending the faithful’ after a cyber squad had reported her for having photos on her Vkontakte profile in which she was depicted lighting a cigarette using a church candle.

There are now up to 400 cyber squads fighting extremism across 22 Russian regions.  As time goes on and Russia’s internet laws become increasingly restrictive and repressive, we can expect to see such movements grow and the number of prosecutions rise.  This could have potentially devastating implications for Russian freedom of speech on the internet, the last place where people can escape the nauseating effect of Kremlin propaganda.