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Opposition supporters take part in an unauthorized anti-corruption rally in central Moscow on March 26.

Alexander Utkin/AFP/Getty Images

When you hear the words Russia and internet, you probably think of Kremlin-backed hacking. But the internet is also a powerful tool for Putins opposition. Last month, the internet helped spark Russias largest anti-government protests in five years. Russia respondedby blocking access to webpagesthat promoted demonstrations.

This is part of a larger story. Just a few years ago, Russians had a mostly free internet. Now, Russian authorities would like to imitate Chinas model of internet control. They are unlikely to succeed. The Kremlin will find that once you give people internet freedom, its not so easy to completely take it away.

I lived in Moscow in 2010 after spending years researching internet activism in China. I quickly found that Russia and China had very different attitudes toward the web. The Great Firewall of China blocked overseas sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. In Russia, by contrast, you could find almost any information online. This was largely because Russian authorities didnt view the internet as a serious political threat. That changed in late 2011 and early 2012, when Moscow was the site of the largest anti-government protests since the end of the Soviet Union. Social media helped organize those demonstrations, and President Vladimir Putin took note. A law that took effect in late 2012, to give just one example, granted Russian authorities the power to block certain online content.

Moscow clearly admires Beijings approach. Last year, former Chinese internet czar Lu Wei and Great Firewall architect Fang Binxing were invited to speak at a forum on internet safety. The Russians were apparently hoping to learn Chinese techniques for controlling the web. Russia has already taken a page or two from Chinas playbook. While Facebook and Twitter remain accessible in Russia, at least for now, a Russian court ruled to ban LinkedIn, apparently for breaking rules that require companies to store personal data about Russian citizens inside the country. This could be a warning to companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook, which risk being blocked in Russia if they refuse to follow such rules.

Both Russia and China have made clear that they wish to regulate the internet as they see fit, without outside interference. Chinese President Xi Jinping has stressed the importance of internet sovereignty, which essentially means that individual countries should have the right to choose their own model of cyber governance. Putin has taken this idea one step further by calling the internet a CIA project. By this logic, Russia needs to proactively protect its own interests in the information sphere whether by cracking down on online dissent or using the internet to spread its own version of events.

Russia internet expert Andrei Soldatov, author of the book The Red Web, says the Kremlin certainly looks for something close to the China approach these days, mostly because many other things failedfiltering is porous, global platforms defy local legislation and are still available. Soldatov says that the government would like to have direct control of critical infrastructure such as the national system of domain distribution, internet exchange points, and cables that cross borders. He adds that this approach, which may not even be successful, would be more of an emergency measure than a realistic attempt to regulate the internet on a day-to-day basis.

Chinas method has worked because Beijing has long recognized the internet as both an economic opportunity and a political threat. Chinas isolated internet culture has given rise to formidable domestic companies. It was once easy to dismiss Chinas local tech players as mere copycatsSina Weibo imitating Twitter, Baidu imitating Google, and so on. But now, some of these companies, notably Tencents WeChat, have become so formidable that we may soon see Western companies imitating them. In the meantime, Chinese internet users arent necessarily longing for their Western competitors.

In Russia, however, American sites like YouTube have become very powerful. The recent demonstrations were in part sparked by an online report by opposition leader and anti-corruption blogger Aleksei Navalny, who alleged that Russian President Dmitri Medvedev had amassed a fortune in yachts, mansions and estates. Navalnys video on YouTube, viewed more than 16 million times, detailed this alleged corruption. Navalny called for protests after his demands for investigating official corruption was denied by the Russian Parliament. According to Global Voices, the Russian prosecutors officerecently requested the blockingof a YouTubevideo calling on young people to rally.

Russian blogger Elia Kabanov believes that YouTube is now too big to block. I doubt the Kremlin will go there, he said. They blocked LinkedIn mostly because it was a niche site in Russia and nobody cared. And of course the government propaganda machine is using YouTube a lot, so it wouldn't make any sense to block it. If they try to take down protest announcements on platforms on YouTube, Kabanov says, new ones will appear. I really cant see the way for the Kremlin to implement the Chinese model now: Everything is too connected, their own agencies are using all these services.

Russia does have its own domestic social networks, of course. VKontakte (VK), for example, is far more influential than Facebook. Soldatov notes that VK played an unusually big role in the recent protests.But Facebook still has a devoted Russian following, especially among political activists.

No government can entirely control the flow of information. Even in China, those determined to find information can find a tool, say a virtual private network, to jump over the firewall. Russian censors will face a similar challenge. In recent years, there has been an ongoing increase in Russian use of Tor, a browser that can be used to circumvent censorship. As a 2015 Global Voices article noted, the increase in censorship closely mirrors the upward trend in interest towards Tor.

In the short term Russian street protests may fizzle out, especially as Moscow cracks down on dissent. But the story wont end there. The internet on its own will not cause a revolution in Russia, but it can be an effective tool for organization. Beijing figured this out a long time ago, but the Kremlin is learning it too late.

This article is adapted from the forthcoming Attacks on the Press: The New Face of Censorship, a book from the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Future Tense is a collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, follow us on Twitter and sign up for our weekly newsletter.

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Russia Is Trying to Copy China's Approach to Internet Censorship - Slate Magazine

President Trump has no time for political correctness. What about you?

Beginning with the very inception of the country, conservative censorship has dominated the United States of America as a way to moderate public opinion. Beginning in the twenty-first century, however, a new kind of censorship dominated the headlines, schoolrooms, and workplaces of America: liberal political correctness. With the rise of right-wing ideals and isolationism, will we witness

This new liberal PC mentality seemingly accentuated a widespread shift from a traditional, religion-based outlook to the more contemporary inclusive, modern toleration-based outlook.

