Christophe Deloire, Reporters Without Borders (RSF).Thank you for your attention, and we hope you will join us in our efforts to prevent the total closure of Russia’s online informational space. What we need now is to start a dialogue between representatives of these platforms and ourselves so that we can work together to build solutions that will reconnect Russian citizens with their independent press in exile. We urge Big Tech companies to join us in our efforts to prevent the closure of the world’s leading social platforms in Russia and to stand up for the civil rights of people around the world. Domain fronting, Tor websites, and mirroring are among the most effective, while new technologies such as artificial intelligence should be powerful tools too. Your companies shaped the modern Internet and you know that there are technical solutions that could allow your services to return to the Russian online space. It is essential to reinstate them otherwise, Russian citizens will find themselves locked in the dark alone with their president. Social networks, search engines, and application catalogs are the gateways to an open informational world. This is the Internet’s most important function, and the major services you are in charge of have become the main actors of this mission. There is an urgent need to reconnect Russian citizens with pluralistic information, as well as with the rest of the world. We do not want to live in a new Cold War era. Telegram and YouTube are the only spaces left where Russian journalists can try to inform their fellow citizens about the reality of the war Vladimir Putin is waging in their name. Only two major platforms have partially survived this purge. The independent press has also been outlawed, and most independent journalists have been forced into exile. Since February 2022, most major online platforms have been banned from the Russian Internet. This will be the final step of a process that began a long time ago and has only accelerated with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We have strong suspicions that YouTube and Telegram could be totally blocked in Russia as soon as this autumn, making more than 140 million people hostages of the state’s propaganda apparatus. As campaign season approaches, the authorities will become increasingly intolerant of any discourse that contradicts the Kremlin’s official narrative. The Russian authorities are preparing for Vladimir Putin's re-election in 2024. We, representatives of Russia’s liberal independent media and the international NGO Reporters Without Borders (RSF), are writing to bring to your attention the alarming possibility of the total shutdown of Russian free online information space very soon, and to invite you to establish a channel with us to build solutions to prevent Russia from disconnecting from the rest of the world.
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