The blocking of social media platforms is particularly important because they provide one of the few remaining sources of outside information independent of the Russian state government and its media, which have disseminated disinformation and propaganda justifying the invasion.

“The Kremlin is more willing than ever to block these platforms,” ​​said Justin Sherman, a member of the Atlantic Council’s Cyber ​​Statecraft Initiative. He said the past week has seen an “unprecedented” escalation of Russians being cut off from Western news sources – it’s just one of the many ways Russia is increasingly isolated on the geopolitical scene.

Putin has been steadily trying to disentangle Russia’s internet ecosystem from the rest of the world for years, experts said, meaning the latest shutdowns are likely to last even beyond the crisis in Ukraine.

“For Putin, this is the last 10 yards of a years-long campaign to lock down Russia’s information space not only from Western and foreign influence, but even from many opposition elements. or nationally independent,” said former National Security Council member Gavin Wilde. civil servant focused on Russia, now management consultant at Krebs Stamos Group.

Russia’s restrictions on social media companies will limit Russian users’ access to independent information and their ability to respond to the crisis in real time, the companies say.

Nick Clegg, president of global affairs at Meta, Facebook’s parent company, tweeted friday that Russians will be “cut off from reliable information, deprived of their daily means of connecting with family and friends, and prevented from speaking out”. He said Facebook was working to restore its services.

Twitter said it was aware of reports that it was also stranded in Russia, but said it had not seen anything significantly different from what it shared last week — that some users are having difficulty connecting in Russia. At that time, the company stressed the importance of freedom of expression, tweeting“We believe people should have free and open access to the internet, which is especially important in times of crisis.”

The US State Department condemned the blockages, saying in a statement that the bans imposed by Russia further restricted the access of tens of millions of Russians to independent information about the invasion and violated an international right to freedom of speech. expression under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

But that’s not all the Kremlin does. Some US tech companies are also pulling their products and services out of the country to appease wary investors and prevent the Russian government from spreading misinformation through their channels. Microsoft and Apple have suspended new sales of their products, including iPhones and business software, in the country. Oracle has shut down its Russian cloud services operations.

U.S. ISPs are also increasingly wary of how state-backed hackers might use their services to spread disinformation and enable cyber espionage. That’s why Dave Schaeffer, CEO of Internet service provider Cogent, gave the start of the cutoff for its Russian customers on Friday. Cogent carries around 25% of all internet traffic worldwide, and Schaeffer said it is the second-largest carrier in Russia.

Schaeffer estimated that Cogent has “a few dozen” Russian customers who rely on his company’s technology to move their data through the backbone of the internet. One such customer is Russia’s largest telecommunications provider, Rostelecom.

“It wasn’t a perfect decision. It’s not clear,” Schaeffer said in an interview. that.”

Schaeffer said the company is working with some customers on a case-by-case basis to get them out of Cogent’s services. He did not specify which companies were taking over Cogent’s customers.

“We have a number of contingency plans, including shutting down specific customers or specific geographies,” Schaeffer said. “We didn’t expect to have to implement it on this scale.”

The company made the decision to pull out on Friday after observing mounting destruction in Ukraine over the past week, where some Cogent employees live and are trying to flee, Schaeffer said.

The Kremlin has long had an adversarial relationship with US tech companies, fining them and restricting social media services when they refuse to adhere to Russia’s censorship demands. The companies, meanwhile, have kept a distance from the Russian market, but have also pulled hardware at the Kremlin’s behest, including a decision by Google and Apple last year to remove a voting app created for opposition leader Aleksei Navalny.

But Russia has differentiated itself from China, another authoritarian country, by allowing US tech companies to operate on Russian soil in the first place. (Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms are blocked in China.) The latest starts from Russia’s tech industry indicate that Russia is heading down a similar path as China.

Wilde said autocracies like China and Russia have long embraced the idea that they should control the internet in their countries.

“There’s no doubt that the internet is fractured along the border with China,” Wilde said. “Now not just the internet, but the wider media is fracturing along the border with Russia.”

And Russia has been investing in its own internet ecosystem for years. With support from the Kremlin, Russians have created their own social media platforms to compete with Western social media, giving the Russian government more control over what is said online. Yandex provides a range of essential Internet services, including search, e-commerce and online advertising. The VK social networking site even looks like a Facebook clone, mimicking the corporate blue and white interface.

Still, YouTube remains the largest social media platform in Russia, with 80-85% of Russians using the video streaming platform. Facebook itself is not as popular, but its Instagram photo platform and WhatsApp messaging service are vital communication networks for Russians. The Russian government has not blocked Google’s YouTube, WhatsApp or Instagram, but experts said it’s likely the companies will walk away or the Kremlin will force them to do so.

Russia’s communications regulator sent a letter to Google on Thursday asking Google to “immediately stop spreading politically false information about a special operation of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in Ukraine in Russia.” Google did not respond to a request for comment.

Western companies that provide outside news or information have a particularly difficult calculation when deciding to leave Russia. “If you cut off the country, you’re abandoning everyone,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, vice president of global advocacy at the Wikimedia Foundation and co-founder of Global Voices Online, a citizen-run digital news nonprofit. .

In addition to the Russian media regulator’s blocking of Facebook, the Putin-controlled Russian parliament passed an emergency law that would punish anyone sharing “fake news” about the invasion with up to 15 years in prison.

Laura Manley, executive director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, said Russia is creating a perfect situation to control its narrative and limit outward coverage of its Ukrainian invasion on Western social media.

“You have the lack of eyewitness information because you have closed critical infrastructure,” she said. “So it’s kind of a worst-case scenario in terms of getting accurate information in real time.”

Sam Sabin contributed to this report.