Political correctness has been criticized recently. From comedians to politicians, the doctrine is criticized for limiting free speech, overacting to even slightly offensive comments, and overall, acting as the thought police. The most obvious, essentially unmissable advocate against political correctness is, of course, President Donald Trump. At the first GOP debate, he stated that he has no time for political correctness, after replying to questions demanding why he has called women pigs and dogs in the past.

This societal censorship did not have liberal origins, however. Many forget that conservative-based censorship was ubiquitous in the twentieth-century. In 1918, for instance, the Sedition Act was enacted, effectively making it impossible to speak out against the United States government. The act barred any type of anti-government criticism that was profane, scurrilous, or abusive language. The penalty for such an offense? $10,000 and/or twenty years in prison. Eugene V. Debs, a prominent American socialist, was imprisoned for making an anti-war speech in 1918 under a similar law.

Even in 2013, almost one hundred years later, right-wing censorship is prevalent. Neil Gaimans book, Neverwhere, was banned in a New Mexico school after a parent complained of a sex scene and The F-word.

The Harry Potter series has come under attack for promoting witchcraft. One of the most thought-provoking and moving works of literature in recent memory, Brave New World, was also criticized for its anti-religion and anti-family values.

Literature has not been the only thing censored. The Pentagon Papers, published in part by The New York Times in 1971 were released after the government threatened to punish the company under the same law the aforementioned Eugene V. Debs was put up against. The Times later stated the papers were a great example of the widespread lying and censorship enacted by the Johnson administration.

The public-school superintendent in Georgia, Kathy Cox, was proposing banning the word evolution so as to not offend more conservative parents. The absurdity of this proposal is simply astounding.

However, with the growing backlash against liberal PC, we may see a retreat to conservative-based censorship. The pendulum of political influence may very well swing back to these kinds of restrictions. This development is doubtlessly influenced by the retreat of globalization and the possibility of the end of democracy as we know it.

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Choose Wisely: Political Correctness Or A Retreat To Conservative Censorship? - The Pavlovic Today

Professors are also getting it in the neck. Mike Jensen, an adjunct professor at the University of Northern Colorado, was hauled before campus authorities last year after one of his students filed a complaint with the campus BRT. Jensens crime? Encouraging students to debate controversial issues such as transgenderism.

According to a recording of the meeting, which Jensen gave to Heat Street, he had asked his class to read Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoffs seminal Atlantic article The Coddling of the American Mind. This would be hilariously ironic if it wasnt kind of sad, Jensen told the BRT official. He was threatened with an investigation, and for reasons undisclosed was not invited back to teach the next semester.

Though BRTs are described as support mechanisms, aimed at resolving unpleasant incidents and fostering campus diversity, Jensens experience reveals the more sinister reality. The FIRE report notes that most of the BRTs surveyed only purported to provide education to the offender, rather than punishment. But this, in itself, is deeply coercive. Not least because 42 per cent of investigations surveyed involved campus law enforcement. This is modern campus censorship at its most militarised.

Another irony here is that, as two professors pointed out in an article for the New Republic, BRTs are hitting the very subjects devoted to discussing issues of racial and sexual discrimination. Even a discussion about racism could be lodged as a bias incident. Fighting discrimination (no matter how illusory) has become the defining obsession of campus politics, and yet students are being encouraged to avoid learning about it or discussing it frankly.

Censorship is always, on some level, anti-intellectual. It presupposes that certain truths are best unchallenged, that certain opinions are better left unsaid, and that people are either too easily led or too easily shaken to participate in public life fully. BRTs make this plain. Whats more, they show that PC censorship has become a thoroughly neocolonial endeavour, devoted to looking after those black, brown, gay or trans folk deemed too wretched for the cut and thrust of academic debate.

The rise of BRTs remind us just how hollowed-out intellectual life on campus has become. As colleges have become bureaucratised, as services have swelled while academic staff have been squeezed, theyve drifted further away from their intellectual mission. Diversity is now the defining value, an article of faith. Tragically, this preoccupation has if anything made campus life more tense and fractured. Encouraging students to snitch every time they spy a racist tequila party is hardly going to make students from different backgrounds feel more chilled out around one another.

But this is not an internal coup by diversity-crazed bureaucrats - academia itself has a lot to answer for. For decades, victim feminism, critical race theory and Frankfurt school blather about the harm in speech, the power structures created by images, the idea that words act upon women and minorities, has laid the groundwork for the BRT craze. These ideas, which have so long gone unchallenged, have lent campus bureaucracies a moral mission, a justification for their bloat and meddling.

Its unclear whether BRTs are run by card-carrying ideologues or mere jobsworths, desperate to keep offended students happy and racist professor headlines out of the press. But whats clear is that campus authoritarianism isnt just a figment of civil libertarians imagination. Colleges have created vast byzantine bureaucracies which encourage students to snitch on their peers, which haul professors before committees for making off-the-cuff remarks, all in the name of protecting students from themed parties, sexist signage and, worst of all, debate. And they call us hysterical.

Tom Slater is deputy editor at spiked. Tom Slater is deputy editor at spiked. Unsafe Space: The Crisis of Free Speech on Campus, edited by Tom, is published by Palgrave Macmillan. Follow him on Twitter: @Tom_Slater_

Later this year, spiked is launching Unsafe Space, our US programme aimed at remaking the case for free speech on campus, with a tour of college campuses. Are you a US student? Want to find out more? Email the team today.

For permission to republish spiked articles, please contact Viv Regan.

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Bias Response Teams: campus censorship at its most sinister - Spiked