How Activists Are Using New Tools To Outsmart Russian Censors

The push to get Ukraine news past the Kremlin’s wall of propaganda is prompting innovative—and old-school—strategies

Early last year, Tobias Natterer, a copywriter at the ad agency DDB Berlin, began pondering how to evade Russian censors.

His client, the German arm of nonprofit Reporters Without Borders (RSF), was looking for more effective ways to let Russians get the news their government didn’t want them to see. RSF had been duplicating censored websites and housing them on servers deemed too important for governments to block—a tactic known as collateral freedom. (“If the government tries to shoot down the website,” Natterer explains, “they also have to shoot down their own websites which is why it’s called collateral.”)

The problem was how to help people find those mirrored websites. Then came a crazy idea: What if they could slip news past Russian censors by hiding articles—like Easter eggs in a video game—that people could unlock with a secret code? And what if that secret code was generated by Russia itself, through the winning numbers in the state lottery? Every time new numbers were posted, the team could use them to create a new web address. Anyone searching those numbers on Twitter or other platforms would then find links to the banned site and forbidden news.

Talk about timing. Just as they were about to launch the strategy in Russia and two other countries, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave the order to invade Ukraine. The Kremlin immediately clamped down on nationwide coverage of its actions, making the RSF/DDB experiment even more vital.

They mirrored the website for Meduza, an independent Russia-focused news outlet that had been labeled a foreign agent by the Russian government in April 2021. And since the invasion, traffic has been so heavy to the lottery-numbered site that the team had to buy more server space and upgrade the site. RSF and DDB also testing ways to use blockchain technology to mint articles and photos of the war—and plan to have more sites active in the coming days.

“We want to make sure that press freedom isn’t just seen as something defended by journalists themselves,” says Lisa Dittmer, RSF Germany’s advocacy officer for Internet freedom. “It’s something that is a core part of any democracy and it’s a core part of defending any kind of freedom that you have.”

Propaganda has long been a staple of war. From bombs showering pamphlets on enemy troops to censorship at home, controlling the message is often seen as key in mobilizing public support. Putin’s iron grip on what gets conveyed to Russians about its war in Ukraine is being attacked on multiple fronts, from whack-a-mole efforts on social media to telemarketing campaigns, Telegram videos and more. Ukrainian entrepreneurs are even hijacking their own apps to let Russians know what’s going on. While such efforts have mixed success, they demonstrate the ingenuity needed to win the information battle that’s as old as war itself.

Activists have found other ways to deliver truth bombs into Russia about the invasion. In the United Kingdom, a crowdfunded a campaign raised £40,000 to target Russians with digital ads with real news about the war. (Organizers say they delivered 57 million ads before being blocked in Russia earlier this week.) Hackers have also organized grassroots efforts: The group known as Anonymous has asked people to rate Russian restaurants and shops on Google Maps to leave reviews explaining what’s happening in Ukraine. Meanwhile, an organization called Squad303 built an online tool that lets people automatically send Russians texts, WhatsApp messages and emails.

Some of the most effective strategies rely on old-school technologies. The use of virtual private networks, or VPNs, has skyrocketed in Russia since the war began. That may explain why the country’s telecom regulator has forced Google to delist thousands of URLs linked to VPN sites.

Putin’s iron grip on what gets conveyed to Russians about the war is being challenged in multiple ways, from whack-a-mole efforts on social media to telemarketing campaigns to crowdfunded digital ads.

For Paulius Senūta, an advertising executive in Lithuania, the weapon of choice is the telephone. He recently launched “CallRussia,” a website that enables Russian speakers to cold-call random Russians based on a directory of 40 million phone numbers. Visitors to the site get a phone number along with a basic script developed by psychologists that advises callers to share their Russian connections and volunteer status before encouraging targets to hear what’s really going on. Suggested lines include “The only thing (Putin) seems to fear is information,” which then lets callers stress the need to put it “in the hands of Russians who know the truth and stand up to stop this war.” In its first eight days, Senūta says users from eastern Europe and elsewhere around the world placed nearly 100,000 calls to strangers in Russia.

In a modern world inundated with spam, scams and other unwanted marketing messages, do any of these efforts even work? The impact of those volunteer efforts is less clear. “One thing is to call them and the other thing is how to talk with them,” says Senūta. As with any telemarketing call, the response from those on the receiving end has been mixed. While some have been receptive, others are angry at the interruption or suspicious that it’s a trick. “How do you speak to someone who has been in a different media environment?”

Good question. After all, Russian authorities have long been hostile to news that doesn’t tow the party line. “You face this propaganda everywhere,” says Oleg Kozlovsky, a Russia researcher with Amnesty International. Within days of the invasion, the country’s communications regulator accused local media sites of spreading unreliable and untrue information, mandating the use of only official government sources in reporting. Terms like “war,” “invasion,” or “aggression” have been banned from coverage, punishable by fines of up to five million rubles (now roughly $52,000) or 15 years in prison. Says Kozlovsky: “It’s getting worse and worse.”

Existing censor-free platforms like Telegram should be utilized rather than inventing anything entirely new, notes Kozlovsky. (Last week, Arnold Schwarzenegger uploaded a lengthy video message to Russians via Telegram that included both Russian and English subtitles.) However, that it doesn’t mean it hurts to also try new things.

“You don’t know in advance which ones will work and which ones won’t,” Kozlovsky says. “It’s very difficult to predict what’s going to work so it’s a good thing to have various methods and various initiatives trying to reach out to Russians.”

The question is whether Russians realize they’re being fed on a media diet of state-sponsored lies and criminalization of the truth. Dittmer believes many Russians are eager to know what’s really going on. So far, RSF’s “Truth Wins” campaign has been viewed more than 150,000 times in Russia. (Previous efforts by DDB and RSF in various countries have included embedding censored news in a virtual library within Minecraft and a playlist on Spotify.)

Censorship also cuts both ways. While Russian authorities have banned Facebook and Instagram as “extremist,” Western news outlets have in turn cut ties with state-controlled outlets because of Putin’s disinformation campaign. While pulling products and partnerships out of Russia may send a powerful message to the Kremlin, such isolation also risks leaving a bubble of disinformation intact. Luckily, “it’s pretty much impossible to censor effectively,” says RSF’s Dittmer, pointing to further efforts to use blockchain and gaming technology to spread news. “We can play the cat and mouse game with the internet censors in a slightly more sophisticated way.”