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 can’t quit it. Russia’s winter of discontent, waves of nationwide protests set off by the return of the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, has been enabled by the country’s free and open internet. 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 China’s great firewall.

Source: New York Times February 21, 2021 07:52 UTC